Walter Saunders Memorial Park

Equipment by Henderson.

Surface: wood chips.

The Beltline is beyond doubt my absolute favourite walking/biking trail in the city.

Follow it east from Cedarvale station and you get a shaded path that slopes almost imperceptibly downhill for several kilometres, and that gets grander and more enveloped by valleys until finally you’re at the Brickworks. As a bonus, it runs past several playgrounds on its route, including the excellent Neshama Playground at Oriole Park, making for natural pit stops if you're travelling the trail with kids.

But what some folks might not know is that the Beltline stretches west from the Allen Road as well, in a 2.5km route that ends not far from the Caledonia stop on the Eglinton Crosstown. While not as scenic or as shaded its eastern counterpart, the York Beltline Trail does have the benefit of running past Walter Saunders Memorial Park.

This long, narrow park isn’t about to blow anyone’s mind with impressive equipment, but it’s a nice little spot, and probably much-beloved by families in the area.

Highlights from the playground include junior and senior climbers, a splash pad, and a large climbing rock that provides good training to aspiring mountain climbers. A bit to the west is an adult workout station by TrekFit, but all its users when we visited seemed to be under age 10. The park continues further west until you arrive at a basketball court.

For now, the York Beltline is awkwardly separated from the main Beltline Trail by a 200-metre stretch of unused, fenced-off greenspace; a frustratingly small gap that the City plans to eliminate in the hopefully not-too-distant future.