A rousing way to start the day

Video from last winter’s walk led by Dr. Stanley Vollant, from Manawan, Que., to Rapid Lake, Que. Who isn’t ready to face the day after a send-off like this? The next Innu Meshkenu (Innu Road) walk starts in a few days.

Streets of Philadelphia

I was in Philadelphia recently and spent a couple of days with police officers who walk the beat in the city’s 22nd District. It’s a tough part of town: there were 35 murders there last year, and it’s only about four square miles in size. But an innovative new program, which sends rookie officers out…

Never idle

Last winter, I joined a two and a half week snowshoe trek in Quebec led by an inspiring Innu surgeon named Stanley Vollant, as part of his multi-year walking project. My feature about that trip — and the myriad health benefits of walking — will appear in the October 2013 issue of The Walrus. In…

Between solitudes

Back in my Can Geo days, I went looking for a hut-to-hut hiking route in Canada to write about for our quarterly travel magazine. I found an excellent trail in Quebec’s Charlevoix region — and it had a luggage-shutte service!

Just the facts

“Taking a walk is good for you.” That’s the kind of statement which, as a researcher who studies links between walking and mental health told me, may appear to come from The School of the Blindingly Obvious. But without hard data to demonstrate precisely how and why walking is good for our bodies, minds and communities,…

A long walk

I walked from Toronto to my family’s cabin (i.e., shack) in cottage country a couple years ago. It took four days, and included a couple of boat rides. An article about the trek ran in an excellent magazine called Cottage Life in October 2012, but, sadly, it’s not online. Email me — danrubin at sympatico dot…