Before the summer bike ride across the Kay Gardner beltline, CJ recorded this video of him walking on the same trail, during the winter, wearing cross-country skis. I think I will try this during the next season, although I never wore skis before. Looks fun.
Hello this is CJ Hoyle today is Saturday, February 20th 2021 and I’m standing here in front of the entrance of the Kay Gardener beltline trail. As you can see I have my cross-country skis with me today and this video. I’m going to be putting that cross-country skis on and starting from here at the western terminus of the Kay Gardner beltline trail at the Allen Expressway and I’m going to ski all the way along here to the mount pleasant cemetery.
All right so here I begin this very urban cross-country skiing adventure. This is my third video in this genre that I’m filming; the first one was in Cedarvale Park a little bit south of here.
The second one was in Hyde park out in the west end of Toronto and this one’s up here in midtown I’d say this one is probably going to be the most urban of the three because basically, this is a trail as opposed to a park, and it’s a rail trail actually the trail is called the beltline trail or the Kay Gardener beltline trail is the name of this segment of it and the beltline trail is named after a railway that used to run through here. it was a very early Toronto commuter train; the idea was that as the city was expanding they wanted, you know I’m sure they originally had trains that sort of came in and out, to different smaller villages and things that surrounded the large city of Toronto.
Well I mean it was a small city of Toronto back then but relatively speaking it was a large place and I guess the idea was there they built this belt line which essentially was like a ring loop that went around the outside of Toronto and it was to hit all the little communities that were starting to form suburbs around the main city but it was sort of like a ring road almost where it just sort of went around so it wasn’t exactly the most direct route to get downtown.
As you can see we’ve got a road here to cross this is called Old Park road and I’m going to take my skis off here briefly to get past it because of course I don’t want to ruin my skis by skiing on asphalt.
All right so there we go continuing our way and I said before I get too far into this I want to apologize for any shakiness of the camera I’m going to do my best to ski as steadily as possible to limit how much shakiness there is but given this type of activity, my body does sway back and forth a little bit in either direction no matter what I do.
Just to finish up what I was saying there about the belt line trail, this train that was here was built in the 1890s, so like I said a very early commuter train and it only lasted – it was only successful or I guess you could say it was unsuccessful because it only operated as a passenger train for two years and from then on that you know there’s still train tracks here for many years and I guess they probably used it for freight, for moving goods and stuff, from various factories and things that were along parts of this trade.
But it was largely unused and then in the 1970s, I believe it was that’s when it ceased to be a railway and it was started to be you know purchased by the city and converted into trails.
So the segment that I’m on right now is the Kay Gardner beltline trail but a little bit to the west of where we started there’s another segment of it which is called the York Beltline trail and it was developed a kind of differently.
The Kay Gardner beltline trail has always been just a gravel trail there’s no asphalt on it; of course, when you’re cross-country skiing on it doesn’t make much of a difference whereas the York beltline trail it’s I’m pretty sure all of it is paved asphalt.
See I mentioned that you know there are factories and things along here but on the segment that we’re going to be skiing in this video it’s mostly just housing developments at least it is today.
All right so we’ve got another crossing coming up here this is Bathurst street once again I have to take my skis off to get across the street. I guess we’ll take them off a little bit early.
All right so picking up where we left off on the other side there – looks like there are some cross-country ski tracks here that I’m skiing in that someone else has left earlier this morning.
We got a bunch more snow and a little bit on Thursday and a little bit more yesterday and overnight on Friday, this video is being filmed on saturday the 20th of February and this is the week when we finally just started to get a decent amount of snow here in Toronto to allow for skiing like this so I’m taking every opportunity I can get here to get out on my skis and experience these trails.
This beltline trail certainly is not really designated as a cross-country ski trail it’s really just a multi-use trail that can be used for many different things it’s a place that is very common to see people jogging and walking dogs and riding bicycles, particularly in the summer but the city actually on there they have a website which is about cross-country skiing and snowshoeing and they’ve actually included the beltline trail as one of the places that they’re kind of recommending as places where you can do these activities which I think must be something new that they’ve added to their website this year during the pandemic winter because of course, we’re being discouraged from traveling at all really right now and it’s really good to be able to find things to keep people entertained and busy and interested close to home like this.
