Vishwawalking-Thomasburg East

This leg has been broken down into sections that can be walked in a few hours, including the return walk. The number of kilometres is noted first followed by a "running total" from Thomasburg to the end of the section described. The "description" date notes the date that the walk was made and described. Updates on walks are noted where applicable.

From Thomasburg, cross the highway by the gas station onto the Vanderwater Road. Usually there is very light traffic on this road. You'll see mostly fields on either side. There used to be a Christmas tree farm on the north side part way along, and there is a horse farm on the same side with a few horses grazing in the field.

Cross the bridge over Moira River just before the park entrance. Look upriver (north) to where the old and much more picturesque old bridge once stood. There is no sign of it now, except the remains of a dead-end road. There is a good view of the wide expanse of river flowing south. Turn right into the Vanderwater Park parking lot.

A better way to get from Thomasburg to Vanderwater Park is described in the Thomasburg South walk.

There are several trails you can take to get to the back of the park; the road is the shortest, but also the least interesting. If you take one of the woods trails, add a bit more distance to the six kilometres noted.

Follow the trail along the ridge above the road. About halfway through the park, it will go under some hydro lines.

Eventually it winds down a hill to a road. Turn sharp left at the road and almost immediately turn left again (don’t go down the hill to the river). Walk down a slight grade to where the path opens up a bit and there is a bit of rubbish lying around. Take the trail to the left. You will come to a fork; stay left and follow the trail as it winds uphill and you'll see a few houses and their back yards to your left..

The trail eventually comes out on theMoneymore Road. Turn left on the Moneymore Road until it meets Hungerford Road going off to the left.

See the Vanderwater Park pages for a more detailed description of possible trails you can take in this section.

This old barn can be found just south of Hungerford Road. One of the trails leading off the main trial will lead you behind some houses will lead you to it. Just after, the trail peters out. You can then sneak through private property, be respectable and ask permission to pass through, or do as I did and backtrack to the main trail (see map).
Photo: December, 2008

See the short walks section for a description of various trails that will get you through Vanderwater Park.

Moneymore is a very straight paved road with a few cars dashing along. It cuts through farmland and mostly cedar bush. There are quite a few new houses and several old farmhouses, both brick and wood.

About two and a half kilometres down the road, you'll come to Moneymore Orange Lodge, built in 1864. It is pretty dilapidated. The stove at left is inside the lodge.

There is one steep but not very long hill as you travel eastward from the lodge. At the bottom of the hill, you can see a part of the marshland that connects to Parks Creek, which we’ll cross on subsequent walks. There are some interesting farms along the way, some very stony fields and some bush.

Carlton Farms, about a kilometre from the lodge, must be connected somehow to Robert Carlton (1828 to 1907), who organized the first Orange Lodge in the area in 1857A big Yogi Bear statue stands at the entrance of a farm on the north side.

There used to be a sign reading "Cheese Factory Lane" a the point that the lane heads off to the south. Shortly after I walked the area in 2005, the sign was broken and lay in the ditch for some time before it disappeared. There's nothing to mark it now, so watch carefully as you come over a little rise in the road. As it drops, you'll see a rough road with an iron gate thirty or forty feet from the road.

In these parts, there’s a difference between a lane and a road. A road is public, A lane is either private, or it's public but the municipality has not recognized it as a road it needs to maintain. On my map, the road reads as "Old Cheese Factory Road."

4) South down Cheese Factory Lanefrom Moneymore Road to junction of Phillips and Naphan roads.

After about 1.6 km., jog to the west ( right) for .9 km. then south again 1.5 km. on Phillips Road to Naphan Road. Phillips Road (technically a "lane") is an unopened road allowance, so at most you'll find ATVs or snowmobiles.

This is a keeper of a walk. It’s a snowmobile trail, with evidence of snowmobilers and perhaps ATVs, but I didn’t meet any, so all went well. There is a tire dump just at the end of the jog heading south again. But for that, it’s a beautiful point in the trail. It looks like the jog, which makes up part of the Tyendinaga Township and Municipality of Tweed (or the old Hungerford Township, if you will) boundary continues westward.

I saw two deer on the Phillips Road part. The initial part can be wet at certain times of the year.

5) Junction of Naphan and Phillips Road to back entrance to Menzel Park on Daley Road.

