In the trees, of the trees

Monday being a holiday hereabouts, and my friends either out of town or communication, I was kind of at loose ends. So I made some plans to just get out, get some earth under my feet, and see something new. Well, something old. I like to explore places that have been abandoned, left behind. Place that once were "places", but are no more, if you see what I mean.

Greater Toronto's in a state of flux. Once just a small town surrounded by farms, it's grown into one of the continent's principal metropolitan areas. People migrate, farmland becomes subdivision. Patterns of land and people change. Thanks to things like GoogleMaps, it's not that hard to soar over the landscape and seek out the places that have been left behind. I found one last weekend and went to explore it.

Situated in Milton north of the 401 and just a little east of Hwy 25, it's an intriguing chunk of territory that, a generation or two ago, must have been settled farmland, or at least attached to it. I've seen lots of abandoned concession and range roads in the past 20 years or so, but I think this is the first time I've encountered an actual abandoned intersection. Yes, in the middle of the forest, a concession and range road meeting up, without lights or stop signs or buildings. Just two thin, cleared lines among the forest trees. I imagine that an intersection like, say, Dufferin and St. Clair must have looked like this once. One became a busy city intersection. The other was returned to nature. Well, more or less.


The roads are still open; they're no more than a single car width now, if they were ever more than that. I parked at the west end and began the walk. The road was full ruts, deep and muddy; the kind of thing I find enjoyable in my style of hiking. Not far in, I found a section of the Bruce Trail leading away to the north; a bit further along, the southbound part of the Trail as well. I stayed with the road, however, passing a clearing, a shallow pond, and any number of rises and valleys. It took me about half an hour to make my way to the intersection, which was surprisingly wide, and featured a large pool that was probably a couple of feet deep. At that point I was more interested in checking out the other road, so I skirted the pool rather than wading it.

Try to imagine this intersection as it might have been... or might yet be, one day... at the heart of a busy city scene.

I didn't go far up the other road; I stopped for a while to sit and enjoy the setting. The air was still; there was hardly a sound. Near me on the road was another big pool, and this one I did attempt as I headed back. Just then, I heard behind me the sound of an approaching vehicle, and I scrambled out, for fear I might get run over. A truck came over the rise, and behind it an ATV. The ATV used the little side road to get around the truck, and its rider stopped to talk with me while we watched the guys in the truck decide whether or not to take on the giant puddle (which they did with aplomb, the driver calling back to us, "Where's the fun in that?"). The ATV headed off south, and then east; the truck turned west, down the road from which I'd come. I skirted the pool at the intersection again, crossing through the forest, and headed back. After ten or fifteen minutes, I heard the truck coming back, and I stepped off the road. It was at the location of the first big pond, which is off the road on the north side. They turned towards it, clearly considering driving through it, but prudence got the better of them and they stayed with the road. They saw me and we shared a laugh and I said I didn't blame them.


On the way in to the road, I'd noticed what looked like an abandoned school on the corner, and that was confirmed when I spoke with the fellow on the ATV. So I stopped there for a few minutes and took a few shots of the sad decay of the place. Later on, I found out a little about it on the net. It was Speyside Public School, and it was built in 1960 and closed (as such) in 1986. Afterwards, it was a Catholic high school for a couple of years, and then a teacher's college for York University till the mid-90s (in fact, it still has a York University entrance sign on it). After that, it was closed for good. It made me sad to think of the people who must have passed through it over the years; a place so full of life once, now just silent and increasingly overgrown.


I also discovered there's a "royal" oak there. Acorns from England were brought over and planted, in the nearby village of Dublin, to celebrate the coronation of King George VI in 1937. It was soon moved about 20 years later to its current location when the new school was built. I took pictures of nearly everything else, but missed the oak! I mean to go back and take some pictures of it; soon, or maybe in the fall.

