Story by Andrew Yee
“I used to live around Grenadier Pond when I was in university. I never went to the park. I lived basically a few minutes walk from the park, but I’d never been there. Then I discovered a family nature walk in NOW magazine. Oh, I thought, somebody’s leading a walk and they’re going to talk about things in the park. I better go. The talk was about the savannah. I realized, wow, I just thought it was a forest. I didn’t realize it was a very unique forest because it’s fairly rare to have this kind of savannah environment in Southern Ontario, particularly in a big city. So I wondered what else could I discover?
I started to go to the park on my own. I liked going there and seeing the changes over time. Yes it’s the same place, but you never know what you’re going to see. The different seasons have different looks. In winter the trees are bare and snow covered. Come spring you see the buds come out, signalling something to look forward too. Then the nicer weather of summer, the fall colours and back to winter again. It’s a cycle, it’s change, it’s time. Down by the retention pond you can see water coming out from an aquifer. This aquifer was created by an ancient river in southern Ontario that predates the recent ice ages. In the park you see lots of sand. That sand is from a glacier deposit from the end of the last ice age. There is evidence of a geological time scale in the park. That’s what I like.”