From Naphan (it’s on the map as a community, but there’s only a couple of houses near the junction) walk down Phillips 2.2 kilometres to Maple Sugar Road, then east 2.3 kilometres on Maple Sugar Road to Marysville Road. At this point, Maple Sugar Road turns into an unopened road allowance. A truck had negotiated all but the last 100 yards, but was stopped by a small fallen tree in the road. I walked in the tire tracks that packed down the snow. It's bout 1 km. to Daley Road. Head north on Daley Road to the purple gates at the back entrance of the Menzel Centennial Provincial Nature Park, where a trail heads off eastward to a little pond. That’s the next adventure.

For more on this reserve, see my description of the park in the link above or see the accompanying photos here.

This is definitely a winter walk as much of it winds through marsh which would be impossible to negotiate in the summer. I did the bit to Mud Lake with my wife, Carol, and my dog Ziggy.

Starting at the western entrance (purple gate) the trail heads eastward through a planted cedar forest, before winding to the right. A small lake appears at the .6 km. point, where there’s a large trailer with a bed, stove, fridge, toilet, all in bad repair. Also there's an RV, where people have slept in summers past, again in bad repair. Some pretty big heavy machinery: a crane, a couple of trucks and two docks, one large one stuck in the ice, another flipped up just above the water line. My dog, Ziggy, was excited by what was probably a rabbit hiding under the smaller dock.

The trail behind the trailer goes up .5 km. to what looks like a small gravel pit which hasn’t been mined for some time, you'll run into an east-west trail. Travelling .5 km. eastward, the trail meets a north-south trail. Travel south, through cedar bush then open marshy scrub, about 1 km.

You must cut sharp right just before the main trial heads into a cedar forest. (We overshot the trail heading southeast just before the main trail goes back into cedar forest. After walking about half a kilometre, we met a family heading south(west) on two ATVs. They told us we had overshot the Mud Lake trail. )

The little trail heading off to the left is not well travelled, although an ATV or snowmobile must have done it a couple of snowfalls ago. It moves through marshy terrain, probably impossible to cover any other time of the year. This trail opens onto the creek indicated on the map midway down the west shore of Mud Lake. From here, we walked about 1.5 km down the creek (it’s wide and the ice is obviously pretty thick) to the lake.
It was a beautiful sunny day, only a few degrees above freezing. There was not a soul on the lake and snowmobiles and ATVs are not allowed in the actual reserve property of 2100 acres.

(We turned back at this point at about 4:30 to catch the last light of the day. It's about 4.1 km. one way, although we added quite a bit more if we had counted the overshoot and the messing about on both lakes.)

To continue from where we left off on the west shore of Mud Lake: Walk across the lake to the clearing where the trail meets the lake, about .7 km. On the day I walked it (this time solo), the temperature was above freezing and the ice was covered in two or three inches of water. Not the most pleasant of walking conditions (very slippy and my pant legs got soaked) and there was a bit of a breeze out of the west to push me along.

From here, there's a trail that winds to Roblin Road, about 1.8 km. away. (See update below. Note that park literature lists the trail at being 2.4 km. long That's exaggerating a bit.) It moves through cedar bush and scrubby marshland. Nearing the road, there are the sad remains of a little shack and the an even smaller building (an outhouse?) nearby. About 100 feet from the road, there is a plaque attached to a a piece of granite, facing south. The reserve (says the plaque) is in memory of (Mrs.) Oivi Vanaselja Menzel. Money was raised in her name for the reserve. The plaque has a likeness of Mrs. Menzel etched into it. The trip across the lake to the south gate took less than 45 minutes. I expect the trail would be a very wet walk in the spring and perhaps even the summer.)

Update: In July of 2008, the park opened a "new" trail from the gate to the lake. The trail I took in 2005, which was basically an old road, has been radically spruced up, with two wide boardwalks over particularly wet areas, numerous explanatory signs and other amenities. It's still a no-facility park, but the trail is much better and there's an excellent brochure describing the fen that makes up the park. See my description of the Menzel Reserve for more detailed information.

Vishwawalking

Corpus Mundi (Thomasburg) Eastward (1)

Leg One: Thomasburg, Ontario, just east of Highway #37, 25 kilometres north of Belleville, to Frontenac Park