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I'm sorry, but on days like this in Toronto – snow falling, snow waiting to be shovelled, snow turning to slush and ice according to winter's adolescent moodiness – the traveller in me can't resist the urge to escape. This city is my home and my life, and I'd gladly say I loved it if that didn't sound too improbable for a true Torontonian. But come on, Toronto in the cold?

What could those dour city founders have been thinking on March 6, 1834, when they decided it was a good time for Toronto to be born? If you're going to establish a city in a northern climate, why wouldn't you do it in June or September, both months for easy pleasures? I could walk you through the leafy paradise of University of Toronto in the late spring, and you'd quickly recognize the success of our urban experiment after 175 years, particularly if the bells were chiming their congratulations to the exuberant mix of graduates whose ancestors, 175 years ago, could only dream.

But in a Toronto winter, or so it seems as I try to play the role of cold-climate boulevardier, you'll spend a good part of an urban stroll staring down at the sidewalk and wondering when someone's uncleared ice and snow is about to upend you. So before we go any further, I want to make one thing perfectly clear: Come here when it's warm and you'll find magic more easily. At the best of times, Toronto's pleasures are bound up with the rhythms of its daily life, whether you're riding the Toronto Islands ferry through the gentle harbour breezes or stumbling across a jubilant cricket match just beyond the bulrushes in Cedarvale ravine, where the red-winged blackbirds sing, or studying the art deco details of the Charles Comfort frieze on Bay Street's Design Exchange – which in true Toronto style is all about the joys of hard work, yet somehow conspires to look playful and beautiful as the city hurtles by so energetically.

But there I go being escapist again. Happy 175th birthday, Toronto in winter. Now, what are we going to do to mark the occasion? For my part, drawing hometown inspiration from European hiking trips, I decided to take a long-distance walking tour through my own city. I've gone to Sicily in April planning to bask in lemon groves and instead found myself pining for my long underwear in unheated mountain-hotel dining rooms. So why can't winter-bound Toronto be my destination as well as my point of departure?

I hooked up with my veteran travelling companion – that would be my recently downsized, ready-for-adventure daughter, Liz – and we marched out the front door of our modest Toronto shack much as if we were back in Geraci Siculo or Piano Torre. I had mapped out a route that simulated the urban/rural mix our European walks do so well, an approach that also happens to suit Toronto, where semi-wild ravines wind improbably through compact city neighbourhoods.

After a preparatory shot of grappa (an Italian hiking ritual), it was just us and the unstoppable dog walkers in the Cedarvale ravine, where the first happy mutt who sprang at us from the cover of the woods looked a lot like a coyote – making us question our back-to-nature urbanity. This is a city that shows an unusual enthusiasm for reverting back to the wild; we've had a hungry hawk parked at the top of one of our backyard trees over the winter, not an unusual sight in almost-downtown Toronto. But what seems like a gift of the gods in the lush warm months can appear awfully chilling and predatory in the solitude of winter.

Emerging from the city forest into the Starbucks comforts of upscale Forest Hill, the first of many such oddly normal Toronto transitions, we felt less like prey. Solitude in the metropolis is a wonderful gift, but we felt equally pleased with the human contact of the security guard who greeted us amiably as we trespassed through the neo-Georgian courtyards of Upper Canada College, and for the subway train that roared past as the Belt Line walking path nimbly transcended the tracks by Mount Pleasant Cemetery. There's a hyperawareness that comes with city walking done for its own sake, and even the determined joggers who appeared out of nowhere gave us an aesthetic rush as we contemplated Mackenzie King's prime ministerial plot and the bright red Maple Leaf flag that marked his grave.

Yes, we could have stayed warm, toured the renovated Art Gallery of Ontario, and found an entire universe in the intricately carved medieval ivories collected by that model Torontonian, Ken Thomson. But then we would have missed the moment on the deepening slopes of Moore Park ravine, a place that can look remote and savage even by Group of Seven standards, when a cheery dog walker outfitted in Yaktrax shoe grips helpfully guided me off the icebound trail before I could slip away into the valley depths.

We left the ravine, promising to come back in May or June, and within a few seconds were racing along the well-tended sidewalks of Rosedale, consorting with the off-leash yappers who ran up to us and the nannies who followed close behind. I tried not to feel my typical Torontonian envy for these perfect garden-city hideaways so close to the centre of things, yet so unattainable for us common folk. Instead, I played the happy traveller celebrating the city's 175 years of sensible comforts: I admired the quiet good taste, the unshowy restraint of the brick architecture, the neighbourliness of the winding off-grid streetscapes populated on this cold day mainly by regiments of grade-school classes on the march.

