I realized something after our first day out, we have to walk back to the car after each of our treks so we are really doing the trail twice! It would be nice to be able to do it once. The advantage is I do get to see things that one may have missed the first time through.
Today the starting point was at Fireman’s Park, which is the 7.2 km mark on the trail and we were to work our way to the “Big Hill” and return back. About 3.5 km of walking one way. No problem since we had done this a couple of days prior (or so we thought).
After parking the car we followed the road to the railroad tracks where we found a trail. However, this trail did not seem to have any blazes that we could see. We could see some going the other direction though so we must be on the right path. After walking for a few minutes I grew a little worried that we could not see the blazes anywhere. Soon we hit a crossroads where we found out we did not start on the right path but since we had now found the blazes we could continue on without worry.
White blaze, Bruce Trail, Niagara
Part of this portion of the trail would take us alongside a road before heading back into the forest. Once in the forest again we found a bridge, a partial staircase and a stile. Continuing our hike we finally found the “Big Hill”. This was definitely NOT the hill we stopped at the other day. Not good, because now I have no idea how much further before we get to the place we stopped at. Yikes! Our only marker was that at one point near the end of our hike the other day was an area with a machine of some sort. On we trudged and in the process of our trudging we found a gully full of trees and large stones. The glacier had definitely been this way.
Vine covered trees, Bruce Trail Niagara
After walking another kilometer we were back at the machine and having a snack. We were very far off our original assumption of where we stopped but luckily we still had the energy to make it back until we hit the road. On our first trip down the road I had not noticed that this 0.5km stretch was going downhill. Why would I since I was still feeling pretty good? But oh did I feel it on the way back up the hill. It was a slight angle but 0.5km of slight uphill is tough when you’re about a 1km away from finishing an 8km trek.
Little did I realize we had one more surprise ahead of us. Remember how I mentioned that we did enter on the right path? Yes well, on the way back to the car we followed the correct trail and it was beautiful until we came out onto the road. There we were…..at the bottom of a very steep hill…..it rivaled the “Big Hill” accept that it was a paved road and at the top of it was my car. *sigh*
