Day at the Scarborough Bluffs

thehappycamper (46)in #nature • 6 years ago

In June of 2016, my girlfriend Jessica and I headed down to Scarborough, Ontario to check out the bluffs there for the first time! It was about an hour and a half drive South for us, plus an extra 20 minutes or so because we got lost haha. Scarborough is apart of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), and is East not too far from the City of Toronto itself. Being so close to Toronto, it is a very popular daytime and can get quite busy. There are parks, walkways, and beaches to see! I never would have guessed until I saw it for my own eyes, but the bluffs and surrounding views are incredibly beautiful. From some of my photos, it could be easy to think we were somewhere more tropical than Toronto on Lake Ontario. We first drove around to the top of the bluffs to see the view before driving to the bottom to check out the beaches.

Up Top

At the top, we came to a park and looked around for any sign of a lookout area, but couldn't find one. The edge of the park that lined the cliff-side has a fence, so we were looking for an opening somewhere. We couldn't find one, but we saw a sign that told us to keep out, explaining the danger or the cliffs and so on. We didn't really think anything of it until we saw a group of younger teens climbing through the horizontal bars of the fence. We decided to follow them and see if they knew about the spot we had seen in so many photos online.

When we cleared the bushes, we walked up too an area that opened up giving a view as far as you could see! We stayed up there for 20-30 minutes to take in the view and the beauty of it all. Like I said above, it didn't even look like Lake Ontario. The water looked light blue like somewhere you would see in the Caribbean. There are little narrow trails that went down the sides of the cliffs, where if you slipped off the side, it was maybe a 30ft fall down until you hit crevasses in the cliffs. We couldn't believe our eyes, but there were more kids there than we saw climb through the fence, and some of them were trying to scale down the cliffs. I read later online that people had died trying to do so, and recently two teens had to be rescued because they got trapped trying to climb down.

Down Below

We eventually made our way to the car and drove down to the bottom. We walked around the park, before making our way to the beach area. We knew the water would be cold, but we were really hoping to go for a swim! After setting up our towels and bags, we started to walk into the water. Let me tell you, it was COLD! So cold in fact that Jess didn't want to go in past her ankles. We ended up just sunbathing for the rest of the afternoon, which sucked because it was hot enough you wanted to be in the water, but the water was cold enough you didn't want to swim! I never fully understood the hate that some people have for drones until some jackass was flying his drone around us, hovering in front of us, and would repeatedly come back after circling the cliffs. I flipped off whoever was at the other end of the camera!

We packed up eventually and headed to a burger joint not too far away called the Burger's Priest before going home. Hands down our favourite burger ever! We haven't been back since then, we keep talking about it! Hopefully we'll plan it for the middle of the summer when it's hot enough to swim :)