Woodford Crevice Adventure, Hike #7

It was a drizzly, cold, grey day on Oct 4th. The kind of day that sane people stay inside with a good book and a cuppa. This year, more than most years, I can feel winter coming. More so because we have already spent 8 months behaving ourselves for the most part in social isolation, and dark mornings and actual-for-real isolation due to winter storms is coming. So there is no staying at home when we could be outside!

Also, it must be noted that this is Bruce Trail Day! The first Sunday in October is celebrated with group hikes and generally encouraging people to hit the trail. This year they cancelled all of the group activities, but instead encouraged people to take the pledge.

- Leave the trail better than you found it

- Share your plant and wildlife sightings

- Be an ambassador

- Support Conservation with a gift

You can take the pledge yourself here.

So the trail it is on a gloomy Sunday! It is still early enough in the fall to have good leaf coverage overhead and we really didn't get wet at all in the forest north of Woodford.

The community of Woodford lies just off of Hwy 26 between Owen Sound and Meaford. You can park for this hike in the community centre parking lot. This hike is very close the the Crevice Springs hike mentioned in an earlier blog. You could do both in one day!

Walk east along the road from the community centre following the white blazes as they enter the woods. We hiked the Bruce Trail first and looped back on the Woodford Escarpment Side Trail.

An amazing amount of leaf fall has occurred with the rain over the weekend and the floor is covered with colourful leaves. It does add an element of surprise to the trail, not knowing if your foot is falling on solid ground or the edge of a small rock!

The first cool thing that this trail offers up is the remains of this old lime kiln used to heat limestone to the point that it can be used for mortar and construction.

The path is full of crevices, mushrooms, moss. Who's surprised?!

Next on the cool list is the ruins of this settlers home, complete with and old metal headboard. It's tiny, like a crib width of a bed, but then the foundation is also small. Hard to imagine all the rooms we "need" today fitting into that frame work.

The clue for finding the code we needed for Secrets of Sydenham is about two crevices that we will enter, one challenging, one a little easier.

How will a first timer know when we've reached the challenging one?! We spent some time hunting around in some neat areas that don't even make the rank of crevice for this hike.

You'll know because this crevice actually comes with a bypass! The crevice is too narrow in points to pass through with a backpack on and so they have very kindly marked out an alternate route.

Not being very fond of the dark, I considered taking the bypass myself! I'm glad I didn't. It was never claustrophobic, and always open to the sky above. Go in there! The warning is for large hiking backpacks I think, not daypacks, but even still, drop your pack and circle back for it if you have a large one.

This is a hike I'd like to do again in the spring, and again mid summer, and maybe even with a dusting of snow. It will be different every season!

Do you see the happy cedar man in this tree growing horizontally across the crevice?

After the crevices we crossed a small stream. Small in the fall, but I assume that this is the area that would hold the Disappearing Waterfalls in the spring and also maybe the hidden pond that this reserve is named for.

The east end of the Woodford Escarpment Side Trail can be found on your left and takes you back to the vehicle following the path you have already traveled on the white trail, but 20 feet higher. It's interesting to see the landscape you were just on from more of a birds eye view.

Along the this blue trail we came across several of these low to the ground blue birdhouse like structures. Bee houses from the little photo on the tree!

This is a great hike! It is going to the top of the list of hikes in our area. Again, footing was a bit tricky, but only enough to rate it 3 goats.

We hiked for an hour and a half. The path was uneven enough that you couldn't get much steam on! We covered 3.5 km with lots of poking around.

October 4, 2020