Day 6 (Aug 19)

Good breakfast and slow start from Dundas Glen. Scooting out the back end of town, the trail winds past a golf course and a farm and into the Dundas Valley Conservation Area. It's lovely and serene, and easy hiking on wide dirt paths, with many handy benches. The cliffs are more gentle and green, with the occasional jagged boulder.

Here the Escarpment turns from southwest to southeast as we round Hamilton Harbor the westernmost point of Lake Ontario, so we're finally heading in the right direction!


There's an official campsite here for Bruce Trail hikers, with drinking water even, but we're here too early in the day so we decide to see what lies ahead.
Our first sighting of a fellow thru-hiker: a very fast and lean Canadian doing the entire Bruce Trail in 3 weeks...wow.
On the way out, two nice falls Canterbury Falls and Sherman Falls. Technically we're in the city limits of Hamilton, which claims to have more waterfalls than any city in the world. This is because the Escarpment runs right through the town: old Hamilton lies between the cliffs and the lake, and newer neighborhoods are on the topside. The land between, too steep to be developed, is home to hundreds of little connecting paths, which in some spots have been supplemented with long metal stairways.

Deeper into Hamilton, Bruce Trail takes on a much more urban feel. Locals use parts of the trail (and the stairs that it crosses) for commuting and exercise.  Other parts are strung along desolate bits of thick scrub between the winding cliff roads. But there's no campable land to speak of, so we take a staircase down to downtown and check into the closest hotel, the Homewood Suites, enjoy a little time in the little pool, and off to bed.

PS: The Homewood Suites computers are really annoying. They try to get you to use Bing for everything and they even disable Google Maps, arg! Bing's maps don't show trails or anything, a real disaster. Homewood is owned by Hilton so it could be all Hilton hotels have these awful kiosk-mode computers. Anyway, a workaround to get Google Maps working is to use a direct link to a user-created map like this:
Gowanus Canoe Trips
That should bypass the block. Other than that, and the incessant piped music, Homewood Suites is not a bad place.