David J. Widmann

Beyond its picnic areas, tennis courts and manicured gardens, High Park is a thriving ecosystem. The Western Ravines and Beaches Discovery Walk explores some of the park’s wild areas, as well as some of the neighbouring regenerated wetlands.

The walk starts at the Bloor Street entrance to High Park. Passing the picnic areas and a concession stand, the Discovery Walk signs lead you down into a ravine beyond the domain of cyclists (in theory) and the park’s iconic trackless train. The path through the ravine takes you to the shores of Grenadier Pond. It’s hard to believe that the marshland at the northern tip of the pond, a place of dense cattails and lily pads, is part of the same body of water lined by the short grass and benches most park visitors are familiar with.

Continuing south, the walk exits the park, crosses the Queensway, passes under the Gardiner Expressway, and takes you to the shores of Lake Ontario. After lingering on the beach with the joggers and the Canada geese, take Ellis Avenue back north. You’ll see a concrete staircase leading back down into the ravine system. This is where you’ll find out if you made the right choice of shoes or not. A narrow, often muddy trail runs along the eastern shore of another area wetland, Catfish Pond. This part of the walk is especially slippery after a rain, so be careful. But don’t spend so much time looking at your feet that you miss out on the enjoyment of this quiet, spring-fed marsh.

From Catfish Pond, it’s up through Rennie Park to Morningside Avenue, and back to Ellis Avenue. From the winding streets and lofty trees of this neighbourhood, it’s back into High Park towards the end of this walk.

By tying Lake Ontario to the wetlands in and around High Park, the Western Ravines and Beaches Discovery Walk underscores the relationship between the city’s varying bodies of water. Also, being early fall, there is a lot of activity going on for folks who like to watch migratory birds as they prepare for their journeys. The map of the walk can be downloaded here in PDF format.

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If you’re downtown and looking for a lunch-hour chill-out tomorrow (Wednesday), head over to Indigo in the Manulife Centre at Bay and Bloor. At 12:15 p.m., Juno Award winner, Grammy recipient, Officer of the Order of Canada, and Canada’s Walk Of Fame starholder Diana Krall will be sitting behind a piano and performing songs from her latest release, The Very Best of Diana Krall. If you didn’t get your autograph fix during TIFF last week, Krall will stick around after the show to sign copies of her CD.For you Krallophiles who can’t make it to the show tomorrow afternoon, you’ll be able to catch the sultry songstress on TV twice this week. Tonight she endures George Stromboulopoulos on CBC’s The Hour, and tomorrow morning she’ll get up early for a stint on CTV’s Canada AM.

Still not enough? Click here to view Diana’s current electronic press kit.

On Sunday, as an unofficial kickoff to the Walk21 pedestrian conference coming to Toronto next month, the Walking Life exhibit opened at the Gladstone Hotel.

The exhibit is an eclectic mix of paintings, maps, architectural drawings, collages and video. It represents images of urban walking from many different viewpoints, from the casual rambler to the urban planner.

Highlights of the show include Adam Krawesky’s “Clockwork,” a digital composite showing pedestrians crossing to all four corners of a street; “Walking Maps,” a collection of paintings based on Marlena Zuber’’s strolls with the Toronto Psychogeography Society, and Val Nye’s stark and stunning photograph entitled “Open Road.”

A stroll through Walking Life is free. It will be on the third floor of the Gladstone until October 4, and is open daily from noon to 5:00pm.

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Toronto is a city of trees. From centuries-old native oaks in our parks to imported Norway maples planted on lawns, Toronto’s greenery may not always be evident, but it is an integral part of the city’s life and history. Local Enhancement and Appreciation of Forests (LEAF) and the Toronto Public Space Committee (TPSC) have come together to create a series of tree tours that explore the urban canopy. Toronto Tree Tours offers guided walks as well as providing the maps required for self-guided tours. This week, Torontoist checked out the Dovercourt Park and Neighbourhood tour.