Now I know I’ve always been someone who’s enjoyed spending their free time exploring my own city but it’s good to see lots of other people doing the same.
The point where I started this trail was just a little bit north of Eglinton West subway station and that’s where I started from today I took the subway up to Eglinton West and then I walked over to the start of the trail and then put my skis on and that’s how we got to where we are now. I started around 8 a.m this morning being that today is a Saturday I’m able to come out here during a later part of the morning than I could on a regular weekday and that’s important because my understanding is that my camera does a better job of image stabilization when it’s brighter outside.
I found that in low light conditions it doesn’t do as well at stabilizing the image so so I let myself sleep in a little bit today; and then came here.
To take off my skis again that last intersection back there was just a driveway into one of the apartment buildings.
So so up ahead you can see that we have an underpass and that road that’s above the trail up there that is Eglinton Avenue and you can’t see it but underneath this underpass basically below the level that I’m going to be skiing under there is a tunnel which is for the Eglinton crosstown which is a transitway which is currently being completed; should take off my skis again because there’s not any snow under here because it can’t snow underneath a bridge.
So yeah I always found it kind of neat there that you’re when you’re going through that bridge you’re going underneath something but you’re also going over the top of something so three different modes of transportation are crisscrossing each other there.
This section here is probably one of my favorites because there’s a long continuous section here without any interruptions no crossroads for a while now you can see there are already quite a few people out enjoying the trail this morning.
So and yeah so on either side of me pretty much the whole way along here we’ve got people’s backyards back before that bridge there were some schools that we went past; that neighbourhood is part of Forest Hill or maybe you’d call that Forest Hill North because it’s north of Eglinton.
So you may have noticed that this beltline trail is extremely flat at least the Kay Gardener section of it is the railway however once he got past the Mount Pleasant Cemetery it actually goes down into the Don Valley on a fairly steep section and my plan for today is that after I finished filming this video when I get to Mount Pleasant, I’m planning on continuing and doing the rest of the beltline trail or another segment of the beltline trail which will take me down into that valley.
But given that this first section that i’m tackling is already about four kilometres I figured that that would be a good length of video to put together as one and then I can make a second video which will show the ravine portion of the beltline trail.
Now in terms of connectivity like I said, I started today from the Edlington West subway station but from that same subway station if you walk about or four minutes to the south of it you would get to the north end of Cedarvale park which is where I skied to in my Cedarvale park video. So if you really wanted a long cross-country skiing run and you didn’t mind taking off your skis every now and again and walking you can connect the beltline trail up with Cedarvale park and then further south of Cedarvale park there’s another ravine called the Nordheim ravine which is only you know three or four-minute walk south of Cedarvale park.
And you can almost form the entire thing into a loop again assuming that you don’t mind walking a little bit from one juncture to the next,
So this little part of the trail that I’m skiing on here it’s pretty hard-packed but it makes my skis slide really nicely because I’m not really getting as much grip as I could be. The skis that I’m using here are what are called waxless skis – they rely on getting their friction during the glide part of each stroke from having some texture on the bottom of them.
And that texture is a constant amount of friction – I mean the skis do flex so when you’re not putting your weight onto that foot it does glide but what i mean is that the more professional type of equipment would be waxable skis and rather than having, you know, the textured section of the ski you would put wax on this ski and you could vary the type of wax that you used based on the temperature of the snow.
But I’ve always preferred waxless skis at least for the type of skiing that I do; when I’ve tried to use wax it always seems like I couldn’t get it quite right and I spend more of the time on the hill putting on and removing wax to try and fine-tune it and get it right.
All right so that uh long section of no taking my skis off has now come to an end or just about come to an end this intersection up ahead we’ve gone across is Avenue Road and there is a pedestrian walkway here.
Back when I first moved to Toronto, there were really no formal proper ways of crossing these intersections here; like I said up ahead here we’ve got a pedestrian crosswalk traffic light thing that will change for us to allow us to cross I’ll just press this button here.
