Flashback - An April 2016 Hike

In April the real hiking season begins, with the snow gone and (slightly) warmer weather.  I often muse back on hikes I took at this time of year, or in the fall, so today I will take you back to a hike a friend and I did from Pinnacle Rock to and beyond Mill Creek.  It's one of the favourite hikes in my memories.  Having my photos and better yet my blog posts helps me a great deal.

We had to hike in on a side trail to get to Pinnacle Rock, an enormous chunk of bedrock that had broken off the Amabel cliffs and flopped over slightly downhill.  It's a well known landmark along the Bruce Trail in the valley.

This is on a large property donated to the Bruce Trail, and the family wanted their recognition plaque attached directly to Pinnacle Rock, it's such a landmark.  Their farm was known as Pinnacle Rock Farm.

On the slope downhill from there we came across a large patch of Hepatica in full bloom.  It's one of our earliest spring wildflowers.

And downhill further we came to this little un-named waterfall.  It's right along the trail, so it's well known; it's on a tributary of Mill Creek which we'll see later on.

This was one of those times when I took my tripod and tried to 'slow down' the water falling onto the  dolostone layer below.  At this point I was of course still using my big Nikon camera.

Now that we've got this far down in the rock sequence we're hiking on the Manitoulin Dolomite, a hard layer that forms the waterfall above, and forms the rim of Mill Creek valley, below.  As you can see, it's composed of many thin flat layers, formed in an ancient delta.

The Manitoulin Dolomite layer, here providing the perfectly flat rim of the valley, is not often recognized, but has a big influence, forming the lip of several of the smaller waterfalls in the valley, and the big plateau of Loree Forest.  We tend to think of the huge cliffs of Old Baldy and we miss this lower thinner geological layer.

It's a long and complex bridge that lets you cross the two shallow channels of Mill Creek in the valley bottom, but it's well built, by an army troop as a training exercise.   It's been appreciated ever since.

And that's the bones of a favourite April hike in my memory, actually the very same date as today.