Continuing on after our lunch break, we almost immediately came to an even better lookout, this time facing south. This was the most panoramic of our lookouts thus far, offering a 180-degree view south across the Madawaska Valley and the low hills of south-central Ontario beyond.
Godin/Thunderbird main lookout
Continuing on, the trail started a final descent off of Godin mountain. There were a few limited lookouts over to highway 41 and the town of Griffith, and then we descended out of the realm of views and back into thicker forest. An easy three hundred feet (~100m) of descent and twenty minutes of time brought us to the E102 ATV / Snowmobile track.
All that was left for us was a walk back west along the ATV track, and then the short 'stick-of-the-lollypop' section of trail back to the parking area. With side-by-side hiking now making chatting easy, it did not seem like very much time had passed before we were back at the closure of the loop. Turning left, we walked for another easy fifteen minutes before arriving back at the cars, for four hours of total hiking time.
Arriving back at trailhead
Restaurant and Godin Mountain
After driving back from the side road to the main highway, we had a stop near the Pine Valley restaurant and store in Griffith - the spot that we had photographed at one of our last lookouts atop Godin Mountain. It took a bit of time to locate the little open patch from which we had observed the valley below; the wooded hillside above the restaurant looked quite nondescript and not especially interesting. Before today, I certainly would not have thought that such a little gem of a hiking trail was present on it.
With that, we hopped back into Frans' car and made the journey back to Ottawa. Thanks for letting me join your hike today, guys!
Afterword and notes: please find below a fully interactive trackmap with photo points. Click on the map to bring up a full-size version from which you can see the track, where all of the pictures were taken, and view the pictures alongside the map. Note from the data at the bottom of this page that this hike is not actually 10km long, as stated in this hike's description. It's actually only 8.5 km long! And lastly, I'd like to add my own assessment of the difficulty of this hike: fairly easy. The terrain is not particularly strenuous or rough, nor is the elevation gain all that much - about 800 (<250m) feet of total elevation gain and loss. The biggest challenge of this hike is wayfinding - given the lack of a tread in many places, it is imperative that you pay attention and not stray off of the marked route. But other than that, this is (in my opinion) not a hard hike.
Interactive Trackmap with photo points. Click map to view
Hike Data - Griffith Uplands Loop
Start Time:
10:29a.m.
End Time:
2:30p.m.
Duration:
4h0m
Distance:
8.53 km
(5.3 mi)
Average Speed:
2.1 km/hr
(1.3 mph)
Start Elevation:
899ft
(274m)
*
Max Elevation:
1346ft
(410m)
*
Min Elevation:
860ft
(262m)
*
End Elevation:
912ft
(278m)
*
* : +/- 75 feet
Total Elevation Gain:
787ft
(240m)
*
Total Elevation Loss:
770ft
(235m)
*
* : +/- 75 feet
Elevation Graph
