I love a lot of places, but this is where I grew up, and it’s where I spend much of my time because my parents still live in the area. Mount Nemo is this outlier of nature on the edge of the suburban GTA [Greater Toronto Area]. It’s hard to develop because it sits up above the landscape, and so it has been largely preserved, except for the fact that the gravel mining industry has been trying to haul a lot of it away over the decades.

It is a place of refuge for so many rare and endangered species — and for people. The Bruce Trail goes right through Mount Nemo Conservation Area and takes you to a lookout across a patchwork of farmland and the skylines of Mississauga and Toronto. In spring, the forest is a cacophony. Bobolinks are flitting from the tops of the trees out into the middle of the fields where they’re building their nests. You can’t hear yourself think with the noise of the spring peepers and wood frogs, and if you go out at night during the first rains in late March or early April, the forest floor is moving with yellow-spotted salamanders and Jefferson salamanders.

It’s Carolinian forest, with shagbark hickory and sugar maple and red and white oak, so in fall you get the splendour of the colours. It’s been called the fountainhead; so many creek systems originate at the top of Mount Nemo. I’m still working with community groups to safeguard it from a very unregulated industry that is trying to hollow it out.

I feel so lucky that I’ve been able to know this place for such a long time and come back to it in different seasons. It’s irreplaceable.

Mount Nemo is located on the treaty lands and traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee and Wendat peoples.