How Were the Profiled Trails Selected?

There are remarkably few managed trails within the Halifax Regional Municipality. The book will profile 30, but you might wonder how did I decide what to include, and what to leave out?

The first criteria that I used was to decide to include entries from every part of the municipality. That was a challenge, because although it would be fairly simple to profile all 30 trails close to the Halifax-Dartmouth urban core, the HRM is quite a bit more than the urban core and extends into areas, such as the Musqudoboit River Valley, that are a long drive from the "city". To be fair, I thought that an attempt needed to be made to include options everywhere in the municipality, even if the quality of experience for some of the listing might not be the best.

Fortunately, there has been tremendous work done in recent years, most often by volunteer community associations, to develop a network of walking/cycling paths in the HRM. As a result, the municipality actually contains some of the finest examples of wilderness hiking trails in the entire province. Add these to the beach walks available, the provincial parks, usually situated near lakes, and the municipal parks and trail systems, and there is actually a quite exciting range of options available.

To capture that diversity, I divided the municipality into three regions: Halifax-Dartmouth, Eastern Shore, and Central/South. In each of these regions I selected 10 listings, ensuring that there would be a trail found wherever you might live or visit.

Naturally, I was also concerned with what type of experience would be enjoyed by the hiker. I did not want every trail in the book to be the same. Ideally, I would want to have some routes that included climbs while having others that stayed mostly level. Winding forest footpaths are what I enjoy most, but I recognize that beginner hikers and groups of friends might like the wide corridors of rail trails. If possible, I wanted a loop route, but, as we know, many trails are only an "out-and-back" walk. And, of course, if a trail can take you to a lake, a waterfall, a look-off, or a good picnic site, that would ranked high on the list of what I wanted to include.

So essentially, the trails profiled in Trails of HRM were selected first for geographic location, but most importantly for the variety of experiences they provided.

And if you think that was easy, don't forget that in order to evaluate what trails would be included, I would need to walk every one of them, and many others that did not "make the cut". Of course, that hiking could be quite enjoyable as well, as you might discover when you try the trails that made it into the book..