The walk itself is short, but it is very well storied. Toronto Tree Tours has done a fantastic job of collecting the arboreal lore of the area. Beginning in Dovercourt Park, participants begin under the branches of hundred-year-old silver maples, and are surrounded by new trees planted in 2003 that will be ready to offer shade when their older counterparts have reached the end of their lives. The greening of Dovercourt Junior Public School’s playground is chronicled, as well as several stories of how non-native tree species came to the city.

The tour also goes beyond trees, pointing out some of Dovercourt Village’s surviving farmhouses and a squat yellow building that is believed to have once been an ice house.

Taking a self-guided Toronto Tree Tours tour does take a little bit of planning. While all of the material you’ll need get the most out of the walk is available on their web site, they haven’t yet assembled downloadable packages that can be easily carried on a walk. If you don’t have a wireless PDA, a good way to make the tour materials more portable is to cut-and-paste the text into a word processor and print it out. When printing, don’t forget to reduce the font size or print multiple pages onto one sheet of paper. Let’s try to minimize the tragic irony of killing trees in order to appreciate them.

The next Toronto Tree Tours event takes place on September 29 in Kensington Market as part of Nuit Blanche. The next scheduled walk is the Bendale Tree Tour in Scarborough on October 14.

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The city’s Discovery Walks program, while extensive, doesn’t cover every nook and cranny of Toronto. For instance, there is very little ground covered east of the Don River.

Great Country Walks Around Toronto by Elliott Katz fills in many of those blanks. This pocket-sized guide covers parks and trails from the Humber River Valley to Rouge Beach, the Islands to Black Creek. This week, Torontoist follows Katz’s guide into Taylor Creek Park.

Taylor-Massey Creek (Also called, at different times in its history, Silver Creek and Scarboro Creek) is a tributary to the Don, and was once home to paper mills and other industries. Its headwaters, now buried by Highway 401, are near Pharmacy Avenue. This walk starts at Victoria Park Avenue and runs five kilometres to the Forks of the Don.

From the Victoria Park subway station, walk north, cross at the Crescent Town Road intersection, and continue walking until you see a set of stairs heading down into the ravine. As you descend, the street and towering apartment buildings around you melt away, replaced by trees and a paved multi-use path. The path winds through Taylor Creek Park, following the newly-naturalized riverbed and passing a series of manicured parklands and picnic areas. If you can avoid the temptation to explore the many side paths that split off from the main trail, you’ll pass under the O’Connor Street bridge and cross a few foot bridges criss-crossing the creek before reaching a parking lot just before the Don Valley Parkway. This is where Taylor Creek meets the East and West Don Rivers.

Passing under the DVP and crossing the footbridge over the railway tracks, the walk ends at Thorncliffe Park Drive. From here, you can take the 81 Thorncliffe Park bus to the Pape subway station, take the trail back to Victoria Park, or flip to page 19 of Great Country Walks and continue along Wilket Creek into E.T. Seaton Park (a walk Torontoist will explore in a future article).

The path that serves walkers, cyclists, rollerbladers and skateboarders in the more temperate months becomes a casual-use cross-country skiing trail in the winter. In an area that was once a hub of industry for Toronto, Taylor Creek Park now offers year-round recreation with close proximity to transit, the DVP and parking. This is definitely an area of the city worth checking out.

From October 1 – 4, the Walk21 conference comes to Toronto. Keynote speaker Dr. David Suzuki will be joined by a host of academics, urban planners, elected officials and activists to discuss urban pedestrian issues. Lectures, discussions and workshops will cover the theme of “putting pedestrians first” in policies and infrastructure in order to make active transportation viable and attractive in increasingly dense urban areas.

Running concurrent to Walk21, the YWALK youth forum is aimed at getting teens involved in promoting active transportation in their communities. Taking place on October 3 at the Royal Ontario Museum, the event will offer a forum for youths to discuss walking and cycling concerns, public space issues, accessibility, and the environmental impacts of the car culture.

