One of these days I’ll be able to tell you it is actually spring and keep a straight face.
Once again my rhythm of walks was temporarily interrupted by a resurgence of winter. I don’t want to suggest I’m incapable of winter walking, but two things happen when we get a fresh batch of spring snow following a nearly complete thaw. First, every sidewalk and trail is a fresh slog for a day or two, and that’s not even considering that a spring blizzard is often just that… a blizzard, cold blasting, wind blowing, bout of bad weather. Second, for a day or two after the blizzard every path is a giant puddle, every trail is mud, and every route is an obstacle course.
If we do end up pushing this fifty walk challenge into November I will be walking through settled snow and shovelled trails as people come off a fresh summer and autumn refresher.
Either way, I walked my third adventure stroll of this thing I’m doing which is trying to log fifty long walks around my world before my fiftieth birthday in November.
The Route
I didn’t know exactly where I was going when I left, but I started walking east. We are in this kind of corner of the city where there is the river to the west and the freeway to the south and kind of the rest of the city to the east and north. There is city south and west of us, too, but it involves traversing the aforementioned river and freeway.
So I walked east, which is really nothing new. I walk east all the time… but I usually turn back shortly after going east and don’t really go all that far.
Instead I just followed the path. And then the sidewalk. And then I found myself traipsing over the freeway on the only bridge for a stretch of ten kilometres with a pedestrian sidewalk, wherein I found myself outside the suburbs and in the outer suburbs and very nearly in an exurb, which was just fine by me because there was a place to grab some lunch. I was a little more than an hour into the walk at this point.
After lunch I ran out of sidewalk.
Well, strictly speaking I did some math and realized I was turning this unplanned stroll into a fifteen klick route unless I made some adjustments. I hiked across a school playground shortcutting the route a bit, pushing into the neighbourhood and finding the quasi-secret entrance to a very special place: a freeway crossing access.
The Effort
As I write this there are two giant heaps of graded fill straddling the freeway where (presumably this summer or sometime soonish) the planned pedestrian bridge will cross the freeway connecting our neighbourhood-ish with the commercial shopping area south of the busy road. See, the planning department dropped the ball for pedestrians in the southwest corner of the city.
Between the highway and the river, a space marked by say the six o’clock and eight o’clock positions on the city-as-a-clock-face and a stretch of about ten klicks there are exactly two official ways for pedestrians to cross the freeway, and one of those is pretty much at six o’clock.
The other one took me four kilometres of walking to get to from my front door.
There are two unofficial crossings, too: one is the graffiti tunnel (aka the oculus) which involves following an unmarked gravel path, walking down an abandoned stretch of road, climbing down a steep dirt hill, and finding what amounts to a giant culvert that was constructed nearly twenty years ago with some vague intention to hook it up to the city trails (which never happened) but which now dumps one out into a grassy field alongside a busy road, where one can walk up the shoulder for about five hundred meters to find the dead-ending trail which drops one onto the south side of the freeway.
The second is the one I took, and it involves going to the far back corner of a neighbourhood, ignoring a number of warning signs, clambering down a rough path, walking through some muddy single track trail and climbing back up a steep gravel hill to where the trail system-proper connects to the pedestrian bridge suspended under the eastbound lane of the freeway. From there one is in the river valley trail system on the interior of the ring-road freeway and (at least in my case) a short walk from my house.
That aforementioned pair of dirt heaps is an active construction project to build a third official crossing. I’m confident I’ll get to try it before I turn sixty.
The Highlight
I want to tell you that I did some serious exploring on this walk but I only really had a short stretch of new ground covered. These are not trails I travel often, and honestly I’ve never before walked this route. Run it, yeah. But walked? No.
And it was just on the fringes of being walkable, too.
No spring maintenance has been done yet and the paths under the bridge as I was nearing the end of my route were spongy and wet.
I did get a hint that the beavers had been out recently with lots of freshly gnawed trees to be seen along that stretch of trail, and it was great to see plenty of others out on the trails on bikes, running and enjoying the warm weather.
I had to pull my jacket off half way through so that I was not drenched in sweat from the heat.
In the end this walk comfortably hit my target distance, clocking in at 11.5km in 2 hours and 28 minutes. This brings my grand walking total for my first three walks up to 7 hours and 20 minutes for 32.65 km. If only I could monetize that my feet would earn me some serious cash, huh?
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