E2E #10: Dufferin St. to Robinson Tract 2015-8-10
August 10th. 2015, E2E hike #10: East bound from Dufferin St. to Robinson Tract (west end)
Eleven of us arrived at the meeting place and shuttled to the start in 3 cars. I couldn’t help think that eleven was a lucky number. Being a movie buff I began to think about the movie Ocean’s Eleven and its gang of eleven that robbed a Las Vegas Casino.
An unknown hiker was at the meeting place and was startled by our arrival (eleven hikers leaping from cars, immediately putting on back packs and bug repellent and without further discussion formed up and headed north on Dufferin St. at a fast pace). The startled hiker thought ours was an advertised ORTA hike and while unusual that there was no preamble before the trek decided to follow us. In a very short distance the unknown hiker was advised we were on an E2E hike, they had better return to their car to await the arrival of hikers for the advertised hike.
Later it was determined the hiker parked in the wrong place for the other hike. The moral of this story is; make sure you go to the right meeting place…..most of us who have participated in many hikes at some time have gone to the wrong meeting place!
Again we had a beautiful day for a hike. The temperature was in the low 70’s, some cloud to shade us, but no wind to cool a sweaty hiker!
Unfortunately long sections of this part of the ORTM pass through Aurora as an urban hike. It’s not scenic as most of the trail but at least we saw many very fine homes along the way.
Along the Aurora urban trail rout the trail blazing deviates from the usual white patches to sophisticated Town trail signage.
Through Aurora we often consulted the ORTA map when the Town trail signage appeared to be missing. At Seaton and Murray Drives there was no evidence of the left hand turn in the trail at all.
The hard road and sidewalk surfaces allowed us to make good progress and at 11:30AM we stopped for lunch in sight of the Vandorf SR. at the south end of Sheppard’s bush C.A.
Until now the trail twisted and turned at frequent intervals but after lunch we had to tackle several kilometers of straight trail as it follows Vandorf SR.
The most interesting part of our trek along Vandorf SR was when the Google street view camera/car came past. The operator obviously couldn’t believe his eyes meeting eleven hikers on a country road in the middle of nowhere as he came past a second time some 15 minutes later, obviously the second visit was to ensure we were not a mirage (was that the name of the Las Vegas Casino?).
The cloud cover increased as the afternoon progressed. On one hand it was good to get increased shade but behind us to the west storm clouds were gathering.
We reached the cars parked at the west end of the Robinson Tract about 1:40PM having covered 20Km and at that moment a few drops of rain started to fall. Within minutes the occasional droplets of rain became a down pore, by then we were all seated in our cars; again luck was with us ….. we really felt like the Ocean’s Eleven gang.
Malcolm Hann - AKA Danny Ocean
