For most of the past few years, if you walked south from Sunnybrook toward Edwards Gardens along the creek, you hit orange snow fencing somewhere past the stables and had to turn back or cut up to Leslie Street. That detour has been part of the neighbourhood's daily rhythm for so long that most people stopped asking when it would end. It just was the walk now: half a loop, a chain-link gap, a rerouted dog walk.
That gap is finally closing. The Toronto and Region Conservation Authority has been rebuilding the Wilket Creek corridor in phases for more than a decade, and the completed section, known in the project files as Reach 2, has been repaved and reopened to the public. Work continues nearby, but the piece that used to force a turnaround is no longer a wall of fencing. It's a trail again.
Why the Fencing Was There in the First Place
The short version: two storms did more damage to this creek than most residents ever noticed from the street. A severe weather event on August 19, 2005 tore into the watercourse hard enough that the city brought in TRCA in 2007 to design and manage a full repair program for Edwards Gardens and Wilket Creek Park. Barely a year after that work wrapped, a second storm on June 23, 2008 hit three of the freshly repaired sites and undid a chunk of the progress. That one-two punch is why this became a multi-year rehabilitation project instead of a single repair job.
The scope, once you see it laid out, explains why the closures dragged on so long. Reach 3 alone runs 640 metres upstream from the park's northern entrance off Leslie Street to the edge of Edwards Gardens, and it covers three separate damage sites. One of them got a new 30-metre pedestrian bridge to replace an undersized wooden one. Another got a 60-metre concrete boardwalk built specifically to let a wetland area regenerate on its own timeline rather than being paved over. This wasn't cosmetic trail maintenance. It was infrastructure work disguised as a walking path.
What You Can Actually Do Now
The completed Reach 2 section means the connective tissue between two of the neighbourhood's most-used green spaces is back. Sunnybrook Park itself is 60 hectares with more than 5 kilometres of trail through open meadow, forested ravine, and riverside path along the West Don. It links to Edwards Gardens and the Wilket Creek Trail heading north, and to Serena Gundy Park heading east, which is what makes the full loop possible rather than just a series of dead-end walks.
If you're doing the whole thing in one outing, the shape of it looks roughly like this:
- Start at Edwards Gardens, where the paved trail follows the stream south.
- Cross into Wilket Creek Park proper, where the newly repaved Reach 2 section now carries you through without a detour.
- Continue into Sunnybrook Park, passing the off-leash dog area and the open fields where local sports clubs run their weekend games.
- Cut east into Serena Gundy Park, where the path narrows and gets genuinely quiet.
- If you keep going, the trail eventually ties into E.T. Seton Park and the broader Don Valley system, though most neighbourhood walks turn back around Serena Gundy and retrace the route.
Done as a there-and-back, it's a five-and-a-half mile outing with just under 500 feet of gentle elevation change, which is enough to feel like you left the city without needing a car to get there. Expect some mud in the shoulder seasons near the wetland sections and the newly planted restoration areas. TRCA has left fencing up around some of that new vegetation on purpose, to give it a season or two to establish before foot traffic and off-leash dogs get anywhere near it.
The Part of the Name Nobody Explains
Here's what the trail reopening actually resurfaces: this neighbourhood's name was never a marketing flourish. This land was Sunnybrook Farm, roughly 175 acres owned by Joseph and Alice Kilgour, whose money came from running the Canada Paper Company. The city took the property over in 1928, and by 1933 it had added memorial gates at Bayview and Blythwood and a plaque at Wilket Creek Park marking the family's presence here.
The riding culture didn't fade with the farm. Sunnybrook Stables has been open to the public since 1978, and it still operates today with roughly thirty horses and an indoor arena built in 1982, with multiple outdoor paddocks tucked behind the main building. In May 2018, a fire tore through the property before dawn and killed sixteen of the twenty-nine horses stabled there at the time, a loss that hit the barn's tight-knit riding community hard. The stables kept operating. Lessons still run. Horses still work ground that's been ridden, one way or another, since the Kilgours farmed it.
That's the detail most descriptions of this area skip past. The Bridle Path isn't a name someone chose because it sounded upscale. It describes an actual, still-functioning riding trail that connects to an actual, still-operating public stable, on land that has hosted horses since the Kilgours ran it as a farm. Walking the reopened Reach 2 section, you're not on a symbolic nod to the neighbourhood's identity. You're on the literal thing.
Where the Walk Ends
The formal city district here, officially named Bridle Path-Sunnybrook-York Mills, stretches west into Hoggs Hollow, where the Don River cuts through a quieter pocket of winding cul-de-sacs. If your walk or ride pulls you that direction, the Miller Tavern sits right at York Mills and Yonge, occupying the site of the old Jolly Miller and known these days for one of the larger patios in this part of the city and a brunch menu that runs from golden buttermilk pancakes to a blue lump crab Benedict. A little further south on Yonge, Auberge du Pommier has been open since 1987 in a building constructed around two relocated 1860s woodcutters' cottages, with fireplaces lit through the cold months and a garden terrace that opens up in summer.
Neither is new. Both have been fixtures of this area for decades, which is part of the point. The neighbourhood doesn't reinvent itself often. It repairs what breaks and keeps using what already works, whether that's a stable that kept going after a fire or a tavern that kept its bones after a name change.
The Loop, Whole Again
Go back to that walk from the beginning. For a few years, getting from Edwards Gardens to Sunnybrook Park meant hitting a fence line and doubling back the way you came. Now the path runs through. It's a small thing on paper, a few hundred metres of repaved trail and a new bridge over a creek most people never think about. But it's the difference between a fragmented set of nearby parks and one connected trail system that happens to run straight through the middle of a neighbourhood literally named for the act of riding through it.
If you've been putting off the full loop because you remember the detour, this is the season to go check whether your memory is out of date.
For those who already call this stretch of Toronto home and like knowing what's actually changing behind the hedges and the fence lines, Bryan Lim keeps an eye on both the trail conditions and the market ones. Let's Connect.
