Exploring Caledon with the comfort of coffee
Guidebook leads hikers through an ‘amazing network’ of routes, cafés
If you want to explore the hiking trails of southern Ontario with a latte in hand, pick up Nicola Ross’s new book.
In Caledon Hikes: Loops & Lattes, Ross provides detailed descriptions of 37 daylong hiking trails in the area, including tidbits about Caledon’s industrial past, plants, animals, and nearby coffee and ice-cream shops. Caledon is a rural gem located within Toronto’s urban shadow — it’s home to fine farmland, the Niagara Escarpment’s cliffs and the rolling hills and river valleys of the Oak Ridges Mo- raine. When the Star asked Ross what readers should expect from her new book, she said: “37 days of enjoyment.”
“This book is a hiking guide; the lattes are the reward either along the way or at the end of the hike,” she said.
Caledon has an “amazing network of hiking routes” with fabulous trails, back roads and small villages, Ross said.
“Some routes are entirely contained within conservation areas while others take walkers along trails and through villages where, oftentimes, you can get a latte. Hence the name.”
Ross, a biology graduate, was born and raised in Belfountain and spent her summers exploring the Forks of the Credit Provincial Park and other parts of the Niagara Escarpment.
It took Ross a year to write the book and she hiked all 37 trail routes, which range in length from two to 25 kilometres.
“The hiking routes we have to offer in southern Ontario are not like the Rocky Mountains. You will often go through a village or past a place where you can stop for an ice cream or have a latte,” she said.
Caledon Hikes: Loops & Lattes is Caledon’s “first and only dedicated hiking guide,” according to Ross.