Toronto likes to call itself the city of neighbourhoods, and assumes that this means something different from whatever Montreal or London or Athens happens to be. I often hear a naive hometown boosterism in the phrase. But when we crossed the Glen Road pedestrian bridge from seemingly ancient and unmoving Rosedale to the modernist towers of multicultural St. James Town, and from there, again within a matter of minutes, to the living museum of artfully restored Victoriana that is Cabbagetown, I couldn't help but fall into line.

This is the pleasure of continuous walking in Toronto: the sudden changes, the cheek-by-jowl identity shifts that turn up as a matter of course. By the eastern edge of Cabbagetown, these instant metamorphoses become almost absurd – take your choices among the old Toronto hillside burial place called the Necropolis (ancient Greek for “corpse city”), its wonderfully inappropriate neighbour, Riverdale Farm, and the overgrown path that takes you down to the Don River and up the other side. There you can sample spectacular views of the Toronto skyline, toboggan, wander over to the nearby Chinatown for dim sum or stroll through cozy Riverdale up to a Greek restaurant on the Danforth – I like the Pantheon for garlicky dips and giant stewed beans.

There is one more option, easy to miss unless you know this modest city's hidden secrets. After talking to the hens at the farm, nuzzling the horses, giving up on the standoffish sheep and leaving the poor cold goats to huddle, we walked down to the bridge across the Don and instead of heading for har gow, we turned onto the river pathway.

Cyclists throng it in good weather, when it becomes a quick, scenic, fitness-generating connection between the suburbs and the lake. We had it mostly to ourselves, apart from some shivering mallards along the bank and the commuters racing by on the Don Valley Parkway. The Don isn't a beautiful river by any means, except for connoisseurs of industrial unchic who get a melancholy twang from the straight-arrow channelling imposed by a previous generation of urban planners who regarded nature as messy and unpredictable. But any water walk is bound to be evocative, and even if the Don path hadn't been a convenient shortcut to where we were heading next, we would have savoured the odd juxtaposition of moody riverbank trees and a Mercedes/Smart Car dealership.

At Queen Street (noting the old-timey bridge clock), we turned back toward the centre of the city, now almost officially downtown. Corktown (as in Ireland) was an impoverished and neglected neighbourhood not so long ago, and in Toronto that's actually a good thing – nobody got around to ruining it in order to build the next generation of parking lots, which means we still got to savour not just the magnificently zany Italian renaissance façade of St. Paul's Church on Power Street but the working-class cottages on the tiny side streets that once supplied its parishioners, down-to-earth Little Trinity Church from 1843 (built for those who couldn't afford the pew rents at the loftier Anglican cathedral – so Toronto), and the humble little brick building on Trinity Street that was Toronto's first free school and is almost as old as the city itself.

Walking is easy, but history is hard. We were wearing out, and no longer making good speed as we stopped to stare. We took refuge in chef Jamie Kennedy's secretive Gilead Café, where I bought souvenir head cheese and pork rillettes while Liz nibbled on a restorative granola square. From there we side-streeted down to the Distillery, a Victorian cityscape of old whisky warehouses that now offers such modern-life panaceas as lait-cru Quebec cheeses (at A Taste of Quebec) and the incomparable hot chocolate “shots” found at Soma – Greek for “body,” but also the drug that induces a state of benevolent well-being in Brave New World.

We were there. And yet not there, for after a second shot of the dark molten stuff we still had to work our way to the urban walker's place of salvation, the lifeline for the sore of foot and weak of spirit. The King subway stop was the answer to our suddenly desperate prayers, and was now just a few blocks away. But before we could finish our walk, we had to stop at St. James Cathedral.

For me, a non-believer in the strictest sense of the term, it's an essential pause on a central Toronto walk, and I can't explain why, except to say that I always feel like I'm a part of the city's history when I'm here among the flags and the plaques in this high-arching space.

“It's closing time,” the sacristan announced just as we came through the door, seeking a little easy refuge. But there was still an opportunity for one more moment of perfect Torontoness: As we were being ushered out into the night, the huge sounds of the church organ filled the air, and suddenly our winter felt much warmer.