About the Niagara Trails Summit
Purpose: Bring together the key stakeholders responsible for all of Niagara’s publicly-accessible trails and routes. Then, consolidate and digitise this considerable Trails foundation, to create new themed experiences that will encourage eco-aware visitors and residents to safely explore Niagara’s abundant geoheritage and active lifestyle assets, to the benefit of all stakeholders.
Challenges: Previous attempts to integrate our extensive trail assets into a consistent network have been unsuccessful because, until now, there hasn’t been a suitable, and motivated, apolitical “all-Niagara” organisation to bring it all together. There is one now: Your Niagara Geopark.
Current Status: There are many individual trail networks, such as Bruce Trail, Wine Trail, Greenbelt, Greater Niagara Circle Route, and so many others. Some, like the Bruce Trail, have excellent downloadable apps, but if you want to combine a portion of the Bruce Trail with, for instance, an Indigenous walking trail in Niagara-on-the-Lake, and simultaneously see the B&Bs, wineries and restaurants nearby, it’s just not easy.
Summit Mandate: To develop the mechanisms and organisation needed to make it easy for residents and visitors to access a single, comprehensive trails network repository, using any device, to find themed trails, interconnections, points-of-interest, special events, sustainable businesses and services nearby. These must be downloadable to all popular apps such as Strava, MapMyRun, RideWithGPS, Runkeeper, etc. The Trails Summit will explore how to achieve these objectives, with both short-term and longer term targets in mind.
