Today is the last day of summer and is it is unexpectedly cool today: 12C! My husband Faan was our trail angel today and after we parked the car at the 7th line parking lot (again) he drove us to Hockley Valley Road where we started on the side trail leading from the little parking lot on 5th line EHS. So we were doing this section in the reverse direction from how it is described in the trail guide. (All the people that we met today came from the opposite direction.) I was hoping to catch more up hills than down hills LOL. According to Tanja’s app this was our highest climb so far. A fitting end to our series of Historical Hikes I think.
We had quite a steep climb up to the main trail and then turned west to go see Dave’s Pinnacle, the highest point in the Hemlock Ridges Nature Reserve. It turns out it was named after Dave Moule who was our trail angel for the third hike! He is a very active volunteer on the Bruce Trail. We turned around and followed the main trail down and back up to Sally’s Pinnacle (his wife!!)
We were lucky today that most of the steep sections were traversing the slopes with the occasional staircase thrown in. I was expecting a muddy trail today, but this area must have missed the rain we had 2 days ago and the trail was nice and dry. We did see some dead and twisted trees with real interesting shapes – the result of a tornado in 1985.
Walking through a white pine forest I could impress by knowing that the leaves come in bundles of 5 as opposed to the red pine where they come in 3’s. (I learned that one summer when we were camping at the Pinery.)
There was a nice board walk across a tributary of the Humber River. You could see the start of fall happening since there were some coloured leaves already.
Today we realized that there is only 10 km of main trail between today’s starting point and that of our first hike at Hockley Valley that we did in the spring. Also, the Badlands were re-opened today and I am quite keen to walk the 5km section that starts on Credit View Road towards the Grange Road that we haven’t done yet. I hope that the Badlands section of the Bruce Trail (BT) will go through there again, since I have never been on that part of the BT before. That means we will then have 27 km left to do and can hopefully still earn the Caledon Hills End to End badge this year as well! Interesting how all this walking makes your muscles ache, but at the end of the day you actually feel MORE energetic!
We are very happy that we managed to finish all 5 trails before leaving for Spain where we are going to walk 155 km of the Camino Frances towards Santiago de Compostella.
Walking the Walk 