Hello! It’s abundantly clear that despite my best intentions my full plate isn’t going to allow me to produce new Check In Niagara episodes in the short term. Hopefully we can get up to speed again in 2012.
In the meantime here’s where you should visit for thoughtful and insightful local views of life in Niagara. Eating Niagara is a website devoted to local eating and agriculture in Ontario’s Niagara Region. It pairs well with Wines In Niagara, which focuses on the wonderful wines and food made in the Niagara Peninsula. You should be following the trials and tribulations of a small Organic Niagara farmer on the Tree and Twig Farm Blog. They’re only slightly more timely than I am, but Get Out Niagara remains a great resource for exploring outdoor life in the region, as does Wolfmaan, where you can follow the barefoot adventures of a local outdoor educator and wilderness guide.
If you’re looking for more on the history of Niagara there are some fantastic resources coming together for the 1812 bicentennial, specifically the Discover1812 website. For information on local hiking and trails you can’t go wrong with the official Bruce Trail website.
So where am I? Of course I remain the managing editor over at Punknews.org, I’m one of the organizers of Social Media Club Niagara and I’m a web developer and social media consultant at JMR Logics.
Of local interest we just launched Some Party: The Punknews.org Ontario Podcast. It’s a monthly music show featuring nothing but Ontario bands, including many from the Niagara Region. You can subscribe to the show in iTunes.
Some Party will strive to reflect the province’s vibrant independent music community. It will feature a mix of local punk rock and the genre-defying offshoots of that scene, from singer-songwriter to alt-country to folk. In the first episode we feature music from Marine Dreams (ex-Attack In Black), The Demics, Bathurst, Northern Primitive, Mark It Zero, The Decay, The Steve Adamyk Band (ex-Million Dollar Marxists), Single Mothers, Bruce Peninsula, Cuff The Duke, Pkew Pkew Pkew (Gunshots), Elk, One Hundred Dollars and Mongo.
Until next time.
Speaking of the Glen, today was the seasonal clean up thrown by the Friends Of Niagara Glen group. We picked up garbage and removed firepits along the trails, only to be caught in a spectacular thunderstorm somewhere around Pebbly Beach, which made for a slippery climb back up to the Wintergreen Flats. The Flats themselves look wonderful with the removal of the totem part and its imposing fence.
The walkway crossing the Ontario Power Generating Station forebays sits where the Screen House one stood. That structure was used to halt floating debris and ice from entering the three conduits that sit below the Gate House. When hydroelectric generation was running at full capacity, water would flow through the forebays at a rate of 340 cubic meters per second.
The gate house was commissioned in 1905. Its stately walls sit atop three 6 meter diameter conduits, two of steel and a third fashioned from wood, bound in iron hoops and encased in cement. These conduits carried water which had collected in forebays underground nearly two kilometers to the generating station at the brink of the falls. At this station, which sits atop a cliff opposite to Goat Island, the water fell through penstocks tunneled through the rock to turbines at the foot of the falls.
