Limehouse Conservation Area

Last weekend we visited Limehouse Conservation Area in Halton, Ontario. I've heard a lot about this area, so I thought with such beautiful weather, why not! It's a lovely conservation area, but get ready to hike! Part of the trail cuts right through fissures in the escarpment and does require quite a bit of an effort to get through, especially when the floor of the caves are pure ice. The conservation area also has a portion of the Bruce Trail as well as some side trails. And, the neatest thing about the conservation area is some of the historical remnants left in the area. 

In the early days of settlement, way back in the 1800's, gypsum mined from beds of limewater shale were used as cement. The limewater shale occurred natural along the Niagara Escarpment, which was easily accessible in the area of Limehouse, Ontario. Without roads, it was hard to move the raw materials to different areas for processing, so everything was built right near the source of the raw materials. Here's a picture of a kiln used to cook the lime.:

And here's a picture of where they stored the lime (at least that's what I think it is, we were so tired I forget what was on the sign!)

The hiking part was pretty neat also. I'm not sure I'd recommend going in the winter, or even now, as the "hole in the wall" was extremely icy. Just look at all the snow in the fissures! 

 In order to get back onto the Bruce Trail we had to navigate down some stairs, some latters and then throug this bad boy:

This is one of the things I love about this area. Limestone is readily dissolved by water and acid rain, which creates these awesome features. You get holes in the side of the escarpment, random sink holes scattered across the ground and a tonne of other neat features. Finally, after we tackled the hole in the wall, we finally hiked down to the bottom of the escarpment, HURRAH! 

 And finally, here's a picture of some of the ruins from the old kiln and powerhouse over a river 

Sorry for such a rushed blog, we're getting ready to move to a new apartment, so things are a bit crazy! We only found one geocache on this adventure, we ended up being more focused on where are feet were going opposed to the GPS because things were so icy. We'll defiantly be back to this conservation area when all the ice and snow melt! 

Samuel Smith Park

With spring just around the corner, it's time for us to get back out hiking and of course, my new favourite hobby, geocaching! I'm still not 100%, so we took it light on Monday night and went for a walk in Colonel Samuel Smith Park in Toronto. It's a beautiful park right along a peninsula on Lake Ontario. There's a lot of wildlife, trees, plants and, as you'll see soon in some of my pictures, lots of birds! There is also a yacht club, for anyone who enjoys looking at gigantic, million dollar boats. Apparently, in the winter, they have an "ice trail" in which you can ice skate on! Pretty neat, we'll defiantly have to check it out next winter. There is also a beautiful view of the Toronto skyline, as you can see in this picture below (this is from an earlier visit to the park)

Overall, it's a very nice park right in the middle of the big city. Plus, there are quite a few geocaches in the park! We went a little bit later in the day, so we only had a chance to look for 2 of the caches in the park. Unfortunately, the first one we couldn't find because where the cache was hidden was still covered in snow and ice. However, we got an absolutely stunning view from the cache location:

The second one we found pretty quickly. I didn't grab a picture of it, but I did grab a picture of this Red Winged Blackbird near the cache, who didn't seem all that happy to have us lurking around: 

 It was getting late after we found the 2nd cache, so we decided to head back to the parking lot. As we were doing so, we saw something big and white fly overhead. We watched the bird fly over the water, back towards us, where it finally landed on a pile of rocks. Luckily we got close enough without scaring this beautiful female Snowy Owl away so could grab this stunning picture:

Probably the coolest bird I've ever seen while hiking and probably the nicest picture I've ever taken. Overall, even though we didn't really get very many caches, it was a great walk. Hopefully I'll have more posts as the weather starts to get nicer and trails get drier! 

--Nicole 

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