I was trying to place when all that was going on; I'd have to guess the winter of 1979-80, since Joe Clark is mentioned and he was prime minister for only about 9 months. First federal election I was old enough to follow, so it stands out. Oh, geez, the guy's even calling out Bill Davis on the...

And so, finally, October, 2016; our last excursion before the road actually re-opened in 2017. The most startling thing for me was that the deck of the bridge had been removed. This kind of upsets me. It was off to the side; no one was going to drive on it again; it was a little piece of our...

So September; almost exactly two years since my solo hike from the north end. The principal change now is the installation of a huge culvert. This was to serve the little creek, no matter how much water it shed in flood, and also to provide a means for wildlife to easily come and go along the...

I neglected the road all through 2014, unfortunately. By the time we got back, just kind of on a whim, we were surprised to see how advanced the work already was. We didn't really go anywhere; it was March, still pretty cold out. These shots are actually just a couple dozen metres to the west of...

In the previous shots, we were driven back at about the 95% mark by a couple of factors. The first was that it had been raining previously and the road was extremely slippery and we didn't care for the look of the descent back down to the extant part of Bathurst to the north. The second factor...

Below: our first glimpse of the little bridge. I don't believe we were even expecting to see one, so this came as a pure delight. Below: as you can see, this little bridge was in almost unbelievably bad shape. Nearly all off its barriers had been knocked away. At some point, to enhance the...

Our first trip to "the Devil's Elbow" was on July 7, 2013, shortly after reading a story about the stretch in The Star, and about how York Region was planning to finally re-open the road. We thought we'd go see what it looked like before they did.

Okay, sorry, everybody, but they looked so lonely standing there. Couldn't resist. :D

I don't think I'll have time to do this justice this evening, but I thought it might be fun to start a new thread... one that I've neglected for years. On April 27, 1995, York Region decided to close a half-kilometre stretch of Bathurst Street just south of where it meets Yonge Street at...

I know that the ROWs were important even if the municipality hadn't seen the need to clear it and build an actual road. The clearance remained a public right-of-way even without it. Often they didn't build a road to something like a river where the going was steep... why go to the expense? But...

I'm not saying it's necessarily wrong, but I've seen lots of maps that imply features that weren't actually there. I'm inclined to think that a lot of map-makers up to the 1950s simply softly implied this bridge, or that obvious road extension or another, already existed... probably in the hopes...

I did a lot of poking around out there about 10, 15 years ago. I was curious to see if there were ever a bridge crossing the Humber there. It's possible there was at some point in the past, but I never found anything that made me reasonably certain... not aerial shots of one and no evident...

Hey, folks. :) Well, I found out what happened. All the old speculation... the road really did cross the creek there, on a truss bridge built around 1898. It lasted till, supposedly, 1964. The story goes that there was construction work on Trafalgar Road, and somehow a heavy potato truck wound...

Ontario's in a decline? Hey, I know I'm chiming in five years late on this, but those five years have been pretty interesting ones with regard to who can stay the distance. Oil might be filling, and then emptying, and then filling, and then emptying again the sails of Alberta and to some extent...

The 1959 aerial shot seems to show this little bridge in situ, but a straight-across Steeles bridge looking rather under-construction; possibly the one we still have because even in 2017, that bridge ain't much. I don't see any evidence of a previous Steeles bridge here; no abutments, no...

Related to that... isn't this an interesting configuration for the conjunction of Steeles Avenue and Reesor Road? This is from 1956, at the north end of the park... Apparently there weren't a lot of folks just roarin' through there back in the day. :)

Heavens, folks. And thanks, Northern Light :) -- I'm glad it's still a park we can all enjoy. But oh, what a loss... what a place it must have been.

The area just southeast of Reesor Road and Steeles Avenue, and north of the track of Passmore Avenue, today looks like the attached image from Google Maps. But in 1971, the three captures from the City's aerial photos seem to show a lot of homes in there. Are these homes in some private...

I have this sinking feeling the "Progressive" part of Progressive Conservative really is lost for good, both federally and provincially (even though they still ostensibly carry the label here in Ontario). The Tories USED to select leaders I could actually imagine voting for. They were...