Odyssey,
Yea, we both have the same route preferences... that green belt north of Toronto would be the Oak Ridges Moraine. The legal framework protecting it from urban development was begun by the Ontario government during the early 90s but I wasn't part of it. IIRC, the extent of the ORM goes from about Belleville to the Niagara Escarpment near Orangeville/Shelburne, with some great roads running through the world's largest gravel deposit (it's an interlobate moraine which a high school geography teacher clued me into who happened to be a most infectious sort of glaciology nut - the huge piles of boulders, gravel and sand being formed by two glacier lobes depositing piles of gravel in between the lobes).
The road that runs through the ghost town of Mount Horeb is high up on those very deep and hummocky gravel deposits and is interesting and off the beaten path with the very canoeable Pigeon River nearby... along with the Windy Ridge Conservation Area also on a high point. Access to the Pigeon River can be at the public boat launch in Omemee, then you paddle a long way upstream where there are few others.
There's lots of info on natural areas in the ORM and some considerable political momentum has been built into protecting the remnants... our brilliant premier Doug the Slug had a plan to start developing it but the public outcry against was just too loud, so he had to move on to something else.
Obligatory & useless fact for the day... did you know that Neil Young's "Helpless" was written during the late 60s and about Omemee which is not actually northern Ontario ("there is a town in north Ontario")? Maybe he had visited some of the old farms and ghost towns in the area when he was a kid earlier on. Here's a vid...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vrDIFYuc4Q
PS... fall color peak in Algonquin now forecast to be mid-week next week, fortunately not on a weekend if you're driving through there.
Yea, we both have the same route preferences... that green belt north of Toronto would be the Oak Ridges Moraine. The legal framework protecting it from urban development was begun by the Ontario government during the early 90s but I wasn't part of it. IIRC, the extent of the ORM goes from about Belleville to the Niagara Escarpment near Orangeville/Shelburne, with some great roads running through the world's largest gravel deposit (it's an interlobate moraine which a high school geography teacher clued me into who happened to be a most infectious sort of glaciology nut - the huge piles of boulders, gravel and sand being formed by two glacier lobes depositing piles of gravel in between the lobes).
The road that runs through the ghost town of Mount Horeb is high up on those very deep and hummocky gravel deposits and is interesting and off the beaten path with the very canoeable Pigeon River nearby... along with the Windy Ridge Conservation Area also on a high point. Access to the Pigeon River can be at the public boat launch in Omemee, then you paddle a long way upstream where there are few others.
There's lots of info on natural areas in the ORM and some considerable political momentum has been built into protecting the remnants... our brilliant premier Doug the Slug had a plan to start developing it but the public outcry against was just too loud, so he had to move on to something else.
Obligatory & useless fact for the day... did you know that Neil Young's "Helpless" was written during the late 60s and about Omemee which is not actually northern Ontario ("there is a town in north Ontario")? Maybe he had visited some of the old farms and ghost towns in the area when he was a kid earlier on. Here's a vid...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vrDIFYuc4Q
PS... fall color peak in Algonquin now forecast to be mid-week next week, fortunately not on a weekend if you're driving through there.
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