Toronto’s Kay Gardner Beltline Trail is a country allée, right in the city

“Deep in the ravines, beside storm sewers and up hardscrabble dirt tracks, in the shadows of towers and bridges and over rotten logs, I’ve seen the intimate architecture of the city,” Andrea Curtis wrote in The Globe and Mail in 2021 during the pandemic. Comparing the landscape to the cadavers on display at Body Worlds, she called Toronto’s ravines “gruesome but also fascinating and weirdly beautiful.”

I likely fall into the gruesome camp, which is why I don’t hike Toronto’s ravines very often; I’d much rather be in an artificial canyon created by skyscrapers than below street-level with gnarly old trees reaching for the heavens and their roots threatening to trip me underfoot. Don’t get me wrong, I respect nature, I just need to know I’m only a few minutes away from a well-crafted espresso.