Some people fly across Canada. Katharina Kneip is walking it — and after more than a year on the country's roads, she's finally crossed the halfway point. The 36-year-old German artist rolled into Saskatchewan recently, 1,400 days after setting out from her home country on foot in January 2023.
Kneip's plan is far bigger than one country. She's attempting a loop of the planet via a northern route, using a mix of walking, skiing and sailing. Canada is one of the longest legs, and she has been moving steadily west across it for over a year, province by province, through the kind of distances most travellers wouldn't attempt in a car.
The route hasn't gone entirely to script. Her original idea for crossing from North America to Asia was to paddle the Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia. Given how complicated — and risky — that crossing has become for Westerners under the current political situation, she's rethinking it. The likelier plan now: find crewing work on a boat sailing from Vancouver to Asia, which is how she's handled earlier ocean sections of the trip. It's a pragmatic pivot that says a lot about how these long expeditions actually work — big goals, flexible tactics.
Even if you're never going to walk across a continent, Kneip's route is a useful reminder of what Canada's Prairie provinces offer. Saskatchewan doesn't get the tourist attention of the Rockies or the coasts, but it's a vast, big-sky region of farmland, boreal forest and lakes, with fewer crowds than almost anywhere else in the country. The Trans Canada Trail and routes like the Yellowhead Highway pass through terrain that rewards slow travel — exactly the pace Kneip has chosen.
For travellers, this is also a good moment to follow along. Long-distance human-powered journeys like this one tend to highlight small towns, quiet backroads and the unglamorous middle bits of countries that guidebooks skip. If a cross-Canada road trip is on your list, her progress westward is essentially a free, real-time scouting report of what the middle of the country looks and feels like — from Ontario's lake country through the flatlands of Saskatchewan toward Alberta and the mountains beyond.
Whether she reaches the Pacific and sorts out a berth to Asia will be worth watching. For now, she's past the halfway mark in one of the longest countries on Earth, on foot, one day at a time.