That was three years ago. In the meantime, he says, a group of residents simply fixed the stairs themselves and installed stumps to help climb over the fence. City staff took the stumps away; residents put them back; and eventually, Spindler chuckles, city staff gave up.

To be clear, most ravines are in far better shape. But surely such a state of affairs wouldn’t be tenable in the first place if more people knew about them and used them. “Torontonians really don’t have a sense or appreciation of what a remarkable treasure our ravines really are,” says Jason Ramsay-Brown, who published a book last year about their history and ecology. “They’re 15 per cent of the city of which most Torontonians know nothing about.”

When I was a kid, the ravines were seen as threatening, especially at night: bad teenagers did bad things under the bridges; heaven knows what the men who lived rough down there might be capable of; the Vale of Avoca, part of the Rosedale Ravine, was a popular spot for gay men at a time when that was enough to impugn the topography itself.