By Doug Draper
A few years back, I descended steps leading down the steep gorge walls of the lower Niagara River with retired Niagara Parks naturalist Robert Ritchie for a tour of one of the few remaining places that can give a person some idea of what this magnificent river must have looked like before the first white settlers showed up in the area.
A Jet Boat, roaring toward the whirlpool rapids of the lower Niagara River early last spring in this file photo by Doug Draper.
That place is on Niagara Parks-owned land and is known as the Niagara Glen – a rich, relatively undisturbed oasis of green along a river corridor that has otherwise been a setting for almost every kind of development imaginable, good, bad and ugly.
As we wound our way down stoney paths, past all of the rare and unique plants, trees and rock formations the Glen has to offer, Ritchie had just finished telling me there was something almost spiritual about this place when the sound of rushing water below us was masked out by the roar of engines and a voice booming through a bullhorn.
As birds scattered from their nesting places in the trees above us, I looked down on the river and there was another ‘Jet Boat’ loaded with tourists, wide-eyed and grinning as if they were on a giant coaster ride at the Darien Lake amusement park. Continue reading
