Category: Meta

A Change in the Metroscape

A reflection on my walks in Toronto, both in 2019 and as a whole for the past 6 years.

A massive valley with towering apartments on the top of the slope.

The remnance of where a river swept an entire crescent of houses away.

Thick forest followed by a massive train trestle overhead.

A sweeping shoreline leading to a downtown core.

These were the sights along my first walk after moving to Toronto, from Cruickshank Park to the lake. While this was something to occupy myself for the weekend, it started a fascination with how Toronto’s natural and built environments collided.

That said, the walks were aimless and kinda shallow. It wasn’t until November 2017 that it became a brand, and a focused effort to document Toronto’s best walks and biggest opportunities. All in all, from what I could remember back to April 2016, I racked up over 1,300 kilometres over 111 walks.

But now, my journeys across Toronto have reached a hiatus. My needs have changed, and I was driven out by the high cost of rent. I have now moved on to new pastures in the tri-city, but I will continue exploring metroscapes.

But I thought it worthwhile to take a look back, and make some initial reflections.

2019 in Toronto

2019 was a pretty fruitful year. Despite only completing half as many walks as last year (306 km, or a drive from Toronto to Chatham), I did go further on average (16.4 km; a Lakeshore West GO train ride from Union to Dixie Road). More important than the stats, however, is that I feel like I went on some particularity special walks.

One was certainly the Leslie Spit. Dreary weather can make for a dreary day, but sometimes it makes the colours in the landscape pop a little more. That certainly was the case with the Spit’s brick-laden shores, wetlands in their infancy, tall barren trees and still harbour waters. There’s nothing else like it.

Another was the impeccably timed documenting of The Toronto Islands. This happened about a month before Lake Ontario broke water level records set just two years prior, and ended up becoming an indepth analysis and a new set of knowledge for me.

Finally, there was walking the Beltline, which was a bit of coming full circle. It mixed the midtown trail that was an integral part of my last 4 years in Toronto, and the valley that fills faint memories from the first 6 years of my life. It’s objectively beautiful without context, but it was a very spiritual trip for me.

Looking Back and Forward

I can’t pick those three walks and say they were my top 3 for 2019, or that any of them were the best of all time. Even when I have an incident(e.g. heat exhaustion, falling through ice, or getting lost), every walk has its moment. Despite my bitterness with the circumstances I had to leave under, these adventures will stick with me for years to come.

I’m just happy that I’m able to share all of this. Whether it’s looking up ideas for your own walks, referring to older pictures as the city continues to grow and change, or using analysis to further improve the walking environment of the city, I will strive to maintain this website as a resource for current and future Torontonians.

That said, the Toronto section of the site is not going to be completely static going forward. I still have work to do in the Projects section, and I will return to the city on occasion to visit and take care of some unfinished plans.

So this isn’t goodbye Toronto. More like “See you later.”

#metroscapes 2018 in Review

2018 marks the first full year of #metroscapes, a brand I launched in November 2017 to organize the hundreds of kilometres of hiking I had done in Toronto, and to represent their theme: the exploration of where natural and built environments collide. And with this new brand, I started upping my game. I started planning my walks, making them less of aimless wandering and more of discoveries of natural systems and built corridors. I started pulling from additional resources, such as the City of Toronto’s mapping service and historic aerial photographs. I migrated this website to a new platform to expand beyond walks, and have dedicated pages for projects such as #shorelineTO, #neighbourhoodsTO and Toronto’s Trail Network. And although this website now shifts some focus away from blogging, I still use it, with a new practice of using it to comment on public documents such as the City of Toronto Parkland Strategy and the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority’s Trail Strategy for the Greater Toronto Region.

So it’s been a good year. I am extremely satisfied with how things have shaken out. The entire experience feels richer, easier to share and keep updated, as well as resourceful for fellow Torontonians, expats, and other followers.

