What: White Water Walk
Price: $19 for adults, $12.50 for kids (children 2 and under are free)
Length: 30 minutes
Rundown: The White Water Walk is a 73-metre-long wooden boardwalk that runs alongside the 48 kilometre/hour, class 6 rapids of the mighty Niagara River. Some of the path’s boards are a little creaky, but the walk is smooth and, crucially, accessible to people with strollers or wheelchairs.
Guests begin by taking a 90-year-old elevator (which a teenage summer staffer kindly operates using a hand crank) down 70 metres into the musty, humid depths of a small concrete tunnel that resembles the entrance to a gulag. But you emerge from that claustrophobe’s nightmare into a beautiful view: Whirlpool Bridge on your right, endless river on your left, New York just a stone’s throw ahead.
As you walk along the river, you’ll find plaques with decreasingly interesting “White Water Walk Facts”, which devolve from genuinely fun facts about the river’s heritage into promotional materials for other Niagara Parks sightseeing opportunities.
The Niagara Parks website says the walk lasts about 60 minutes, but employees will tell you it’s half that. In truth, the walk can probably be completed in 20 minutes, start to finish. But since you’re paying $19 per person, you may as well linger.
Worth It? No, not unless the accessibility matters to you or you’re on a strict time limit. If you want to get up close to the Niagara River, and you want to spend more than 30 minutes doing it, you’re much better off visiting the Niagara Glen, an expansive hike just a bit north of the White Water Walk. The Glen is free to enter and is not a terribly strenuous hike for reasonably fit people or children. The White Water Walk is just too expensive and too short for what you get—which is a view, and nothing more. What’s worse, we’ve heard stories of crowds on busy days getting bottlenecked on the way out, forced to stand in that dank Soviet-style tunnel for 30 minutes while the tiny old elevator moves a handful of people up and down.
That said, the Glen is not accessible, and does require more effort. So, if you’re dead-set on getting close to the rapids and hiking down a steep staircase isn’t an option, you’re stuck with the White Water Walk. Just get there early, or you’ll get stuck longer than you think.
