How Were the Profiled Trails Chosen?

There are hundreds of managed trails within a 100-km-by-air distance of downtown Ottawa. If only 50 can be adequately profiled, how do you decide what to include, and what to leave out?

The first way to select is to choose to include entries from every part of the region. After all, it would be simple to profile 50 trails just within Gatineau Park and the National Capital Greenbelt and Pathway System. There has been tremendous work done to develop a vast netowrk of walking/cycling paths. However, I found that there were many other trails, usually less well-known, found outside of NCC lands. Hikers in the Ottawa area should know about these as well.

Accordingly, I divided the area into five regions: Quebec - Gatineau Park, Quebec - Outside of Gatineau Park, Ontario - City and Greenbelt, Ontario - Outside Greenbelt, and the Frontenac Axis. In each of these regions, I would chose 10 listings, ensuring that there wold be some representation nearly everywhere, yet the areas with the greatest degree of trail development, such as Gatineau Park, would have a number of selections.

In order to better explain to the reader what type of experience they will have on any particular trail, is to provide a "Degree of Difficulty" rating. Each trail is provided a rating between "1", suitable for almost anybody, to "5", recommended for experienced and/or fit hikers only.

So, in each of the five regions, I decided to ensure that there would be at least one profiled listing in each of the five "Degrees of Difficulty". Ideally, there would be two for each of the five levels, but that was not often possible, particularly in some of the regions.

And next, but by no means finally, I was concerned with what type of experience would be enjoyed by the hiker. I did not want every trail to be the same. Ideally, I would choose some routes to include climbs while selecting 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 prefered to select a loop route, but often the profiled trail can only be an "out-and-back" walk. And, of course, if a trail took you to a lake, a waterfall, a look-off, or a good picnic site, it ranked high on the list of what I wanted to include.

So essentially, the trails profiled in Hiking Trails of Ottawa were selected first for geographic location, also for "Degree of Difficulty", and most importantly for the variety of experiences they could provide.

And if you think that was easy, don't forget that in oreder 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".

Next Post: Explaining "Degree of Difficulty"

How Many Trails?

Developing a book is quite different than building a Website. With a Website there is almost unlimited storage potential, as well as the opportunity to make changes and additions as frequently as required. A book, however, is inflexible; what can be included is constrained by space and once printed it can only be changed at infrequent intervals.

So it is critically important to the success of a book to plan what will be included long before the writing begins. In the case of Hiking Trails of Ottawa, that meant, among other things, deciding how many trail listings will be profiled.

In the previous entry, "What Trails are Included?", I said that I had selected an area within a 100-km distance of Parliament Hill as the region to be profiled in this book. As any outdoor person knows, we are blessed with hundreds of possible hiking destinations inside that small area, and thousands of kilometers of possible walking.

However, if I attempted to profile every trail, the book would be little more than a shopping list, with very small amounts of information available about any particular trail. Either that, or I could produce a volume of 1,000 pages or so - but I think the resulting price tag would be too high for most people. Creating lists is excellent for Websites; books need to be more selective.

For me, two facts are critically important for each trail profiled: how to find the start (trailhead), and what will be seen when on the trail. Obviously, you need to be able to find your way to the trail in order to hike it, but many books I have seen somehow fail to provide adequate directions, and I find few things as frustrating as driving an hour for a hike and being unable to find "the third driveway past the blue house", or some similarly unhelpful postings. Perhaps even more importantly, once on the trail you should be able to follow a route without becoming lost. Again, some books provide such vague comments about a particular route that it is as much by luck as by design that a hiker is able to navigate their way.

To provide this information accurately approximately 1,000 words of text is required for each trail listing. Add supporting information such as natural history facts, hiking tips, maps, and general background, and for a book limited to about 350 pages - about $20-25 retail) that works out to about 50 listings possible.

So, expect that Hiking Trails of Ottawa will provide detailed descriptions of 50 hiking routes within a 100-km circle of Parliament Hill.

Next Post: How were the profiled trails chosen?

What Trails are included?

The most difficult question to answer for this book had to be, "What trails do I include?" As anyone who has hiked around Ottawa knows, there is an incredible variety of options available.

The first issue to be decided was what I meant by "Ottawa". Was it the city, the river valley, eastern Ontario, or something else? In one of the books I reviewed, Nature and Natural Areas in Canada's Capital, published by the Ottawa Field-Naturalists' Club, the region was defined as a circle of 100-km centred on Parliament Hill. I found this definition particulalry helpful, because it did not attempt to use political boundaries or even geographical features, but simply anything within a prescribed distance.

As I continued to hike various trails and collect information, the more reasonable this 100-km circle appeared. There were clearly enough possible routes within that distance, as it included Gatineau Park, substantial portions of the Outouais region of Quebec, and most of eastern Ontario.

Next Post: How many trails, and what kind?