Walk21 also brings us the World Record Walk, which gives Ontario a chance to show Western Australia that we can get more people out on the street to walk one kilometre at the same time than they can.

As a satellite event to Walk21, Ryerson University is running their Gould Street International Student Design Competition. The university is looking for ways to design a new “pedestrianized” urban campus space along the Gould Street corridor. The design competition is open to any full-time student enrolled in any academic institution, and entries will be accepted until September 17. Winners of the competition will be announced October 2.

The Walking Life exhibit at the Gladstone Hotel, which runs from September 5th to October 4th, also takes advantage of Walk21’s presence in the city. The exhibit will celebrate “the experience of walking” through works created by artists and community members.

Registration for Walk21 is available now and closes September 25. There is a series of free pre-conference workshops taking place on October 1. Standard registration for the conference is $750, and you can attend a single day of Walk21 for $300. For more info, email walk21@toronto.ca

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Old Mill station offers a brief respite from the dirty grey walls of the subway’s usual monotony of underground tunnels. Crossing over the Humber River, the windows of the station offer a view of daylight and trees in either direction. Not surprisingly, Old Mill station is also the start point for another of the city’s Discovery Walks: the Humber River, Old Mill and Marshes.

From the subway station, Old Mill Road curves down past the Old Mill Inn and Spa, and into King’s Mill Park. The park was named after the first industrial structure erected in Toronto, a mill that supplied the wood that built Fort York and some of the city’s earliest buildings.

Walking across the historic stone bridge over the river and along some tree-lined streets, you come to Riverview Gardens, becoming Riverside Drive south of Bloor. Riverside is part of an ancient carrying trail used by First Nations traders to transport goods from Lake Ontario north to the Upper Great Lakes. It is also along Riverside where Anne of Green Gables creator Lucy Maud Montgomery spent the last seven years of her life, the site now marked by a plaque and a well-manicured parkette.

Continuing south, passing by a procession of grand old residences and the Humber Marshes, you finally come to the Queensway. Crossing the busy bridge over the river, you head back north along a paved walking and cycling trail past the sewage treatment plant and into South Humber Park. The trail breaks off at Stephen Drive, and picks up again a bit north, heading back into King’s Mill Park, past the Toronto Humber Yacht Club, and under the subway bridge before taking you back to Old Mill Road.

The Humber River is a rich historical and environmental resource for Toronto. The Humber River, Old Mill and Marshes Discovery Walk [PDF map] is a great way to explore this important watershed.

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Wireless number portability (WNP), the ability to keep your cellular phone number when you change service providers, came to Canada in March of this year. The masses of consumers looking to free themselves from their frustrating cell companies cheered. Those cheers turned to grumbles with the realization that the spiffy new phones received for “free” came attached to lengthy service contracts. Breaking a contract can make switching to (or from) the company with the cute dogs in the ads prohibitively expensive.

Cue the smart university student using the social networking capabilities of the Internet to solve a problem. Bijan Shahrokhi, an Electrical Engineering student at the University of Toronto, has created CellClients.com, a trading post for unwanted cell phone contracts. If you’re looking to dump your phone plan for something with better coverage or lower long distance rates, sign up and let people know what company you’re with, what your rate plan is, and how much time is left on the contract. If you want to take over a cell phone plan in order to save on activation fees, SIM card fees and all the other sundries that inflate the first phone bill on a new plan, you can browse what’s available and contact a contract holder directly to make the switch.

CellClients.com is a new service, so the user base is rather small. Still, if you want to take advantage of WNP and don’t want to wait out your contract, it’s at least worth a look.

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There are more ways to walk and discover this city than just following the city’s Discovery Walk maps. There are an increasing number of guided audio tours that you can download from the Internet and pack into your digital music player before heading out on your expedition. One audio tour company, City Surf, has several neighbourhood tours available for about $10 each. Recently, City Surf teamed up with Waterfront Toronto to offer a free audio tour of the central waterfront area.

