June 10 - 11, 2010 - Hike

June 10th, 2010 - Escape from the City!!

We are getting better and better at escaping the city on Friday evenings. We leave at 4:00 PM and drive into Cedarholme, our B&B for the weekend, around 8:30 PM. Enroute we have stopped at a restaurant that we have been eyeing around Caledon. It is a disappointment. This Mom and Pop establishment promotes prime rib dinners but in reality, the meat tastes like a regular well-done roast beef. Olivia quite likes her chicken fingers, however, and would return again if it were up to her. I quietly knock the restaurant off of our hit list and remind her that we have many more places to try before the end of the hiking season.

The weather forecast for the Bruce Penn. Region is rain showers with lightening and thunder. John encourages us by e-mail to come anyway – it ain’t over until the fat lady sings or the lightening strikes the hiker - or something like that.

Lynn McCurdy our hostess at Cedarholme B&B, is a resident at the house and provides us with a warm welcome. The house that we are staying in is 150 yes old with well-lit, spacious rooms. I ask if the windows were installed recently as they are large and framed beautifully with polished oak. Lynn says – no. The original owner/builder was a visionary and many of the architectural details which we would consider "modern", were, in fact, original to the home’s design. Through Lynn, we learn that one of the sons of the original owner, now a very old man, said that his father had installed a "toilet room" long before indoor plumbing was widely available- just because he knew that one day, a bathroom at that location would be a desirable thing to have. So the room remained empty for many years until indoor plumbing was eventually installed. Lynn says there is a square cupboard in one of the bedrooms that is connected to the main stair hallway. The soul purpose of this "tunnel" was for air circulation in winter. The warm air rising through the stairwell could be by-passed directly into the bedroom.

Olivia and I are the only ones staying as guests in the B&B. There are cabins associated with the site as well and several of them are occupied with tourists. Though we have a "shared" bathroom arrangement – there is no one to share the bathroom with, so the price is right for our stay at Cedarholme ($95/night total for both of us with breakfast).

June 11, 2010 - Hike Day - 15 km - no actually 17 km

Breakfast is a fresh grapefruit, freshly baked banana bread and eggs and toast, coffee, milk and juice – more than substantial for the day ahead. Several of the GTA folks have left the city at 5 AM and tell us the drive is great at that time in the morning. Today, we actually walk by the door of our B&B and appreciate the 7 minute drive to the first day’s meeting spot. Our hikes this weekend are supposed to be 14 km and 19 km. Walter uses GPS to determine that the purported 14 km hike, with the newly acquired lands cresting the shore, make today’s hike closer to 17 km. We finally meet the real John (one of our excellent guides on Day 2 - who I thought was John was really Don.)
Olivia and I are decked out in our long pants and gaiters. Though the itching of the poison ivy has largely subsided, I have ugly red scars on my legs where the leaves had brushed. Lesson learned. Gaiters and long pants from here on in. I am hoping that with care and exposure to the summer sun, the scars will soon fade.

The weather is heavily overcast, with a thick mist surrounding the land below the escarpment, No breathtaking views today. In many places, the path has a busy creek flowing down the middle which means the hikers are left to step along the edges of the path to avoid an immediate soaker. At Camp Croaker, we start along an extremely slippery boardwalk through a swamp area. The lady slippers are enormous – maybe half the size of my fist but none are conveniently located close to the board walk so that I can hold a hand next to one for reference. These blossoms are breathtaking and unusual. We carefully slide along the boardwalk until we hit the rock face of the escarpment and start climbing upwards.

Once on top, we move through a mist shrouded forest. Still no rain and the temperature hovers around 20C with a light wind. It is actually very pleasant hiking weather except for the puddles and dripping wetness of the leaves. It feels as if we are moving through a tropical rainforest but without the imagined heat.
We encounter streams that whip along and disappear into the ground – down into some subterranean network of caves, rivers and streams. Walter tells us these are part of a karst topography. We encounter strange formations of rock that have become moss-covered over time, leaving surreal shapes rising out of the forest floor. At one fascinating stop, we view potholes, where 10,000 years ago, the waterfalls pouring off of the glaciers that rose 2 km above our heads, plummeted into the earth. The base of the cascade carried boulders in the washing machine-like turbulence, drilling circular bore holes into the limestone. Walter says that there are two competing theories for these potholes – one saying that the 8 ft wide holes were made over thousands and years. Another school of thought says that some catastrophic event caused the bore holes over a relatively short time span. One can’t help but reflect on how very different the world must have been 10,000 years ago. How amazing it would have been to observe from some safe haven time machine, the waterfalls pouring off of the immense glaciers, or watch the glacial dike breach in that prehistoric grand event where the melt waters gushed from Timmins to where we hike today, in a matter of minutes.

Olivia leaves me in the dust and is up with the top 3 hikers. For the first day of the weekend, we have a slow group and a fast group. With my picture taking (photos which people want copies of), I am often near the back of the fast group. The hike is still enjoyable. About 2 hours from the finish, Olivia looks exhausted and says that her stomach hurts. I tell her to take it easy and hike with me. She doesn’t have to be at the front of the line.

With Day 1 complete, and still no rain but wet feet and pants, we pack up and head back to Cedarholme, On the ride home, Olivia searches my face and looks at me with doe eyes. Would I mind if she didn’t finish the end to end hike? I tell her, that it would be OK and that I would prefer it if she enjoyed herself. The whole idea of getting out together was to have fun. If that wasn’t happening for her, then she should not continue to hike. But I did tell her she was hiking at an incredibly aggressive pace. I told her that I could not keep up with the top 3 hikers. I ask her if she would consider going slower, helping me take photo’s and staying back with some of us slower people. I suggest that maybe we should offer to "sweep" – that is be the last people, counting heads and bring up the rear. I ask her to think about it and wait until after she has had a hot shower and sips a cold drink with her feet up for a while.

At Cedarholme, we do precisely that and we then head into Lion’s Head for what we think is a local pub experience. Salad, fish, drinks and dessert put us back $80 which is pretty pricey for pub fair. Though the food is good, it was not as good as the $12 fish fry at Mar. In reading the local newspaper, I note that the Lion’s Head pub donates to local charities, so I don’t feel totally ripped off but it is a spot we will not be visiting again. Walter comments the next day, that a beer has set him back $7 – which again – is a lot for a beer. We tour around the lovely town and check out the cottages rimming the bay. We spot one we might like. We learn through Lynn that the humble cottage is close to $1mil and deceivingly, is not actually a water front lot.

We realize that by the time we wrap up in Lions Head, everything has closed so we can not purchase our lunch for the next day. Our gracious hostess, Lynn comes to the rescue and makes us a fabulous sandwich for an additional $4. This definitely falls on the other end of the spectrum of our Lions Head dinner.