Up and down at Woodside Park

 What a delight. I was recently mentioned in dispatches over at Jim Grey's dependable and always fascinating blog Down the Road, though it was kind of a wincing compliment. A boot in the pants to post more often. I keep promising myself I will. My hobbies have turned back inward to my art and my writing, and all the wandering just gets sliced, diced, and put into the Millennium Project for eventual accrual to the provincial archives (I hope) rather than forensically laid out here on City in the Trees like it used to be ten, fifteen years ago.

Well, I can't promise I'll be a daily doser here like I was back then, but I can certainly post about some of the wanders, if only as an aid to memory. I can't count how many times I've been back here just to figure out when it was I did whatever, and after about 2012, I really stopped providing myself that memory aid. Oh, anyway... here's something that some of you might find interesting if and when you pass by.

Bolton is a small town that's actually part of a bigger town, Caledon, to the northwest of Toronto out in Peel Region. It's pretty much on the border with York Region, and I mention it only as a geographic reference. The place I'm concerned with today is a few minutes' drive east of Bolton in Vaughan. I blogged about it once, way back in 2006, when P-Doug and I were first there. We didn't return until the spring of 2020 (during the meantime, Cold Creek Road has gone from gravel-dirt to paved). More recently, in the past summer or two, we've been back a few times. It's a moderately challenging climb and a beautiful hike; a place that was once cleared and populated in long-ago summers but is now conservation land slowly returning to wilderness.

Back in the 1960s, the place was called Woodside. It was a park or campgrounds of some sort. There's some suggestion, although it's not conclusive, that the site hosted a local nudist club for a couple of years in the 1950s before it moved on to a more permanent location. There really isn't much about it out there... well, why would there be? But it's been an interesting derelict for a long time, and frankly, I'm a little disappointed in myself that I left most of 15 go by before going back.

Like I said, there are some good hikes to be had there. Down in the valley, the most prominent remnant of what the place once was remains the concrete swimming pool, set ironically a 30-second stroll from the freely-running waters of the Humber River. Talk about belts and bracers. It's an absolute mess today; trees have broken through and are growing in it. But back Dr. Kimble was still The Fugitive running from state to state, it must have been the pride and joy of the place. 

York Region maintains an array of aerial maps that include some plates from various years in the past. It's by no means as complete as I'd like; there are decade-wide-or-more gaps in it, but it's way better than nothing at all. Here are some comparison shots of the site in 1954 and 1970, and contemporarily. The red circle in the modern view indicates the location of the house in the 1970 view that came and went in the meantime between 1954 and today. I'll come back to that later.

Along with the swimming pool, there were some interesting buildings on-site in 1970. I have no real idea exactly what they were, but I suppose they were there in support of the enterprise, whatever it was. 

By the pool here seems to be the central hub of the place. This must have been a snack bar and/or the changing room and washrooms.

Back when we were there in 2006, we wandered northwest a bit and found some old, long abandoned and largely collapsed wooden structures. I keep promising myself to go back and look for them again, but really, what would there be to see even if they haven't been cleared out? More pronounced collapse?

A few things have disappeared since we were there; the place was "cleaned up" by the region at some point in between. The wrecked car that once graced the place is gone.

...Although to the north, a more modern wreck exists on a small promontory of land on the far side of the river whose location and presence is much, much harder to explain! This view was shot telephoto from the heights on the west side of the river, looking down across it.

And the supports for a bridge that once gave vehicle access to what appears to be a farm on the far side of the river. When we were there, P-Doug suggested these were supports for a suspension bridge, but the aerials to me looks like just a more mundane pony truss. There's no way to really be sure at this point, however. Anyway, these, too, are gone, though the abutments are still in evidence.

If you go back to the maps at the start of this post, you can see there's some suggestion that part of the park included land up on the heights, were a single building at the lip of the valley is indicated. That's the house you can see at the bottom left in the 1970 view. That causes me to speculate if the house was in fact the administrative aspect of the park, at least for a time.

So let's consider the house now. Essentially, it existed from the 1950s or 1960s to sometime in the 1970s or so. Where its driveway met Cold Creek Road, you can now park and hike in along the way that once brought you to the house.

Since I like to geotag my 3D shots, and my now-ancient FujiFilm FinePix W3s don't have any geotagging facility of their own, I turn on the tracking app on my phone and put that information in later using Photo Mechanic.

But matching the shots later made me realize that, a some point, when you hike the trail along the edge of the valley, you are actually walking through the very spot where the house once stood.

And, in fact, on that spot, you can still find a little bit of what I assume was the concrete parking pad of the garage just a foot or two off the trail in the woods. Other than that, though, there's nothing left of the house per se; nothing at all.

By 1978, the photo evidence is the place was demolished and utterly gone. At the risk of repeating myself; below: 1954, 1970, 1978, 2022. (Interestingly, the bridge across the river to the far property still seems to have been there in 1978.)

Studying the place on Google Maps, I've long been intrigued by what looks like two extant structures. When we were there last year, I decided to finally make a point of finding them and learning what they were.

One of them, that white spot just to the lower right of the second "bullseye" in the above images, turns out to be, according to the consensus of friends' opinions, a smokehouse, built at a nose-friendly distance from the house proper.

The other was a barely-visible dot that turns out to be down the slope, and is, in fact, a long-ago pilfered Toronto Star newspaper box that subsequently appears to serve, or has served, some sort of role in drunken reveries down in the hollow.

There are four ways down into the valley from Cold Creek Road. The first is the most obvious, and the one we took the very first time we were out there. At a dip in the road, the actual road down to the park once existed. Even with the dip, it's a long, treacherous hike, and P-Doug scraped his knee badly our first hike down it back in 2006. Frankly, I can't imagine how anyone could have made it down there hauling a trailer without it jack knifing, so maybe it was tents only.

The second is just to the north of the end of the driveway, in the open space. It leads down to the cup of the valley to hook up with the first route near the bottom. The third is a slippery but more direct descent just a few yards before the second that drops you more or less where the swimming pool is.

The fourth, which we've discovered more recently, is a trail between where the parking pad of the house once stood and the proximity of the bridge abutments, lending some credence to the idea that the house really did have something to do with the park, more formal than just being a neighbouring property. It's not quite wide enough for a car anymore, but it's reasonably open most of the way down... once you can find it, that is. The first twenty yards of it are nearly completely lost in the trees, and we only ever found it in the first place by essentially reverse engineering it, coming up from an obvious gap in the trees at the trail in the valley.

I guess at this point I've exhausted all I really have to say about it, other than that it's a glorious walk from late April to early November, and one I hope to return to many more times in the future.

And here's to you, Jim, for getting me off my butt... or actually, on my butt... to write this all down. :)