So with that, I decided to conduct another year-in-review, similar to what I did for 2017 (it appears that blog post didn’t survive the migration, perhaps a retroactive rewrite is in order). I will go over the stats, the neighbourhoods and watersheds covered, and highlight my favourite shots from the year.

Statistics

2018 was the year that I surpassed what I had walked (and tweeted and recorded) in the prior 21 months.

  • Over 40 walks, I travelled 557 kilometres (km), the equivalent of driving from Toronto to Montreal.
  • The average walk was 13.9 km, about the same distance along Yonge Street from Sheppard Avenue to the lake.
  • The longest walk was 23.2 km (May 5), or almost the distance between Kipling and Warden subway stations.
  • There was lots of variation month-to-month as well; one walk early in August (when I usually take vacation, but was expecting my child this year), and 100 km over 7 walks in February.

Neighbourhoods

There were 166 neighbourhoods covered in 2018, 143 of them which were truly walked through, up from 120 and 80 last year, respectively. Good broad coverage of the city, and Scarborough in particular was blanketed pretty well. Walks in Toronto-East York mostly avoided the downtown core, sticking to East York, the shoreline, and west end. 6 walks went beyond the City of Toronto borders, 3 of them in the Pearson airport area.

Watersheds

Last year, I covered all watersheds except for Mimico Creek. I was able to rectify that this year, covering all watersheds in Toronto.

  • I covered most of the first-order rivers and creeks of the 7 main watersheds, with the exceptions of the East Humber and the Rouge River.
  • 20 second-order or lower streams were followed, ranging from major tributaries such as Black Creek or Taylor Massey Creek, to small semi-lost tributaries such as Vyner Creek or Silver Creek.
  • 7 lost rivers were traced. Two drain straight to Lake Ontario, one was a tributary of Mimico Creek, two were Lower Don tributaries, and two were tributaries of West Highland Creek’s Dorset Branch.

Looking to 2019 and Beyond

It’s been nearly three years since I started tracing and tweeting Metroscapes walks, and that has resulted in over 1,000 km of walks in total. That also means I’ve covered many of the neighbourhoods and watercourses in Toronto. That doesn’t mean I am in short supply of places to see. As I mentioned at the top, I have been planning my walks, and that means there is plenty of goals set for 2019:

  • Three major watercourses: Upper West Don, the Lower Humber, and the Rouge River.
  • Major destinations: The Islands and the Leslie Spit.
  • Numerous tributaries of the Humber, Don and Highland.
  • Exploring the edges of Toronto’s highways and railways.

If I was still able to walk every weekend, I could probably achieve all the walks I’d like in 2019. However, I need to prioritize: I’m now a father with limited free time, and 2019 may be my last year in Toronto.

But this will not be the end of Metroscapes. In fact, it will be an opportunity to expand the brand to the next city/region I call home, and to other cities as well. Stay tuned, and keep exploring your local metroscapes.

Exploring Metroscapes: Announcing a Change in Direction

Greetings!

Metroscapes has historically been a bit of a personal soapbox of mine, a place to vent about transit and other city issues. The posts were usually fueled by concern or frustration, so the content was usually negative, sometimes repetitive, and often sporatic.

However, following the lead of some other Toronto tweeps, I have been doing a lot of storytelling through Twitter as of late. It’s now a regular hobby of mine to spend my weekends exploring corners of Toronto (and sometimes a bit beyond the border) that I haven’t been to yet. These usually involve ravines and the infrastructure within, across and under them, but it can also bleed into the concrete jungle, or get deep into the thickest of the intact natural areas.

It has actually been an enlightening exercise. I have come to realize what my passions are in life, and what I am driven to do: simply put, I like wandering around, exploring natural and built environments, and the intersections between them.

I am a nomad with a passion for exploring metroscapes.

With that in mind, I am refreshing this website to organize my walks of Toronto, doing additional research on some items, and sharing more of the pictures I take along the way. I will be doing this for past walks, and going forward. Looking forward to sharing my adventures with you.