This Bruce Trail "blue blaze" is from near Mt. Nemo, north of Burlington, Ontario. It's part of a short loop to an overlook.

If you're ever looking for a hike that can be short as 15 minutes, or as long as an hour, the entrance is just on Guelph Line.

Might cost you a few dollars to park at peak times though.. beware!

All that really remains is this community centre -- the doors locked for who knows how long, certainly unused since the 1960s. (The bright orange curtains visible through the window give away the last time anyone anyone redecorated.)

By far the vast majority of individuals to walk past this old hall are hikers. This is not on a road you drive down to go anywhere but to the trail or one of the few remaining farms.

One of the roads has become solely part of the Bruce Trail; it's not just a trail alongside a road, it's a road that became a trail in the woods. The hydro-electric lines run through the woods here, as if there might be some remote hermit living on the grid miles back into the bush. But really, they're just the sole remainder of modern infrastructure left.

I wondered: what's the story of this place?

So I did what any web-savvy person does -- Googled it. Oddly enough, had I done this a month, or even a week earlier, nothing would have come up. It just so happened, the same day I was pondering this question, the Owen Sound Sun Times published an editorial on the very subject of Hopeness -- a place where the residents were bought out, forced to move, for the needs of the Dow Chemical Company (who ended up never using the place for anything).

A neighbour farmer has been going back and forth down the Hopeness Road with his tractor and wagon for the past week or so trying to get his hay in between rain showers and threatening skies. It's late in the hay season but it was too wet earlier. Even so, he took a little of his precious time to stop for a chat a few days ago. It served to remind me again of the huge challenges the pioneers in this area faced in clearing the land for cultivation, or risk having it repossessed by the Crown for their failure to do so. (source: http://www.owensoundsuntimes.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=1691556)

Now that I've finally gotten around to posting these pictures, I can link to the article quoted -- which is now very hard to find in a search engine due to a lack of anyone linking to it. Take a read of the article when you have a few minutes -- in these days when everything thinks everything is online, this article is the sole existing story of a once-community called Hopeness.

On this day we were slow on the uptake and didn't have the time in the day to make any journey over the border, so we tried one we'd never been to -- Short Hills Provincial Park, west of Thorold.

And what these photos don't contain is the constant noise of gun fire all afternoon during this hike. I'm not sure if there was a shooting range next to the park, or a special event that weekend, but whenever there wasn't rifles firing there were planes and helicopters flying overhead.

Suffice to say, there's some improvements to be made at Short Hills. Usually one would expect the human interruptions at a provincial park would be on a busy long weekend with lots of hikers, or some festival event.

What was great about the experience though, is now several months later refecting on it via the photos from that day. You'd never know such a place was noisy unless you were there. As I recall it was difficult to get the images I wanted from some of the all-yellow maples, there's something about the contrast of yellow against the grey-brown bark that can't be photographed. Or at least, I can't get it to work.

I'm expecting to add some more photos to this blog as the week goes on. It feels like there's a million of them on my computer -- even many I haven't even looked at myself yet!

This week's hiking blaze comes from Allegany State Park in upstate New York, skirting the border of Pennsylvania. It's roughly a 3 hour drive from Hamilton, so not actually all that far away.

This wasn't the only marker used.. just the one for the 'blue' trail we were on. I can't recall at the moment the name of the trail.. not that it matters much, but I'll probably update this later with the right trail name.