Dangling my feet over the bank of a fast-running creek, I watched the sunlight filter through a leafy canopy above me. Here, in the middle of a city of 3 million people, I felt utterly alone, and though I was loath to admit it, a little disoriented. But that was why I had come.

Much of Toronto is oriented around a straightforward grid of streets. But for those who know where to look, there is an emerald city hidden inside that grid. Like the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, Central Park in New York and Yoyogi Park in Tokyo, the ravine system in Toronto forms an oasis, albeit a sprawling and decentralized one.

But unlike those landscaped parks, Toronto’s ravines feel wild. Many Torontonians — let alone visitors — never descend into their vastness. Sitting on a mossy log listening to the water of Yellow Creek, I felt so peaceful I could have been in a national park. Instead, I was a 10-minute walk from the corner of Yonge and Bloor streets, one of the city’s main intersections.

‘Going down into a burrow’

Over two days, I set out to walk several of the ravines and experience a more primal and less manicured version of Canada’s largest city. Torontonians often see the ravines as a space unto themselves where underground parties, guerrilla gardening and homeless encampments coexist. And this separateness lends itself to the unexpected; in my ambles along their paths, I have encountered coyotes, nude sunbathers and, once, Eugene Levy (or his doppelgänger).

“People go into the ravines because it’s close to their home, but it’s almost like they’re going down into a burrow,” said Geoffrey Chan, a lead steward with the Toronto Nature Stewards program. Chan, along with about 800 other volunteers, works in partnership with the city to care for the 27,000-acre ravine system. Stewards pick up litter, cull invasive species and plant native ones.

On the first day, I met up with Chan and Tom Connell, also a lead steward for TNS, outside Roxborough Parkette North, a small park in the Rosedale-Moore Park neighborhood, across from an entrance to Rosedale Ravine. Decked out in gardening gear, Connell held a long, orange object that looked like a cross between a shovel and a pickax — an extractigator, he told me, with which he planned to yank out invasive species by the roots.

“You have your street network and then you have your ravine network, and I think the city is getting better at recognizing the importance of the ravines,” Connell said. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the ravines were a neglected dumping ground, and now they are prized for their biodiversity and unkempt beauty.

“We know about the ravines, but we also don’t know about them — many of us,” Chan said.

Famous holdouts

I began my solo explorations in midtown Toronto at Cedarvale Ravine, which flows out of the rolling expanse of Cedarvale Park. I followed a wide lane until it narrowed and passed under Glen Cedar Bridge.

My path unexpectedly led to a marsh. Tall cattails and goldenrod rose up against a pale blue sky, and the buzz of cicadas filled my ears. I spotted leopard frogs in the muddy waters. Around me, families walked their dogs, couples held hands, and runners sped past.

Hidden portals

The ravines can be easy to miss: Their frequently hidden entrances often have low-key signage, sometimes on dead-end streets or along active rail lines.

Nordheimer Ravine, my next destination, was one of these. One minute, I was standing on crowded St. Clair Avenue across from a giant Loblaws grocery store in the Casa Loma neighborhood. Then, as I went down some steep steps secluded by trees, the air quieted and the heat subsided. These stretches of urban wilderness host 369 species of birds, and I passed several people with binoculars.

These ravines are the traditional territory of many nations, including the Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, Anishnabeg, Chippewa, Seneca and Mississaugas of the Credit. Parts of the network intersect with the historic First Nations trail known as Gete-Onigaming, which translates to “at the old portage,” connecting the Humber and Don rivers.

Nordheimer Ravine winds into Sir Winston Churchill Park before spilling uneventfully into Rathnelly, a neighborhood that in 1967 symbolically declared itself independent of the city and Canada in protest of the Spadina Expressway, and street signs there pay homage to this.

A ‘Frankenstein’ network

On the second day, I headed for the central neighborhood of Rosedale. Off a dead-end street, I descended onto the Milkman’s Lane trail and veered toward Moore Park Ravine.

The leaves had just begun to turn. Tawny yellows and crisp oranges flecked the blue sky as I sloped down toward Evergreen Brick Works, a community center in a former quarry and brick factory.

The ravines have a cobbled-together quality, or what Jordan Teichmann, a Torontonian who assembled a 2018 subwaylike map of them, described as “a Frankenstein nature.” They merge into tiny parks, border residents’ backyards, conceal buried rivers and shelter vibrant, fast-flowing creeks. They are fractured by urban growth, yet they have endured.

I admired the late-blooming wildflowers as I carried on along Park Drive Reservation Trail. An elderly couple strolled ahead of me and a woman chased her toddler. It was peaceful, with fewer people than Cedarvale.

I exited at Roxborough Parkette — the place where I’d first met Connell and Chan — and crossed Mount Pleasant Road into the Vale of Avoca, an especially wild part of Rosedale Ravine. Here, Yellow Creek runs between steep slopes. Fallen trees occasionally act as makeshift water crossings, their upturned roots evidence of ongoing erosion. For hikers who prefer real bridges, there’s a charming wooden one about two-thirds of the way toward the entrance to historic Mount Pleasant Cemetery.

I paralleled the creek, listening to the rush of water. I didn’t encounter a soul in the vale. The industrial grandeur of graffiti-sprayed concrete pillars of a rail bridge emerging from the foliage echoed the majesty of the natural surroundings. I inspected an outcropping of mushrooms and stared up at the canopy of 30-foot trees. Someone had suspended a piece of slate-colored ceramic from a branch, and it caught the sunlight. I sat on a moss-covered log to take it in.