Dani and I and the kids had a wonderful afternoon walk at the Evergreen Brick Works nature trail last weekend. It’s free to access the trails but parking is pretty expensive ($10 for two hours). The trails are on the north side of the brick works buildings. This is located Bayview about a 10 minute drive from downtown. Highly recommend it for kids of all ages – especially at this time of year. Watch out for the bridges. They don’t have guards on one side (see pics) Presumably this is to permit easy viewing of all the fish – and we saw a lot of fish. But it sure was disconcerting as a dad.
The Oxbow Trail
A terrific walk for toddlers and preschoolers. It’s behind Todmorden Mills (see smokestack pic below) at 67 Pottery Road just off Bayview. An adult could walk it in 7 minutes but it’s a good hour with toddlers. A perfect fall walk. Cool little talking stations (see pic below) that tell you what you are looking at with a push of a button. My kids pushed them often 🙂 it’s a 10 minute drive from our building with no traffic. Access to trail is at the very end of the long parking lot. There is one stair with about 8 wooden steps. Otherwise you can push a stroller around it freely.
Below is what it says about getting their by TTC. The walk down the hill would be great.
“By transit, take any TTC bus north from Broadview Station on the Bloor-Danforth line, get off at Pottery Road and walk 5 minutes down the hill”
The walk back up at the end will be pretty tough as its a very big hill!!!
Glen Steward Ravine / Ivan Forrest Gardens
Glen Steward Ravine/Ivan Forrest Gardens is a Beaches nature treasure. Confusingly this park/trail is named Ivan Forrest Gardens on the south side and Glen Steward Ravine in the northern section. The two parks are really one skinny park/nature trail stretching from Queen St to Kingston Rd. (See map below)
It’s a perfect walk for toddlers and pre-schoolers complete with trees, streams squirrels and birds. As you can see from the photos it’s a beautiful nature trail – especially the northern part. In the summer you wouldn’t even know you were smack dab in the middle of a residential neighborhood.
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