Walking the Bypass

by Ken Wilson

Reflections from the lone traveller for whom a highway was never the intended destination



Walking the Bypass recounts Ken Wilson’s singular experience of walking alongside the decidedly pedestrian-unfriendly Regina Bypass, all while situating the highway within the ongoing history of settler colonialism in southern Saskatchewan.

 

Through a series of ambitious and unconventional walks, Wilson sets out to understand the arrival and significance of the new (and politically contentious) highway encircling Saskatchewan’s capital as well as the Global Transportation Hub, a sprawling warehouse park the Bypass was intended to serve. He offers a new perspective on these heavily travelled yet untrodden spaces in a region dominated by industrial agriculture and high-speed transportation. Reflecting on the profound transformations to the land since the arrival of settlers in the 1880s, he wonders whether it’s possible to form a connection with the land through walking—even on the gravelly edge of the freeway.

 

In vivid and sincere prose that captures the thoughts of a man trudging along the roadside, Walking the Bypass explores how walking can transform non-places into places and enable settlers to forge a relationship with the land around them.

356 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 14, 2025

About the author

Ken Wilson is a settler who grew up in the Haldimand Tract in southwestern Ontario. He lives on Treaty 4 territory in oskana kâ-asastêki (Regina, Saskatchewan), where he is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Regina. His forthcoming book, Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road, is his first; its manuscript won the 2022 City of Regina Writing Award. His second, Walking Well, will appear in 2026. He blogs about things he reads and walks he makes at readingandwalking.ca.

Reviews

[Sabrina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I usually tear through books in a couple of days. This one took me a bit longer, because it made me stop and think—about my own relationship with the land as a settler, about my own privilege, about our history of genocide in this country, about political corruption, about how we’re destroying the land we need to live on, and so much more.

For some people, walking is a meditation; for Ken Wilson, it is a way to heighten his senses and explore thoughts about his own relationship with the land he’s walking on, going along the different paths those thoughts follow. And he takes us on that journey with him.

This book is meticulously researched yet accessible, combining observations of what Wilson sees along the way with personal insights, settler and Indigenous history, and contemporary politics.

It is very much rooted in a place—Regina, SK, Canada, Treaty 4 Territory—but it contains universal messages, which is why Harper’s Magazine recently gave it a rave review.

If you live or have lived in Regina, you will find this book full of local landmarks and descriptions, making your own experience of Wilson’s description of his travels richer. If you don’t live in Regina but are willing to consider your own place on the land and your relationship with the first people who lived on this land, then you will also appreciate this book. I feel smarter having read it.

[Phil Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Walking The Bypass Ken Wilson University of Regina Press

