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Road trip & Things to do in Quebec, Canada (Great Trail & Outdoor activities)

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A week behind the wheel through Quebec puts Canada’s longest trail system within reach of anyone with a rental car and a decent pair of boots.

Travel creator Steve Hänisch, who publishes under the name BackPacker Steve, spent seven days looping through Quebec for his video “Road trip & Things to do in Quebec, Canada (Great Trail & Outdoor activities),” released in August 2019. Rather than chase a single bucket-list stop, the itinerary strings together Montreal, the Laurentians and a run of national and provincial parks connected by the Great Trail — better known outside Canada as the Trans Canada Trail. The result is less a highlight reel than a working blueprint for travelers who want wilderness access without needing expedition-grade gear.

• The Great Trail (Trans Canada Trail) spans more than 24,000 kilometers, making it the longest multi-use trail network on Earth, and several Quebec segments anchor the route.
• The road trip covers Montreal, the Laurentians and protected areas such as Parc national du Mont-Tremblant over the course of a full week.
• Activities featured include hiking, cycling along the converted rail route Le P’tit Train du Nord, canoeing and wildlife viewing.

Retracing a Converted Rail Line

One of the video’s central stretches follows Le P’tit Train du Nord, a former railway corridor through the Laurentians now repurposed as a cycling and multi-use path. Converted rail lines like this one are exactly the kind of infrastructure that makes the Great Trail workable for casual travelers rather than only hardened thru-hikers — flat grades, clear markers, and towns spaced along the way for food and lodging. It’s a different animal from the backcountry slog documented in guides like first-time Appalachian Trail attempts, where resupply points and terrain are far less forgiving.

The pacing matters here: Hänisch treats cycling the rail trail as a full day’s activity on its own, not a quick detour between bigger attractions. That reflects how the Great Trail was designed in the first place — a patchwork of regional paths, waterways and old rail corridors stitched into one continuous network across the country, of which the Quebec segments are just one piece.

Mont-Tremblant and the Wilderness Stops

Parc national du Mont-Tremblant gets dedicated screen time as the trip’s wilderness centerpiece, with canoeing and wildlife viewing featured alongside the hiking. The park functions as a case study in the video’s broader argument: that Quebec’s protected areas and outdoor recreation reserves let travelers get real backcountry exposure — lakes, forest, wildlife — without the logistics of a multi-week expedition.

Quebec’s Great Trail segments show how a week-long road trip can move from a city skyline to a canoe on a wilderness lake without ever needing specialized expedition gear.

That accessibility angle is the throughline of the whole video. Where a route like the Trans-Catalina Island Trail demands sustained solo backpacking, the Quebec itinerary is built around day trips staged from a car — hike a section, drive to the next town, sleep somewhere with a bed.

Montreal as the Urban Anchor

Montreal bookends the trip as the cultural counterweight to the parks and rail trails, giving the itinerary a city-to-wilderness rhythm rather than a straight nature crawl. Pairing a major metro area with days of hiking and canoeing is a structure familiar to other Canadian family and road-trip content on the network, including coverage of Saguenay Lac-Saint-Jean, another Quebec region built around lakes, fjords and outdoor access points.

The video frames summer and autumn as the target seasons, leaning on scenic driving routes between stops rather than treating the car as dead time between destinations. That’s consistent with how road-trip travelogues generally get built — the driving itself is part of the pitch, not just the transportation to it, a formula also seen in cross-country entries like California to New York.

Hänisch wraps the week having covered city streets, a converted rail line, a national park and a stretch of the world’s longest trail network — all without a single overnight in a tent. For a channel built on backpacker credibility, that’s the real pitch of the Quebec video: you don’t need a thru-hiker’s kit to get a thru-hiker’s scenery, just seven days and a rental car.