Waterfront Trail Voyage Tips and guide

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The Waterfront Trail is a 3600-km-long, hiking, cycling and walking trail that connects communities along the Canadian shores of the Great Lakes and the St Lawrence River in Ontario. Most of it is on paved roads.

The Waterfront Trail is a project by the Waterfront Regeneration Trust, a charity to protect Ontario's waterfronts. The trail is intended to serve as a way to connect various communities to the waterfronts in order to build awareness and encourage community pride in their bodies of water.

PDF maps are available from the official Waterfront Trail website. While most of the communities that are connected to the trail have amenities, you might find that they're underdeveloped and perhaps inferior to simply camping. The communities can also be separated by dozens of kilometres in some cases, so it would be prudent to pack extra food and water before leaving a town.

The Waterfront Trail can be accessed from over 150 communities. The trails can be identified by their distinctive logo.

The trail is split in several sections. While it can be traveled in any direction, this article assumes that you're travelling from west to east.

This segment of the trail begins at Pigeon River, which is part of the US-Canada border. From there, you bike along the coast of Lake Superior, passing through Thunder Bay and White River in the process.

This segment begins in Gros Cap, a conservation area near Lake Superior. Most of this trail is on paved roads and passes through over 2 dozen communities, most of them very minor but usually having some sort of amenity. At Espanola, you can choose to either go to Manitoulin Island, largest freshwater island in the world, or you can continue onward to Sudbury, which is home to over 300 lakes.

This segment hugs the shore of the Georgian Bay and passes through Parry Sound. This section of the trail doesn't have signage (as of 2025), which can make it easy to get lost. At the end of this section, you end up close to Manitoulin Island again, although you can only travel between the island and the peninsula by a ferry during spring and summer.

This segment takes you from the peninsula across the shore of Lake Huron.

This segment of the trail takes you along the coast of Lake St Clair, bringing right up to the US-Canada border again.

This segment takes you along the shore of Lake Erie.

This segment takes you along Lake Ontario. Unlike most of the other segments of the trail, this one takes you through several large communities, such as Hamilton and Toronto.

This segment takes you along the Saint Lawrence River.

• Detroit
• Buffalo
• Montreal