Hiking Mono Cliffs Provincial Park...

. . . Or, You Can't Escape the Escarpment . . .

Mono Cliffs contains a significant section of the Niagara Escarpment, including crevice caves, an upland limestone plain, and talus slopes. The park features two prominent masses of rock, separated by erosion from the main rock body. When this occurs, the resultant feature is called an outlier.  The park also boasts a large stand of old growth white cedar.

We decided to explore the trails in Mono Cliffs Provincial Park because we've encountered the Niagara Escarpment before - most recently in Hamilton, Ontario.  Before that, we hiked the Escarpment in 2014 near Campbellville, Ontario, and before that with our friends Karen and Conniwe in May 2014 at Letchworth State Park in New York State.  Here's a photo of the beginning of our hike:

The Niagara Escarpment is a long escarpment, or cuesta, in the United States and Canada that runs predominantly east/west from New York State, through Ontario, Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois. The escarpment is most famous as the cliff over which the Niagara River plunges at Niagara Falls, for which it is named.

The Niagara Escarpment is the most prominent of several escarpments formed in the bedrock of the Great Lakes basin. From its easternmost point near Watertown, New York, the escarpment shapes in part the individual basins and landforms of Lakes Ontario, Huron and Michigan. In Rochester, New York, there are three waterfalls over the escarpment where the Genesee River flows through the city. The escarpment then runs west to the Niagara River forming a deep gorge north of Niagara Falls, which itself cascades over the escarpment. In southern Ontario it spans the Niagara Peninsula, closely following the Lake Ontario shore through the cities of St. Catharines, Hamilton and Dundas, where it takes a sharp turn north in the town of Milton toward Georgian Bay. It then follows the Georgian Bay shore northwest to form the spine of the Bruce Peninsula and Manitoulin Island, as well as several smaller islands located in northern Lake Huron where it turns west into the Upper Peninsula of northern Michigan, south of Sault Ste. Marie. It then extends south into Wisconsin following the Door Peninsula through the Bayshore Blufflands and then more inland from the western coast of Lake Michigan and Milwaukee, ending northwest of Chicago near the Wisconsin-Illinois border.

. . . Or, How to Fall in Love With the Bruce . . .

Another reason we wanted to visit Mono Cliffs is that the Bruce runs through it.  "The Bruce," or the Bruce Trail, runs 560 miles from near Niagara Falls on the south end, to the tip of Bruce Peninsula which lies between the main body of Lake Huron and Georgian Bay, which is an arm of Lark Huron, entirely within the Province of Ontario.

We previously hiked sections of the Bruce Trail in May and June 2014 when we stayed near Toronto, Ontario.

Here, David hugs the trail marker as he re-encounters the Bruce Trail and we start our journey along the Niagara Escarpment in Mono Cliffs:

Mono Cliffs offers an amazing diversity of eco-zones.  We enjoyed every one of them, including the meadows and wetlands we first encountered:

Stream crossings were an occasion for capturing the symmetries of bridge and fence construction:

The centerpiece of our hike was MacCarston's Lake.  Here are several views of it from the vantages the trail

Another small lake graced our hike, and we could see a verdant grassy shoreline across from the cattails that marched along our shore of the little lake:

The climax of our hike was to actually encounter the Mono Cliffs as we climbed back up to our original trailhead from viewing the lakes.  Here is a section of the cliffs we could climb on one stairway --

-- and here is another at Jacob's Ladder:

As you can tell, we were amply rewarded for our hiking efforts today!  The weather was perfect and the trail was dry enough, with few bugs.  We enjoyed having a chance to get back out on the trail again after so much time away.