We set out on an epic 20-kilometre walk heading east from the Kipling subway station commuter parking lot, a vast space that affords great views of the rapidly densifying skyline around Islington station.

My walking companion was Trevor Heywood, a 30-year-old with a penchant for day-long Toronto walks in sometimes unexpected places, part of a project he calls Metroscapes. Many of his walks follow ravines and utility corridors, all oblique routes through the city.

“In a major city, such as Toronto, where it can be busy, bright, loud, dirty and hard, these spaces can be an escape, a breath of fresh air,” he says. “I think it’s essential to big city life, and the research out there suggests it could have significant benefits to your health.”

The route Heywood planned for us follows a hydro corridor that runs from the edge of Mississauga to St. Clair Ave. and Caledonia Rd., where it splits in two directions.

“There are also so many of these corridors that are fragmented by private ownership, lost to redevelopment, or simply overgrown and inaccessible,” says Heywood. “Something in me is driven to explore all that I can, and document where the line is intact and where it’s broken.”

We soon ran up against a fence at the eastern end of the Kipling lot, forcing us to backtrack and follow Fieldway Rd., instead, an interesting street where industrial and residential zones overlap.

This would be our pattern for the day, as we tried to stay as close to the corridor as possible, but detouring when needed.

I first caught a glimpse of Heywood’s wandering on Twitter, where he leaves a trail of observational tweets during each of his walks.

While always into taking “random walks,” he started this project in earnest three years ago when he quit drinking.

“I needed a new hobby,” he says. “So I took this to the next level, and walking the city became my new addiction.”

Since then, he’s walked 1,357 kilometres through Toronto and documented them on his Metroscapes website.

Quite a bit of work goes into plotting out routes. Heywood relies on the city’s online maps, which show individual parcels of land and indicates what is city-owned parkland and open space. “This can reveal spaces that are forgettable, and public rights-of-way, like alleyways and easements between houses, that you’d otherwise miss if you were just passing by or looking at a map,” he says. “If I need to go back in time and find things like lost rivers or redeveloped utility corridors, I used the city’s historical aerial photos.”

After we crossed Bloor, the hydro corridor roughly began to follow the Guelph Radial line of old Toronto Suburban Railway right-of-way that ran between 1917 and 1931. We crossed Mimico creek in Tom Riley Park and strolled onwards to Royal York Rd. and Dundas St., an elevated intersection which, from below, resembles an alternate Gardiner expressway.

A little further on, we had to make our most elaborate diversion away from the hydro corridor to get around the Humber River, its ravine walls as steep as the Scarborough Bluffs here. The pedestrian and cycling bridge crossing the Humber far below us uses the remnants of the Toronto Suburban’s bridge footings here. Fall and winter are good times to walk, as the lack of leaves reveals details covered up in the summer.

Once on the other side of the river, we stopped in at Lambton Arena, busy with hockey kids and parents on a Saturday morning, but a splendid bit of 1966 cinder-block chunky grace, complete with a round, unused box office in the front lobby, which, itself has become a conservatory of sorts, filled with tropical plants enjoying the sun.

Further along the corridor, past elaborate allotment gardens, we came to Rockcliffe Blvd. and the edge of the valley where the Black and Lavender Creeks flow. The edges of this circuitous valley provide one of Toronto’s great, unsung panoramas. It feels more San Francisco than Southern Ontario. Nearby, the northern end of Runnymede Rd. terminates at this edge.

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At the UP Express and GO Train rail corridor by Weston Rd., we made another diversion, returning to the hydro corridor at Union St., where angry junk-yard dogs barked at us, as if they were characters in a noir crime film. Through a series of diagonal parks beyond Old Weston Rd., we reached St. Clair and Caledonia and walked to Lansdowne subway station and parted.

“I want to inspire others to explore some of these places for themselves,” says Heywood.

He hopes the city will find a way to make public trails through all these corridors. While still walking Toronto, he, his wife, and young son have recently moved to Cambridge to escape Toronto’s high rents, but he’s also started walking and exploring there, too.

Explore Heywood’s routes for yourself at metroscapes.ca

Shawn Micallef is a Toronto-based writer and a freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @shawnmicallef

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