I almost didn't go. It was six-something in the morning, still dark out, and my phone said it was nine degrees. Not cold enough to justify staying in bed, but cold enough that I had to think about it. I pulled on a long-sleeve and a windbreaker, filled a water bottle I wouldn't touch for an hour, and rode south toward the valley.
The first thing I noticed was the air. All summer the Don Valley smells green — damp leaves, river mud, that vaguely sweet rot that hangs near the water. But on this morning, it smelled like cold stone and woodsmoke. Not from a fire anywhere nearby. Just the season arriving. You can't fake that smell. You can't get it from a window.
The trail was empty. Not "quiet" the way it sometimes is on a weekday, where you pass a few joggers and a dog walker. Actually empty. I rode for maybe twenty minutes before I saw another person — a woman walking alone near the footbridge south of Pottery Road, hands in her pockets, breath visible. She didn't look up. I didn't wave. It felt right, both of us out there early, not needing to acknowledge it.
What the light does
Here's the thing about the Don Valley in fall that I can never explain well enough: the light changes completely. In summer the canopy is so thick that the trail feels enclosed, green and shadowed, like cycling through a tunnel. But by October the canopy starts to thin, and the morning sun comes in low and sideways, cutting through the trees at sharp angles. The whole trail turns amber. The river catches it. The pavement catches it. Your hands catch it.
I've ridden this trail maybe forty times, and on this morning it looked like a place I'd never been.
I stopped near the big bend south of Beechwood, where the river slows down and the valley opens up. There's a bench there that I've sat on maybe a dozen times, always in summer, always in the middle of a long ride when I need to drink some water and check my phone. But this time I just sat. The trees across the river were half-turned — some still green, some deep orange, a few already bare. A heron stood in the shallows, completely motionless. The only sound was the river and, somewhere far off, the hum of the Don Valley Parkway. Two worlds, separated by about two hundred metres of trees.
I rode the rest of the trail slowly. There was no reason to push. The leaves were starting to come down — not falling in sheets the way they do in late October, but drifting, one at a time, catching the light on the way. A few had settled on the trail and I could hear them crunch under my tires. Small sound. The kind you miss if you're going fast or listening to something.
By the time I hit the waterfront the sun was fully up and the city had woken around me. Joggers on the Martin Goodman. A construction crew somewhere. The spell didn't break all at once — it faded gradually, the way a dream does when you start to hear your alarm. I turned around and rode home the same way I came, but the valley was different now. More people, more light, less of whatever that early-morning stillness had been.
Why I keep coming back
People ask me sometimes which trail in Toronto is my favourite, and I always say the Don Valley, and they always look a little disappointed. It's not exotic. It's not hard. There's no dramatic lookout point, no reward at the end that you can photograph and show people. But that's not what makes a trail worth riding forty times.
What makes it worth it is that it changes. Not just season to season, but week to week, morning to morning. The river is different after rain. The canopy shifts every few days in October. The birds change. The people change. The version of yourself you bring to the trail changes.
I brought my bike in and stood in the kitchen making coffee, still a little cold in my fingers. Through the window I could see the neighbourhood waking up — cars, people at the bus stop, the ordinary machinery of a Friday. But I'd already had my morning. I'd been in the ravine when the light was low and the air smelled like autumn and nobody else was there. That's the kind of thing that stays with you longer than the ride itself.