This is a book fashioned in epic proportions. Partly because it is the narrative of a walk around the hard shoulder of the nearly fifty kilometres of the Regina Bypass in southern Saskatchewan, Canada. Partly because it concerns the undoing and redoing of a being, and of a way of being, and of a physical entity untrained for distance walking, often limping on blistered feet, being reformed by the exigencies of a thin strip of the world made without thought for pedestrians. No shelters, no food stops, no cultural comforts.
The abject asceticism of Ken Wilson’s walk is all the more bracing for the relative under-use of the road system it follows; the Global Transportation Hub for which the Bypass was built lies mostly empty at the time of Wilson’s walk. The Bypass itself is not filled by a bumper-to-bumper stream of vehicles, but is a marginal void punctuated by occasional trucks and cars. Despite its apparent utilitarianism, the road seems to owe more to financial speculation (and probably theft) than the economics of production and distribution. Indeed, it is what Wilson sees at work beside the road, and records with elegant precision, in ‘Walking The Bypass’ that better represents the ‘logics’ of the social system that has produced the Bypass: a settler agriculture of extraction and pesticides, ploughing out any marks (“tipi rings, medicine wheels”) of First Nations culture and the removal of the grasslands that once supported herds of millions of bison, reducing their numbers to hundreds.
Wilson describes an attrition upon the First Nations people of this land every bit as vicious and organised as the violence to the bison: the conniving theft of so-called Treaties; the manipulations of translation at negotiations; the murderous, incarcerating and culturally-corrosive regimes of the Indian Industrial Schools (the book begins at the cemetery of Regina’s School); private property rights that undermined the fishing and hunting of First Nations people; the official indifference to the murder and disappearance of women and girls. Where First Nations farmers competed with settler farmers, the railroads and the churches suddenly required their land; after the First World War more of their land was grabbed to give to veterans.
In response to his study of colonial theft and displacement, Ken Wilson consults First Nations scholars and activists on how to appropriately and subversively walk in relation to this stolen land. A Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe colleague, Vanessa Watts gifts him the term “Place Thought” to address the land as “alive and thinking”. From Elder Sky Dancer Louise Bernice Halfe, he learns the obligation/privilege – even when walking alone – of being “part of a community; because walking involves developing relationships with everything around us: plants, animals, the land, the sky”. Throughout his walk along the hard shoulder, always vulnerable to a wayward truck or something flying off a vehicle, Wilson repeatedly ponders what relation he is making with this land; he is not always convinced that he makes any relation, let alone a good one. Such is the austere nature of what remains of the land, at times it seems that the extraction has gone in on Wilson as much as across the grasslands. While the narrative is far from self-absorbed, the walker here is subject to an existential depredation, not so much a crisis of being as a vanishing in the landscape.
Nevertheless, despite the erosion (maybe partly because of it), in repeated encounters with tiny absurdities and wondrous details, the monotony of the Bypass bursts in small flashes of colour and strangeness. Hallucinating a passenger in a junked car, a pelican gliding overhead, a piece of Venetian blind lying on the roadside, an evangelical church demanding “Picture / Plan / Pursue / Prosper”, a void left by the missing sign to the CINEMA 6 drive-in, “ruderal” spaces defined by disturbances, damaged billboards “speaking gibberish”, the ashes of a campfire, a quartz crystal “discarded, perhaps, because its curative powers were exaggerated”, a pile of human hair, a broken padlock, singing crickets, a mask, landfill on the horizon, a gas flare from a distant refinery, an abandoned railway line, dark chemical bins… the wonders of detritus bending the walker on the Bypass back to their origins of production.
As Ken Wilson arrives back home, limping, he ends his journey as he begins it. As taught by an Elder he puts down a line of tobacco and steps over it. It is hard to know what his walk has “achieved”, and yet maybe it is in its very non-instrumentality that there is something of the “non-extractive encounter with the land” to which Ken Wilson has aspired. It is in keeping with the hard ask of this book – in the attrition on the walker-writer and in the engagement with a shameful history – that it ends in paradox. In an ambiguity from which there appears to be no escape, either by truck or by slow pilgrimage upon the hard shoulder. This is a tough read, of a story that may one day be told by other voices, some of them more-than-human, but it begins to ask questions and celebrate a relationship with fragments. It ends with the opening of a door to take the inside outside.

[Melanie Schnell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an essential read for all Canadians. Wilson combines in-depth research with astounding prose, documenting his walks on a land ravaged by the effects of post-colonialism and late-stage capitalism. The triad of deep research and, at times, poetic prose, along with the kind of stream-of-consciousness writing that the act of reflective, immersive walking creates, offers us a story that speaks of what happened before, and what those deemed invisible--both human and more than human--are saying or have said. Above all, he asks us to face where we stand now, even though it is difficult, even though the powers that be do everything to blind us from our physical reality on this earth. Here we are now, Wilson tells us through his ambulatory adventures, on this land, in this present time, with these past actions and their effects before us and beneath us.
And so we must ask, What will we do, now? How to move forward?

[Patrick Book · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wilson has done an incredibly admirable amount of thinking about the implications of colonialism, what the ownership of land means under treaty, and decolonization than most white folks in this province.

The book is aware of its own contradictions: he openly admits it’s unlikely that walking the bypass once will trigger any kind of meaningful understanding or connection with that stretch of “land” (just as he expresses concern that people will of settler origin may not be able to form such a connection at all), but he does it anyway.

So could he have written a book that summarized and explained the bypass and GTH projects without doing the walk? Probably. But the journeys provide a different level of colour and connection that readers who will never even consider such a journey may not have otherwise.

It’s a touch repetitive at several points, but that aside, this is a largely compelling thought exercise.