Back at the intersection where I crossed Bathurst Street, there was a refuge island about halfway across and again that wasn’t there when I first moved to Toronto. A lot of these intersection improvements you know were installed by the city but for a lot of that, we have to thank the local cycling advocacy group cycle Toronto midtown for their work in applying pressure on the city to make this trail safer for all road users by making safe crossings.
Snow feels a little bit more slushy here at least the sections where people have been walking finding that my skis didn’t glide as easily on those.
It’s pretty neat how many people’s feet walking on the trail just sort of pack it down really nicely and makes it into you know a pretty solid base layer. I can remember as a kid when we would ski at Horseshoe Valley.
That you know the trails were really only supposed to be used by cross-country skiers and then every now and again you’d see you know footprints from someone who had walked in the trail and it was usually seen as oh they’ve ruined the trail; they’ve messed up the tracks by walking in them and it really did sort of interrupt things but what I’ve found is that when you’re skiing through these trails and parks in the city, there are enough people walking on them that their footprints start to get spread out and they pretty much just pack it down very nicely so it’s really not a bad thing.
All right just gonna take off my skis again – this is Oriole parkway that we’re crossing and once again there’s a pedestrian in cyclist refuge island here which will allow us to safely get across in two stages. This again was installed two or three years ago thanks to the advocacy work of Cycle Toronto Midtown.
All right so now we continue and we’re getting closer towards Yonge street one of the nice things about the crossing at Yonge street is there’s actually a bridge that goes over top of the road.
So I believe there’s only one more foot crossing here where I’ll have to take off my skis for the rest of this video.
Never made a video of riding my bike along the beltline trail but – it’s certainly on my list of places to cover.
If you’re not already familiar with my youtube channel I film lots of different kinds of bicycling-related videos and one of those is one of the styles is narrated cycling videos which is basically the same as the video that I’m doing right now but instead of cross-country skiing I’m riding a bike – but while I’m riding him giving him live narration and describing all the things around me and things like that.
I had a lot of plans last year to ride on various different trails and make videos of those but with the pandemic, I decided that I probably should avoid trails last year as much as possible because with so many people taking up new hobbies and riding bikes and just getting out on the trails, the trails are really clogged with people;
And I’ve ridden all these trails many times myself so I kind of figured it made sense that I would just leave the trails to the newcomers and avoid the crowds.
All right so here I continue that last road back there was I think it’s called LaSalle’s boulevard. It’s definitely called LaSalle’s boulevard further north once you get past that park that we pass on the left back there which is called Oriole park, but the road is interrupted by that park there.
But you can ride your bike through that park and that’s actually a very common cycling route in fact I’ve ridden my bike many times there and showed it on the video a couple of times it’s a very common route from getting from the Yonge and Eglinton neighbourhood down towards the downtown.
This part of the trail is very well-packed – I think I’ll go and ski over here towards the right where this other skier has left some tracks behind – that’s definitely better!
So much of the way that I’m skiing today is decided based on video factors again I’m trying to ski relatively slow and steady to keep the camera as stable as possible but I also recognize that skiing sort of down the middle of the trail kind of works better for the image stabilization too, because it kind of makes it easier for it to find the horizon and less sort of activity happening at you know keeping the activity on either side of this the frame equal to one another.
So this bridge up ahead here is the bridge that first – the first segment of this goes over the top of the line one Yonge- University subway which just north of here which I’ll show you is Davisville station which is also a TTC yard where they work on trains and there’s also that office building that’s over there just beyond those service buildings which is I believe the TTC’s main headquarters – where their main offices are.
So yeah this bridge right now we’re crossing it over the subway line within this next section here where you can see those big black things on either side – this is now Yonge street that we’re crossing and I’ll just point the camera down this way.
So that’s Yonge street facing south; over to the left is Mount Pleasant Cemetery; over to the right is the Yonge subway line.
I’ll show you looking up the hill as well – that’s looking towards the midtown young neighbourhood.
So that concludes this cross-country skiing adventure on the Kay Gardner beltline trail if you watched all the way to the end of this video I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment section below and thanks for watching.
