Niagara Escarpment - Hilton Falls

On June 1, we decided to bike over to Hilton Falls, which is only about 4 miles from our RV campground.  However, what made the bike ride exciting was that we needed to do it in hiking boots with full day packs on our backs.  Can you say lower back exercise?  Here, Kathy is showing her biking form as we pedal along Campbellville Road toward the park:

Niagara Falls is another major feature of the Niagara Escarpment in the Toronto region.  Two tributaries of Sixteen Mile Creek flow through the park.  One tumbles off the escarpment at beautiful, 30-foot Hilton Falls.  The other flows through a series of beaver ponds and fills a 35-acre man-made pond called Hilton Falls Reservoir:

The reservoir is formed by a huge earthen dam that leaves the downriver side a beautiful, lush meadow with a small outlet stream flowing through it and sanctuary for all sorts of wildlife:

The park has been improved with 22 miles of hiking trails, all well marked and blazed, interwoven with the famous Bruce Trail that we discussed in our blog entry on Rattlesnake Point in the Niagara Escarpment.  Other than the trails, which include hiker-only trails as well as a sophisticated system of mountain bike trails, the area has been left completely natural - that is, except for the occasional "rest house" for those who are weary or otherwise in need of sitting down:

The trails wind through a lush forest of deciduous trees and large cedar and pine trees:

Hilton Falls itself lies at the end of a short, 3-mile trail that is accessible to a wide variety of levels of hiking ability.  The falls are spectacular, and are set at the location of old sawmills, marked only by the remains of their stone foundations.  In the photo of Hilton Falls below, you can see the arched stone outlet of the tailrace of the most recent sawmill:

From the falls, we decided to follow the Bruce Trail north to the section of the park trails that wind through the beaver ponds on Sixteen Mile Creek.  Here we passed a wooden bridge used by mountain bikers on one of the bike trails that crossed our hiking path:

The Bruce Trail takes the hiker up and down elevations of the escarpment, to put the hiker into direct contact with all of the escarpment's unique features, while the park's more developed paths tend to work their way around the escarpment's challenges in order to avoid elevation gain and loss.  Here is Kathy in one of the more interesting hollows along the escarpment ridge:

Soon we came to a portion of the creek that burbled merrily after tumbling down a small cascade over a beaver dam:

The beaver dam itself was shy and tough to photograph, but here is a photo of its cascade, through the brush along the side of the stream:

We stopped for some refreshment along the trail, and Kathy spotted a trumpeter swan, feeding in one of the corners of a large beaver pond.  The swan was alert to our presence and kept a way eye on us, but suffered us to get close enough for David to snap this photo:

Having wound through the beaver ponds, we hiked back down to the reservoir, dam and visitor center, and, with a pause for a drink of water and a contemplative look at the reservoir lake, we hopped on our bicycled and made our way home.