Cathedral Bluffs Park

I think you'll agree that Cathedral Bluffs are the most beautiful part of Bluffers Park.  The overlook is dangerously stunning reaching heights of over 90 metres! 

'Cathedral' Bluffs obtained its name from the 'cathedral-like' spire formations created by erosion exposing evidence of five different glacial periods.

The Bluffs located in Scarborough Canada stretch over a span of 14km and were formed over thousands of years of glacial activity and erosion by the currents of Lake Ontario.


When you are standing up top here looking down, it is almost impossible to imagine the water level being this high at one time.   To give you an idea of high it is up here just look at the one picture here in this post where you can see a person down by the shoreline below.  Yes that little speck is a person!

You can gain access to the beaches below just off Kingston Road, via Brimley Road in Toronto Canada.  It's a straight down dramatic descent below which captivates the eyes in any season. 

Once down here, there's a private marina (now advertising water houses for sale currently in rows and docked for the season), a private marina, a Bluffers Restaurant and the park itself formed by landfill.  You really need to have a car to get down here, and in the busiest months, parking can be tough.  Of course you can walk down into the park, but its a good work out getting back up by bike or walking.

I wanted to mention that while down here I noticed a group of people around some trumpeter swans near the boat launch.  Since the swans had tags on them, I immediately formed the notion that they were involved in some race.  "The Great Canadian Swan Race"?   I am not sure what the tags were really meant for but I assumed MO01 was a swan representing Montreal and L64 could perhaps be a 'local' representing swan?




I've learned to research my ideas and laugh off a lot of them!  Seriously, the real reason for the tags are so that volunteers can track the swans' locations from a distance, especially during breeding and nesting season when the swans become too rowdy to get close enough to look at their ankle bands.  The wing tags last about 2 -4 years.

There are many birds at the park here.  It was too cold still for a walk today though, but anxiously awaiting sprung to spring (spring to sprung).

Birkdale Ravine

With winter taking a while to disappear, there isn't much in the way of colour in parks these days (which is one of the reasons I haven't been actively photographing the trails.)

However, I did happen to spot a colourful orange Bobcat off in the distance while walking through the Birkdale Ravine the other day.

Not just any colorful cat either: this one was busy at work cleaning up the damage caused from the recent Ice Storm in December 2013 that affected so many in Toronto over the holidays.  A local man walking his pup had mentioned that the damage to the park was catastrophic and sadly most of the larger trees were taken away already.


Birkdale is a 2 km walk which starts north of Lawrence off of Brimley and winds north west towards Ellesmere.

One of the paths of the park is marked by a tall, elegant light standard — self-sufficient, too, generating its own solar/wind power.  Now that's a great idea.  The same man who was taking his pup for a walk had mentioned that he has been out at 4 am and still saw the lights generating power.

There is plenty of wildlife in and around the creek.  This must be why it was chosen as the site of a village inhabited by Iroquoians around 1250 A.D.

Sometime in the early 1950's a group of University of Toronto students had excavated the area to discover varied clay tobacco pipes, tools and sharpened objects.  They also found pieces of pottery and long slender poles and bark used to build very large log cabins.   It appeared that each cabin had a centre line of fireplaces that were used for both their heating and cooking.  They lived off the land by fishing, hunting and growing basic agriculture of squash, pumpkin, corn and beans.  Later they found bones of mass graves on a hill side a little north of here called Tabor Hill.   (see this blog: Tabor Hill).

I thought I would share this falls view video of Birkdale Ravine bursting with colour, to brighten up the post with promise of better seasons ahead for those stuck in the grey blahs of winter.