Saunter Trail: Nature’s Path to Wellness
Saunter Trail winds for roughly a kilometre through the varied woodlands at cliffLAND, past erratic rocks and a small creek to a lookout over Grey Owl Pond. We’re preparing this existing trail to offer visitors different ways to experience nature and its potential benefits for well-being.
Plans include benches and self-guided audio experiences developed with contributors bringing different skills and perspectives, from forest bathing and nature therapy to music, sound and other creative approaches. We’re working toward a 2027 opening, and this page will grow to include the audio guides and activities as they become available. Until then, explore the resources below for ideas and inspiration.
Help bring Saunter Trail to life
Contributions of materials, skills, time and funding will help develop the trail and its audio experiences. With sufficient support, we also hope to offer honoraria to contributors.
Explore ways to support cliffLAND, including bench sponsorship.
Both Saunter Trail and Blueberry Mountain Trail are free to visit.
Connecting · Related
Other Links/Resources
The following resources represent a small palette of the nature experience to inspire.
The central idea
Nature’s Path to Wellness
This film explores the relationship between people and nature and connects with the thinking behind the cliffLAND Wellness Trail. Parts were filmed here, though not the entire film.
Beyond the trail
Other ways of reconnecting
These films and resources approach nature connection from different directions. Some explore awareness and well-being; others turn to sound, art, music, outdoor learning or our relationships with the land. They offer additional perspectives on a subject that has room for many.
01 · Reconnection
Re-connect · Community of Christ
This video comes from a Christian community, but the desire to reconnect reaches beyond any one tradition. It offers another perspective on the need for relationship and the things that can draw us back toward what matters.
02 · Listening to place
Forest Listening Rooms: Wildcat Hollow
This sound-based experience explores a forest through its changing layers of sound. Listening becomes a way to discover what is happening around us, including things that may not immediately catch the eye.
03 · Nature therapy
Forest bathing and nature connection
Known in Japan as shinrin-yoku, forest bathing involves spending unhurried time among trees and attending to the experience through the senses. The emphasis is on noticing the light, air, sounds, textures and atmosphere of a place.
Nature therapy and wilderness-awareness practices have their own approaches, but many encourage us to become more attentive to our surroundings.
04 · Outdoor learning
The Wild Path Home
This Canadian documentary explores efforts to help children build lasting relationships with the outdoors through learning and shared experiences. It considers the place of nature in childhood, education and community.
05 · Wilderness awareness
Tom Brown Jr. · Tracking and wilderness awareness
Tom Brown Jr. is known for teaching tracking, wilderness survival and awareness of the natural world. His work encourages close observation of tracks, signs, movement and the details of a landscape that are easy to miss when we hurry through it.
Art, sound and the natural world
06 · Land art
Andy Goldsworthy · Land Art
Artist Andy Goldsworthy works with materials found in the landscape: leaves, stones, branches, ice and water. His work begins with close attention to what a place offers, and often changes or disappears as weather and seasons take their turn.
07 · Film, painting and music
Waterwalker · Bill Mason
Canoeist, naturalist, filmmaker and artist Bill Mason travels through wilderness landscapes, stopping to paint and reflect on what he sees. The film brings together water, landscape, visual art and music, allowing the journey itself to shape the experience.
08 · Sound and image
The Space Between Sounds · Perri Lynch Howard
This PBS feature follows an artist whose recordings of wind, birds and flowing water become part of her visual art. It explores the meeting point between listening and looking, and how a place can inspire work in more than one medium.
09 · Indigenous perspectives
The suknaʔqín̓x Okanagan Is Beautiful
A place can hold relationships among land, identity, memory, responsibility and community that are not always visible to a visitor passing through. This film offers a perspective rooted in the Okanagan. It is one particular account, not a representation of all Indigenous peoples or traditions.
10 · More to explore
Further reading and listening
Richard Louv · Vitamin N
Practical ideas for bringing more contact with nature into
everyday life.
Explore the book ↗
In Our Nature
A documentary exploring the human relationship with the
natural world.
Film information ↗
Take Me Outside · Media and podcasts
Films, conversations and resources about outdoor learning.
Browse the collection ↗
David Suzuki · Reconnecting with nature
A radio feature about reconnecting with nature.
Listen at ABC Radio ↗
Research · Music and wilderness
Wilderness Rhythms
Playing Music to Enhance the Nature Experience
What happens when making music becomes part of being in the wilderness? My master’s thesis at the University of Alberta explored wilderness experiences that incorporated playing music, examining the relationship between the music, the people making it and the natural setting around them.
The work looks at an aspect of wilderness experience that can easily be overlooked: we do not only encounter a landscape by looking at it or listening to its existing sounds. We also bring our own sounds into it. Music can change how we attend to a place, while the place itself becomes part of the musical experience.
Chad Clifford
Master’s thesis, University of Alberta, 2002
Read Wilderness Rhythms at the University of Alberta ↗
For a broader research perspective: Review of research on music and nature ↗
The cliffLAND Wellness Trail is being developed as a place to spend time with nature and discover what that experience can offer. The other resources here provide a few more ways to think about that connection.