Sunday Autumn Hike

I’ve been sitting on my butt for too long, so decided to go for a wander on Sunday. Temperatures are perfect, colours are vibrant, time to get out there and enjoy. Consumed some Pillsbury Doughboy products and off I went.

The general region I would be walking. More over to the right of the picture than the left of the picture.

The yellow leaf road.

Them trails be paved with goooollld!

Chip Monk, the chipperest chipmunk around.

Along the way is a neat old information board with a bit of the history of Cootes Paradise and the Desjardins Canal. This shows the route that boats would have had to take in order to get to Dundas. For quite a while Dundas was one of the largest settlements in Upper Canada, but it’s growth was limited by the difficulty of getting goods out to the Lake or into Dundas from the Lake. The first hurdle was a large sandbar between Burlington Bay and Lake Ontario. There was a shallow route through it, but it was often intermittent. A proper canal through it was competed in 1826.

Cootes Paradise as it looked when the map was made. People dreamed of digging a canal through the Iroquia Ridge to avoid the shallow, marshy loop they had to take to get from Burlington Bay to Cootes Paradise. Not to say that Cootes isn’t shallow, but trying to manoeuvre barges through the loop had to be a very tricky procedure. The marshy area at the far end of Cootes Paradise also required the dredging of a canal to make boat traffic more viable.The dream got rolling with an early settler to the area, Richard Hatt. When he died in 1819, one of his employees, Pierre Desjardins continued it. He went broke trying to make it a reality and died under mysterious circumstances in 1827. Capital to continue the project trickled in and by 1837 it was completed. Dundas prospered for a time because of the canal, but in a few decades the railway, improved roads and the growth of Hamilton with its easier access to Lake Ontario, had all but doomed the viability of the canal as a trade route. (Apparently Desjardins had also dreamed of a canal from Dundas to Lake Huron. The completion of the Welland Canal put an end to that pipe dream, but it’s still interesting to think what might have been.) 

The signage system is a nice example of the sign painters craft. It is starting to show signs of a half century of weathering, and I worry that it might at some point get taken down and be replaced with something…bland. I hope that this just gets a repainting, not replacement by something else.

I’m glad some people had the foresight to protect this area. 

The Thomas B. McQuesten High Level Bridge as it’s properly known, off in the distance. It’s one of several bridges that span the Desjardins Canal.

Being at about the northern edge of the Carolinian Forest Zone, some uncommon trees for this part of the world can be found here, including sassafras, Kentucky coffee, and tulip trees. There is some remarkable plant diversity present here, with 24% of the flora of Canada and 38% of the flora of Ontario represented in the lands protected by the RBG. Among this diversity are endangered species such as the few-flowered club rush which is now the only population in Canada. Both northern and southern flying squirrels can be found here, and recently some bald eagles have been nesting in the area, the first time that has happened anywhere along the north shore of Lake Ontario in 40 years.

The Escarpment, where I was headed to next. Borer’s Falls on the right and Spencer’s Creek on the left.

I always seem to hang a left when I get to the top of the Escarpment, but this time I hung a right. I decided to go and have a look at the new tunnel that has been constructed under the reworked Highway 6.

Took a slightly different route and checked out some of the RBG lands that I’d never seen before, including the Thornapple Trail, which connected with the Cartwright Conservation Area. Nothing really spectacular, but nice to know that there are some more areas that are protected.

The Bruce Trail tunnel under Hwy. 6 is a big improvement over risking life and limb to cross the highway or the nuisance of making a big detour. But would you believe it, some wigg… I mean caucasian hip hop fashion victims have already defaced the walls with lame tributes to Tupac and Easy-E. *sigh*