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ADDENDUM:

August 25th

Last Friday (August 22), P-Doug and I went out to Milton and I got the following pix of the Royal Oak for you. :)

Rain, rain... we went away

Well, if I wanted some rain for the hike on Kirby Road and didn't get it, I got it in spades this Saturday. It would have been nice if we could have averaged out the two.

My friend Larry, who also likes to hike lost places, got in touch with me and said he was game to explore this weekend. As it turned out, the unseen but world champion of finding lost places, Bassmentbeats, had sent me a new assignment just days earlier. It was in Halton, north of Milton, just up on the escarpment in the vicinity of a quarry. In fact, from the looks of things, the reason the place has been so extensively abandoned in recent years is that the quarry plans to devour the place. Exploring it in the short term looks to be the only option... soon, it won't be there to explore, it seems to me.

Bassmentbeats said he'd traveled the road before, back when people were still living in the homes at the southern end. Today, half the road's blocked off and the houses that once were there are gone (there are still some nice ones being lived in at the north end of the road, however). We parked the car and set out, in what was initially a light rain, to explore what BB figures was probably a campgrounds.

The temperature was in the mid-teens; comfortable enough, even with the light rain. The uncomfortable element, really, was the wind. If it hadn't been for that, we probably could have persisted longer, even when the rain really kicked in. But at least initially, it wasn't so bad. We turned off the road and onto the driveway leading into the grounds. We noticed some fresh truck tracks entering from a south turn, and assumed they must have been affiliated with the quarry since there's no other way to get to that end of the road. We followed them along, leaving tracks of our own in the mud as we explored.

It wasn't long before we came to some hints of what had been... some plastic chairs, a desk, and a ruined canoe. The former items were neither here nor there, but the canoe strongly suggested some kind of camping activity. There were no rivers or major lakes handy, just a couple of ponds BB had seen and shown us using GoogleMaps.

We came to a fork in the road and followed the left fork down to a concrete-bottomed artificial lake. It was full of algae blooms and its central drainage system had seen better days. The place has probably been abandoned for 15 or 20 years at this point. As we stood looking it over, Larry spotted headlights through the trees. It was the truck coming back from whatever mission it had been on. We were either hidden by the copse of trees or they just didn't care; they drove on without stopping.

It was right around then, though, that the rain began to pick up. I usually carry an old outer shower curtain with me for times I want to sit back for a while in the forest without getting all covered in leaves and dirt. We found a couple of trees and attached the curtain to the branches and stood under it. It was fine at first, but the rain quickly became semi-torrential, and eventually soaked through the fabric. It wasn't doing us any good just standing there, so we elected to do an Apollo 13 and abandon the mission to get back to base. It pretty much rained on us the whole twenty minute walk back to the car. We both remarked to one another that it really wasn't the rain, or even the saturated clothes, that bothered us. Even the ground water and the mud were comfortably warm enough as we made our way through them. No, it was the wind, blowing over our sodden shirts that was the downer. Larry even said that, had there been no wind, he probably would have be in favour of continuing exploring in the rain. But it was just unpleasant enough to chase us back to shelter.

We had to sit naked in the car for about half an hour while things dried out, at least a little. We listened to the radio tell us about the rain and watched a couple of other lost cars come to the end of the road and turn around. Eventually, we got back into our clammy things and headed into town to get something to eat.

Above is a beautiful Anglican church in Milton. Larry liked the church so I took the shot for him.

Incredibly, we found Breyden's in Milton. Breyden's is a place I've been a number of times with P-Doug down at Jane and Bloor. I had no idea it was a chain. We ordered the nachos and a couple of sandwiches; it was more than enough to satisfy us. I did manage to dump my pop on the table and partly onto Larry at one point, which only added insult to injury, but we both found the irony pretty humourous. The young waitress must have wondered what she'd done to have a couple of wet, bumbling assholes visited upon her. We tipped apologetically.

And that was it. Come more favourable weather, we're intending to go back and extend the mission.