The former Milton Limestone Quarry in the Town of Milton, Region of Halton, is on the edge of the province’s major population centre: the Greater Toronto Area. The quarry opened in 1958 along with others in the local area to provide construction materials to build the new provincial Highway 401.
The strategic location near Toronto has made the site an excellent one for supplying aggregates to Canada’s largest market. It is situated on the physiographic feature known as the Milton Outlier on the Niagara Escarpment, which is an excellent source of high quality Silurian Amabel dolostone. The outlier had active quarries and lime kilns in the early 1900s. The quarry supplied one million tonnes per year of crushed stone for construction uses for over 40 years until operations ended in 2001.
The strategic location of the site also makes the rehabilitated quarry a prime candidate for public use. Not only is it less than 50 km on provincial highways from downtown Toronto and Hamilton, it is situated in a scenic and rich natural area of the Niagara Escarpment. Over a thousand hectares nearby are already in public ownership, visited by thousands of residents and tourists each year for skiing, hiking, rock climbing, swimming, boating and outdoor education. The site is in the Niagara Escarpment Plan Area, within the Province’s Greenbelt.
The Greenbelt is an area of over 700,000 hectares of green space that the province established in 2005 to preserve the natural resources from urban development.
Lands adjacent to the site are owned by Conservation Halton, a local environmental agency that operates on a watershed basis. A major function of Conservation Authorities is protecting watersheds through ownership and management of lands, which are also used for public education and recreation. One of their public parks is the Kelso-Glen Eden Conservation Area, which is immediately next to the former quarry. This park includes a major ski area, extensive trails above the escarpment and a reservoir (Lake Kelso). While the main function of the reservoir is for flood control and stream flow augmentation, it is also a major recreation facility for swimming and boating.
The active life as a fully working quarry was followed by a second stage of 10 years where the final rock was recovered during site rehabilitation. The quarry was donated to the Conservation Authority in August 2006. In its new life as a public conservation and recreation area, it joins several other former quarries in the Region of Halton that contribute natural heritage and recreation values as public parks.
When the quarry approached the end of its operating life in the mid-1990s, Conservation Halton recognized the potential value of the site as an addition to its existing Kelso-Glen Eden Conservation Area. They negotiated with the owner, Barrick Gold Corporation, to donate it when fully extracted and rehabilitated. Lands to be donated included the rehabilitated quarry and the adjacent 700 m swath of natural forest and cliffs that had been protected from extraction within the 71 hectare licensed area.
The natural forest and cliffs are ecologically significant and will be protected in a Nature Reserve “Special” zone in the Master Plan to be completed by Conservation Halton. The University of Guelph’s Cliff Ecology Group discovered an old growth forest of eastern white cedar there in the mid-1990s, and the Nature Conservancy of Canada has expressed interest in helping to provide support to protect this ecosystem.
The approved rehabilitation plan included a 5-metre deep lake in part of the quarry floor and identified recreation as a possible after-use.
The rehabilitation was particularly innovative in the approach to cliff and slope creation to produce varied landforms, and the configuration of the lake in the quarry floor to make it suitable for a public recreation area.
A detailed rehabilitation plan designed by staff at Conservation Halton guided the final extraction of the quarry floor. The lower few metres of the excellent Amabel Formation and some of the underlying Reynales Formation were extracted to recover the last remaining bedrock resource and create the final lake configuration. The lake design included shallow areas and shoals for fish habitat, and also areas for future public beaches. Lake levels were determined as part of a hydrogeological study. Levels are managed by a small weir structure, allowing gravity outflow for the spring freshet or storm water events into a defined open channel, which then flows through a buried drainage channel that eventually surfaces at the edge of the escarpment.
Over the years, the company used several grass and legume mixtures to stabilize the slopes and quarry floor, and planted native trees on the slopes. As a result of the outstanding success of the final rehabilitation, the Ontario Stone, Sand and Gravel Association (OSSGA) awarded Barrick Gold the prestigious Outstanding Achievement in Property Rehabilitation Award in 2007.
Today, the former quarry site is an exceptionally beautiful property set within the surrounding natural area of the escarpment and Conservation Halton has trails that run along the western edge of the property. These trails also connect to the Bruce Trail, which is an 845 km public hiking trail that runs along the Niagara Escarpment from Niagara Falls to Tobermory. The property itself is not yet open to the public.
Conservation Halton views the Kelso Quarry Park as an excellent example of rehabilitation and plans to implement the installation of park infrastructure and facilities befitting this spectacular regional escarpment park.
Use Flickriver Badge Creator to create a badge linking to your photos, your group or any other Flickriver view.
You can place your badge on your Flickr profile, Blog or Website.
Add to your iGoogle or Netvibes page
Flickriver widget for iGoogle or Netvibes can display almost any Flickriver view - most interesting today, by user, by group, by tag etc. Once added to your personalized homepage, just edit widget settings to select your desired view.
Clickr on one of the buttons below to install:
Embed on your Web site
To embed this view, Copy and Paste the following HTML code:
Add 'Search on Flickriver' to your browser's search box. Works with Firefox and Internet Explorer.
Install search plugin
"View on Flickriver" Greasemonkey script
A Greasemonkey script that adds Flickriver links to various Flickr photo pages - user photos, favorites, pools etc, allowing to quickly open the corresponding Flickriver view.
Also, allows quickly viewing any Flickr photo on black background in large size.
