Another warm 21C to start our day, totally unseasonal weather so we’re told.
Today we left the Beaver valley and moved into the Blue Mountain Club section of the trail. The trail went along the top of the extensive Ski slope area that occupies a 4km section of the escarpment. As this is a very popular area both summer and winter the trail was wide and easy, a walk in the park almost. Then we moved into an area that is above the scenic caves and is dedicated to a huge range of winter activity with all sorts of Skidoo trail, Snow shoe trails and cross country Ski trails. This section is closed to hikers from November to March to cater for the winter sports. Needless to say it was fabulously maintained and just a superb walk through Old Hardwood forest. We finally left this wide open terrain and were back onto our Bruce trail proper. The trail was simply superb with the usual mix of terrain mostly easy hiking with some challenges thrown in. The Petun Conservation area is very popular for both hikers and mountain bikes and the whole area is criss crossed with trails for both. While hiking through here you hear lots voices of MTB folks whooping and hollering out to each other as they dart manically through the woods. We just had to go off route to the site of the highest point on the Bruce trail at 540m above sea level.
Thankfully most of the route today was under the cover of trees so it was cooler, just, air temperature when we reached our car was 33C and the few times that we had to walk out in the full sun was scorching. We love this dry weather but 33C is a bit much thank you, specially with the high humidity.
Our next mission was to drive south to Peace Valley Ranch where will be staying Tuesday & Wednesday. We chose to take as much of our heavy gear down there while we had a car so we would not gave to walk with a heavy big pack on Tuesday as we shift locale.
It was then a mad dash back the our B&B to get cleaned up and ready for dinner as we had planned to meet up with Margaret & Ken from Thornbury and Robin and Elizabeth with the respective husbands. All for of them are also hiking the Bruce E2E but are 4 days behind us now. We met them in our first week of hiking and have been keeping in touch, giving them feedback on the trail condition etc. We had booked our dinner at the Dam Pub that has over 800 different Whiskys to offer with MaCallan 35 year old the most expensive at C$592.00 per 40ml dram. As this is my favourite Whisky I was tempted but had to hold off as it is just too expensive, I just could not justify that amount on a dram sadly.
When got back to our digs our host had fired up the AC thankfully because it was still stinking hot. At least we could get a good nights sleep.