Local hiking club will take Americans on walking adventure

The Humber Valley Hiking Club is preparing to host a group of more than 30 American hikers this week.The visitors will be coming to the province to especially partake in two particular hikes, namely the Corner Brook Stream Trail network and Western Brook Pond.Both of those trails are the only jaunts in this province currently sanctioned by Volkssport, an international federation of hiking groups.

The group is set to arrive Saturday for a six-day adventure are from the organization Walking Adventures International, based in Vancouver, Wash.“This will be the fifth time Walking Adventures has been here, but it will be a different group of people again this time,” said Bob Day of the Humber Valley Hiking Club.Day will lead the hikes through both the Corner Brook Stream Trail and Western Brook. The hikers will keep travelling up the Northern Peninsula, doing the boardwalk hike along Torrent River and visiting the Maritime Archaic Indian national historic site at Port au Choix before making their way to L’Anse aux Meadows to visit the Viking site there. They will then board a charter flight to St. John’s, where they will hike at Cape Spear, Signal Hill, Quidi Vidi Lake and Rennie’s River before heading back home.Last year, a group of about 70 hikers visited western Newfoundland.

“The Volkssport-sanctioned trails are what really brings them here,” pointed out Day. “They have their books and they get credit for these two sanctioned hikes. Then they can say they have hiked Newfoundland. Most of them have hiked all the provinces in Canada, all the states in the U.S. and have hiked in Europe too.”Day said he’d love to see more trails in Newfoundland and Labrador get sanctioned.“If we had more Volkssport trails, more people would come just to say they have done them,” he noted.

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