MOUNTAIN LIFE - Blue Mountains | Fall 2017

18 ML BLUE FALL 2017 Picture a place with no dry land—just a shallow sea vanishing into a featureless horizon. Untroubled by the terrestrial life that will later dominate the globe, this long-ago place hosts lifeforms that look more or less familiar to us. One of its larger denizens, the cephalopod Endoceras , a squid-like ancient mollusk with protuberant eyes, propels itself through the water, tentacles extended in search of its usual prey, the proto-crab Pseudogygites trilobite—one of the era’s most successful animals in spite of its status as prey. Countless variations on this silent, submerged life cycle continue through time, encompassing the reign of many species we now easily recognize in the fossil record. Four hundred and fifty million years later, the carbonized remains of this shallow sea form a rough terrestrial path, the Niagara Escarpment, through a very different southern Ontario. This apparently haphazard path was only recognized as such—as the Bruce Trail, routed, mapped, blazed and painstakingly negotiated—after a remarkable coalescence of people and ideas 50 years ago. In the decade or so before the Trail’s establishment, Ontario’s population was exploding. The provincial government was establishing the 400 series highways, crosshatching the southern reaches of the province with pavement and cement made from Escarpment-quarried aggregate—a seemingly limitless source of raw material on the doorstep of Canada’s industrial engine room. Steel for bridges and other infrastructure came from the Steel Company of Canada, Stelco, headquartered in Hamilton, a city bisected by the Escarpment. Around this time, Stelco metallurgist and Hamilton Field Naturalists (HFN) member Ray Lowes began to muse about a trail that would lead birders and other nature seekers out of Hamilton, THE PATHS TO THE TRAIL NED ITORIAL DAVE BARNES ILLUSTRATION THE LONG WALK FROM PREHISTORIC SEA TO PUBLIC FOOTPATH