A Trip to the Scarborough Bluffs

I spent my Victoria Day out in Scarborough, walking along the bluffs. It was the first time I'd really taken the time to explore out there (I'd been to one outlook a few years ago, but that's all). And, as you might expect, it turns out that the Scarborough Bluffs are totally spectacular — the whole day felt like I was alone in a world a long long way from the biggest city in Canada.

My walk took me along the base of the bluffs on the curently-under-construction Doris McCarthy trail (named after the Torontonian artist who studied with the Group of 7's Arthur Lismer) before I headed up to catch the spectacular views from Cathedral Bluffs Park and back down to finish my day on the beach at Bluffer's Park just in time for some fireworks.

I've posted all of my Instagram photos from the day on Facebook. You can check them out here. And, as always, you can follow me on Instagram at @todreamsproject.

The Scarborough Bluffs Looking Like They Belong In A John Ford Film

I can't seem to find any information about this photo online — like, say, when it was taken — but I like it so I'm posting it anyway. It almost looks like a shot of Monument Valley, where John Ford shot his iconic Westerns, but this is, of course, our very own Scarborough Bluffs. They were apparently originally formed thousands of years ago as part the shoreline of the ancient Lake Iroquois, the giant lake left behind when the last Ice Age ended and the enormofuckingus glacier that used to cover this land melted away. (The big hill that runs through Toronto just north of Davenport Road was also part of that shoreline.) The cliffs been gradually moving north as they erode away, and the sand that gets washed off them is what formed the Toronto Islands (which were nothing more than a sandy peninsula when our city was founded — before they got separated from the mainland by a storm and then enlarged artificially).

There are some cliffs that look a little like this on the northeast coast of England, at Scarborough, which is why Elizabeth Simcoe,  the wife of the guy who founded Toronto, named our cliffs Scarborough, too. The name obviously stuck. And ended up being used not just for the Bluffs, but for the entire east-end suburb that was eventually swallowed up by the Megacity.

Photo: Scaling The Bluffs in 1909

I don't have much to say about this one, since the awesomeness kind of speaks for itself. Here are two people who have climbed to the tip of an outcrop at the Scarborough bluffs, in dress shirts and ties, in 1909. It's from one of the more helpful books I've come across, Toronto: An Illustrated History Of Its First 12,000 Years, which you can see more photos from here and buy here.