You can borrow an MP3 player from City Surf’s booth near Queen’s Quay Terminal, or you can download it as a zip file here. The file includes all of the audio tracks for this walking tour, as well as a PDF map you can print off and take with you on your journey.

The tour begins with a brief primer on the waterfront’s industrial and shipping history. An overview of the Port Lands, the story of the now-posh Queen’s Quay Terminal building, and the origins of the Power Plant Gallery are a few of the subjects covered at the beginning of the tour. This narrative helps to give the listener a grounding in the waterfront’s origins and a taste of what the area could be like in the future if Waterfront Toronto’s plans see fruition.

The rest of the tour is a similar mix of past, present and future as you walk west along the waterfront. As you listen, Toronto’s changing relationship to Lake Ontario is revealed. The new yellow umbrellas on the beach at HTO Park, the renaturalized wetlands at Spadina Quay, and the hulking silos of the old Canada Malting Company — landmarks passed by thousands of people every day with barely a second thought — take on new meaning in this context. (Incidentally, the walk also takes you across the Amsterdam Bridge, recently captured by Panoramaist.)

The farthest point of the tour is Ireland Park. The sculptures in here are half of an art installation, with the other half residing near the port of Dublin. It is here that your digital tour guide offers you the option of hopping onto the Harbourfront streetcar and ending the tour, or backtracking and learning more about some of the sights you’ve just passed. This last bit of the tour includes a brief history of the Toronto Islands, a bit more on the future of the Port Lands, and the story of how the Toronto Islands ferry service came to be.

City Surf has done a good job of creating a well-paced, informative tour for a sunny afternoon. It’s a little heavy on waterfront revitalization content, but it’s because of Waterfront Toronto that this tour is being offered to the public at no charge, so that’s to be expected. That bias doesn’t take anything away from the enjoyment of this waterfront walk. Besides, it’s nice to believe that the vision of parkland and walkable neighbourhoods planned for the area might actually exist one day.

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The Belt Line Railway opened in July 1892 to service the new neighbourhoods of Rosedale, Moore Park, Forest Hill and Swansea. A recession and competing rail services led to the railway’s closure only 28 months later. Parts of the railway were purchased and used by other companies over the years, but much of the old Belt Line sat abandoned for many years. In 1972, the city purchased a stretch of the railway east of Allen Road to create what would become the Kay Gardner Beltline Park. This is where the Central Ravines, Belt Line and Gardens Discovery Walk begins.

Starting just north of Eglinton West Station, the Beltline Trail follows the former rail line south, passing through several other parks along the way. After crossing a bridge at Yonge Street, the trail enters Mount Pleasant Cemetery.

Torontoist never really understood the thought of a stroll through a cemetery to pass the time. Even on a bright August afternoon, Mount Pleasant looks like the setting for an old Anne Rice novel. After a while, though, the creepiness fades, the beauty of the place becomes apparent, and it’s easy to see why so many cyclists and ramblers explore Mount Pleasant’s winding trails. The cemetery is also an interesting look into the multiculturalism of Toronto, with crosses, Stars of David, Chinese dragons and other cultural symbols jumbled together.

From Mount Pleasant, the walk goes down into the Moore Park Ravine, following Mud Creek. At Bayview Avenue, south of the Don Valley Brickworks, the walk turns, following the ravines north. This part of the walk is a bit more like a nature trail than the well-groomed Beltline Trail, so hopefully you’ve chosen your footwear accordingly. Following the Yellow Creek through the dense canopy of the Vale of Avoca Ravine, it’s easy to forget that you haven’t left the city.

Heading out of the ravine and back into Mount Pleasant Cemetery, this Discovery Walk ends at Yonge Street, close to the St. Clair subway station. Although this walk is bounded by only a thin ribbon of trees for most of its length, this afternoon stroll feels like a total escape from the city. If you can’t remember the last time you heard the sound of water flowing over rocks when it hadn’t been previously recorded, give this Discovery Walk a try. The map can be picked up at City Hall, libraries and community centres, or downloaded as a PDF.

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