Curiouser and curiouser: Montreal: Mount Royal

As soon as I decided to spend a few hours in Montreal, on either side of a trip to eastern Canada, I knew I would want to visit Mount Royal. Mount Royal Park is Montreal's equivalent to New York's Central Park (and in fact was originally designed by Frederick Law Olmsted); it is a green oasis for the city, where residents like to walk, run, bike, and picnic. The name Montreal is generally thought to derive from the name for this small mountain, itself named by Jacques Cartier in 1535.

While Mount Royal is not very tall--arguably more of a hill than a mountain, at all of 764 ft (233 m)--it is quite steep, but the rewards at the top are well worth the climb. Perhaps most famously, it provides panoramic views of the city, the St. Lawrence river, and the other two constituents of the Monteregian Hills beyond.

Here's the full panorama.

This spectacular view is from the courtyard of Chalet du Mont-Royal (Mount Royal Chalet).

Inside the chalet ... there are squirrels! Well squirrel statues of a sort. I've never seen squirrel...well, whatever these are, they're not exactly grotesques (and lacking downspouts, they're certainly not gargoyles), but they have a similar effect.

You can see all sorts of landmarks from up here, but one of the strangest is the Olympic Stadium (which looks a bit like the Starship Enterprise after a crash landing).

There are many other attractions throughout the park, including sculpture gardens, Beaver Lake, and many small trails through more forested sections.

This pretty--but terribly invasive--flower is a creeping bellflower (Campanula rapunculoides).

One of the other major attractions is the Mount Royal Cross. The first cross here was built in 1643, when the colony Ville-Marie narrowly avoided flooding, but the current cross dates to 1924. It is illuminated at night with a system that has been updated over the years from 240 incandescent light bulbs, to a 30-bulb fiber-optic system, to modern LEDs.

I must say, it reminded me quite a bit of the Eiffel Tower.

Having wandered over much of Mount Royal, I descended towards the northeast, passing the Monument to Sir George-Étienne Cartier, a father of Canadian Confederation.