Canada Day Weekend Hike

Happy 4th of July to our American friends and happy Canada Day to our Canadians! 🙂

I finally managed to take some time off this past long weekend! I’m truly terrible at Not Working but I’ve been feeling so burnt out and un-creative lately it was time to take a break. I even managed a big hike with some friends at sunset, which was absolutely perfect. The sun setting behind the city across the lake, just being out among the trees, and we even saw some wildlife! 🙂

Here are some photos I took during my hike, the weather was beautiful and spending 3 hours exploring was the ideal antidote to how busy/crazy the city was this weekend with Pride celebrations and Canada Day.

The park we hiked is a man-made peninsula called Tommy Thompson Park. Whenever demolition or construction happens in Toronto the waste building materials (concrete, filler, bricks etc) are dumped in this space and then molded into a peninsula which houses waterbirds and all sorts of lovely nature-y things. It’s about 5km long but has tons of little pathways and routes throughout to extend it.

taeden hall

There are all sorts of ponds and water spaces for wildlife in the park! We saw so many little baby bunnies and all types of birds. There’s also a protected nesting ground for a variety of waterbirds. We mostly saw cormorants and some weird looking heron type bird I didn’t recognize. It smelled damn awful. In the photo below you can see the birds nesting in the trees, there were hundreds!

bird sanctuary tommy thompson toronto

At one pond we even came close to two beavers! (How Canadian of us!). I’ve never been close to beavers in the wild, these ones seemed unfazed by our approach and I managed a few good pictures of them before they swam off into their sparkling lillypad covered pond. I was surprised how big the beavers were!

I love how Toronto has so many parks and green spaces to explore. I’ve been making a point of getting outside as much as I can while the weather isn’t horrendously hot yet.