Montreal Exploration bike ride - the Mile End stream

With a busy life it can be hard to get out of the city to explore new places and things, but don't fret: Montreal has plenty of good exploration-themes to keep you excited about life.

Having fun exploring Montreal is one of the principle reasons we started this blog: to give you ideas, themes and places to ride. The other is to bitchbitchbitch! Hopefully we balance the two with an overall positive result.

Today's theme is the Mile End Stream. We want you to explore, so there will be no map.

The Mile-end stream is an above-ground stream, or babbling brook if you prefer, that descends Mount Royal through upper Outremont (i.e. above Cote Saint-Catherine road). Upper Outremont is a compact area and includes the scenically-amazing Mount Royal Cemetery. The cemetery is where the mile end stream starts, happily in the beautiful park-like setting of the cemetery (note: no dogs permitted here).

After the cemetery, the stream descends through through upper Outremont in three locations, then crosses Cote-Saint-Catherine road and descends through the three Outremont hillside parks, and finishes (we decided) at the pond at Parc Viateur beside Bernard street. In the lower Outremont area, some amount of human imagination is required for the connection of the streams through the different parks, but the Outremont parks are very worthy and pleasant parks with an extensive amount of naturalistic streams and waterfalls that we always enjoy visiting (and this gives us an opportunity to enjoy the most-excellent lifestyle of our Outremont-dwelling Quebec elite!).

In most cities, and Montreal is no exception, natural streams are buried as development destroys the natural landscape. So we think it is simply amazing that the mile end stream remains above ground in upper Outremont.

We will return to the water theme in the future with some more of our favorite Montreal ponds, fountains and water sculptures. Stay tuned!