15C and sunshine! Although I'd love to be skiing on March 10, I guess it's time to embrace spring. 'Bent wanted to test his mountain bike before Moab but the trails here are too icy/muddy to ride without damaging them (or ourselves). He proposed a ride down the trail that runs beside the Humber River in Toronto - a rare urban adventure. I
checked the maps quickly but didn't bring them along. I figured we couldn't get too lost, even though there are a few places where the trail spits you out onto the road and you need to find your way back onto it in a different park. I figured we'd be able to navigate visually using the river valley, the location of the sun and (if we got really uncertain) my iPhone.
The northwest terminus of the Humber Trail is on the northeast corner of the Hwy 427 Finch exit, across the highway from Claireville Conservation Area but not connected to it. We couldn't park at the very end so we parked in a nearby subdivision and headed into the valley.
We rode some very mucky trails in the outer reaches of the Humber Arboretum - best avoided by bikes as there is a more direct and better maintained route to the bike trail that we took on our way back. Once we got to the main paved trail, the riding was excellent - a few pedestrians, dogs and other cyclists but plenty of space to ride at a good speed and admire the scenery. We made a wrong turn for a few blocks at a place where the southbound river turns north but otherwise it was straightforward.
South of the 401 and Weston Rd., the trail sent us out onto the road. A few blocks later, we found ourselves at the top of a tall steel staircase that plunged into the valley. We asked a man who had just come up whether the bike trail was at the bottom of the stairs. He was very friendly but English wasn't his first language and I wasn't sure whether the trail at the bottom of the stairs was merely muddy or if it failed to go where we wanted to go. In any case, he urged us to take Weston Rd. for a few blocks until we hit a major cycling trail turn-off.
This section of Weston Road was pretty much the opposite of everything I enjoy about outdoor activity. Two lanes of heavy traffic going in each direction, narrow lanes, no shoulder, buses, noisy, smells of exhaust... We weren't going far so we just stayed on the narrow sidewalk. We could see a police officer and car with flashing lights so we walked our bikes like good citizens. The area was dingy and we passed a few unsavoury-looking characters whose facial expressions did not suggest a love of bikes. I got out my iPhone to make sure we were heading the right direction. Yup, almost there.
I wanted to sneak back onto our bikes on the sidewalk so I looked back where the police officer had been. No sign of him but I did a double take when out of the grit and blowing garbage in the distance emerged The Perfect Runner, looking as out of place here as we felt. Excellent running form, good posture, snappy cadence, no wasted motion, tons of energy... Even his outfit was perfectly matched, including Salomon pack and S-Lab XT Wings. Hmm, that's weird... so this guy on this busy urban road is a trail runner - and obviously a good one. If I ask his name, I bet I'll recognize it. Funny, he kinda looks like STORM. Oh! That's because it *is* STORM. And Heather B on a bike pacing him.
It was about the craziest and most unlikely place for us all to run into one other but it was fun to have good company and conversation as we escorted STORM on the last 10K of his 46K long run. (He is also training for the Death Race - a whole lot better than I am!)
Heather B lives near the south end of the Humber Trail so she led us through a couple of places where trail discontinuities could have led us astray.
The farther south we went, the more crowded the trails got and the smaller the dogs became. We had started in the Lab/German Shepherd part of town and made it down to Pomeranian/Shih Tzu Land. It was a treat to arrive at Lake Ontario where STORM's run ended.
If you look really closely, the CN Tower is sticking out of the top of STORM's hat.
This was only our halfway point so we didn't linger. Our ride back in the warm evening light was great - except when 'Bent's chain broke. Glad we got that out of the way before Moab.
We didn't go directly home. It felt like the first day of spring so we had to stop at the DQ on Weston Rd. (Missed you, Harps.)
We rode to the end of the trail just to map it with GPS. It was getting kinda late - a perfect evening to pick up Caruso's Pizza in Bolton. Fun day of urban exploration! :)