Philly’s ‘Walking Artist’ embarks on another leg of his epic tribute to Harriet Tubman. This time it is a 450-mile trek from N.Y. to Canada.

Ken Johnston, the West Philadelphia man who recently completed a 165-mile walk through South Jersey to honor Harriet Tubman’s 200th birthday anniversary, is on the move again.

If all goes as “unplanned,” as he described his recent decision to travel to Canada by foot, Johnston was to start out Thursday morning, from Harlem to St. Catharines, Ontario.

He planned to start from Alison Saar’s Harriet Tubman Memorial statue, Swing Low, at the Harriet Tubman Triangle at 122nd Street in Harlem, where he completed a walk from Pennsylvania to New York last year.

From Harlem, he plans to walk to the historic Lincoln Avenue Corridor in New Rochelle and follow the Underground Railroad network up the Hudson River Valley to Albany and across parts of central New York before reaching Auburn, N.Y., where Tubman lived until her death in 1913, and on to Canada.

Tubman had lived in Canada for nearly a decade before the start of the Civil War.

Johnston, 60, who lives in Cobbs Creek, said he uses walking as an art form to tell the story of civil rights and freedom movements around the world. But he has a particular interest in Tubman.

“Harriet Tubman’s determination is so inspiring to me,” he told The Inquirer. “As I prepare to embark on the next leg of Walk to Freedom journey from New York to Canada, my goal is to reach Harriet Tubman’s final resting place in Auburn, N.Y., and then continue on to St. Catharines, Ontario, where she lived for a number of years away from the grasp of the American justice system.”

This 450-mile walk is a continuation of earlier walks Johnston made, from Poplar Neck, Md., near Tubman’s birthplace in Dorchester County, to Philadelphia, completed in February 2020, and later, to New York, completed in April 2021.

But unlike his New Jersey walk, which was a “segment walk,” completed mostly on weekends, the walk to Canada will be a continuous, more than monthlong walk.

After a break for a planned trip on Aug. 15, Johnston said, he will return to the trail sometime during the week of Aug. 22, to complete the final miles of the journey to Canada.

In a blog post Tuesday, he announced plans for the New York-to-Canada journey and asked for supporters to donate to his GoFundMe page or share contacts of places he might find lodging along the way.

“I’m nervous because the unplanned walk will begin on Thursday, the day after tomorrow. It came about very recently when a window of opportunity in time suddenly flew open and the sudden breeze offered to carry me to Canada,” he wrote.

Johnston began his first Harriet Tubman walk on Dec. 24, 2019, at 10 p.m. That walk was in honor of the Christmas Day 1854 rescue, in which Tubman led her three brothers and at least 10 others from the Poplar Neck plantation to Philadelphia and later on to St. Catharines.

The 2019 walk roughly coincided with the November 2019 release of the movie Harriet, which was loosely based on Tubman’s life.

Johnston, a Philadelphia native who spent part of his childhood in Massachusetts, has hiked hundreds of miles to mark global civil rights movements since 2018. That year, Johnston walked more than 400 miles from Selma to Memphis — to observe the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

On April 2, Johnston and Deborah Price, a volunteer at the Underground Railroad Museum in Eastampton, Burlington County, began the Cape May-to-Burlington City walk.

That was a “segment walk,” conducted mostly on weekends and ended on May 28, 2022.

» READ MORE: To honor Harriet Tubman and others, this 165-mile ‘Walk to Freedom’ traces South Jersey Underground Railroad routes

But Johnston’s new walk, from New York to Canada, is planned to be a continuous, at least monthlong or more walk.

“People are invited to join me along the way, " he said. But for the most part, he said he expects it to be a solo walk.

» READ MORE: On Walk to Freedom, a stop at a South Jersey church where Harriet Tubman may have brought freedom seekers

Johnson released a partial itinerary of the trip from Harlem through Albany, which he anticipates he will reach by July 25. He expects the route will take him from Harlem to New Rochelle, Scarsdale, and Bedford to John Jay Homestead Farm, to the Katonah Museum to Poughkeepsie, Hudson, and Albany.

After Albany, he expects to travel the bulk of the journey, about 300 miles: Albany to Syracuse, to Auburn, to Rochester, to Buffalo, and finally on to St. Catharines. (St. Catharines is about 30 miles from Buffalo.)

Part of walking the Underground Railroad means that he will sometimes zig and zag across Upstate New York, visiting sites along the way. Johnston said he will be consulting historians to pinpoint his trips from Albany to Canada.