Frederick Law Olmsted designed Mont Royal Park in 1874 — the same Olmsted of Central Park, the same year as the Boston Emerald Necklace — and the principal carriage road he laid out, the Chemin Olmsted, switchbacks up the eastern slope of the mountain in a long lazy spiral from Avenue du Parc to the chalet at the summit lookout. The grade is two and a half percent the entire way, low enough for a horse-drawn carriage and gentle enough for a hot-July walk, which is its purpose now. The trail is unpaved, gravel, and runs through dense mixed deciduous forest — sugar maple, beech, red oak, basswood — with a fully closed canopy from May through October. On a July afternoon at 4 PM the entire eastern slope, which by that hour the mountain itself is shading from the lowering western sun, reads ten degrees Fahrenheit below the Plateau streets a block away.
The picks below trace the Olmsted plus a few of the smaller branches: the connector to Beaver Lake, the steps up to the Mordecai Richler gazebo, the short descent through the old maple-syrup grove to the Tam-Tams meeting circle on Avenue du Parc. The premise is the late afternoon window, from about 3 PM when the eastern shadow lengthens to about 6 when it covers the whole slope and the route becomes simply a walk in the forest. Stay Cool grades these against the actual sun angle and Mont Royal’s topography — the mountain itself is a piece of shade geometry, not just the trees on it.
A practical note on the trail. The Chemin Olmsted is multi-use: walkers, runners, calèche horses on summer weekends. The horses have right of way and the gravel on the curves can be loose. The unofficial side trails — the staircases, the woods paths — are steeper, mostly shaded but rougher underfoot. Stay Cool flags the rough ones.