Part of the Stories from the Greenbelt series
Help Connect the Oak Ridges Moraine Trail: Put Your Mark on a Once-in-a-generation Project.
For Once, the Map Asks You for Directions
Thirty years ago, volunteers set out to build a trail across the entire Oak Ridges Moraine, the forested ridge that rises between Caledon and Northumberland. Stretch by stretch, they built a 268-kilometre route, roughly half of it off-road through forest, meadow, and farmland.
On a map, the trail reads as one unbroken line, and thanks to those volunteers, you really can walk it end to end. But more than half your steps would land on roads, many of them shared rural roads without shoulders. The best stretches of the trail exist. Many of the connections between them are pavement, and the route that would take the trail off the roads has never been drawn.
That changes this fall. The Oak Ridges Trail Association, in collaboration with the Greenbelt Foundation, has opened the first major public engagement on the trail in more than twenty years. From August 10 to October 12, we’re asking one question: where should the connected trail run?
What the Trail Crosses
The Moraine is a 13,000-year-old ridge of forest, hills and headwaters covering 470,000 acres. Rain that falls on it soaks into deep beds of sand and gravel and comes back out as the headwaters of more than eighty rivers. The aquifers beneath it supply clean drinking water to an estimated seven million Ontarians. Eighty-eight provincially or nationally protected species at risk make their home there. And most of us will only ever meet this landscape on foot.
What a Connected Trail Would Do
Once fully connected, the Oak Ridges Moraine Trail will be one of Canada’s most iconic trails, linking with the Bruce Trail and the Trans Canada Trail. It will:
- Bring nature within reach of people living in one of North America’s fastest-growing regions.
- Invite people to play a part in protecting the ridge that stores and cleans the water for an estimated seven million people and is home to 88 species at risk.
- Strengthen local economies by making the towns along the Moraine places to walk to, and stop in, not just drive past.
- Make visible the histories, cultures, knowledge, and ways of knowing of First Nations and other Indigenous Peoples, long silenced by colonization.
Shaped With First Nations
The Moraine is also a landscape with deep Indigenous histories, knowledge and continuing connections. The future of the trail must recognize these relationships and create opportunities for Indigenous perspectives, education, cultural connection and ceremony, as part of supporting Truth and Reconciliation.
Where Your Pin Goes
The survey is a map of all 268 kilometres. Drop a green pin on a stretch worth keeping exactly as it is, a red pin on a section that isn’t working, a blue pin where you see what the trail could become. You don’t need to know the whole route. One stretch you walk, run or ride is exactly what we need. Every pin and comment feeds the preferred-route report, and we’ll publish what we heard in early 2027.
One Moraine. One Trail.