Tag: Hikes

The drive to Lions Bay from Vancouver is 31 km and takes from 30 minutes to much longer depending on the traffic.  Access to Highway 99 takes you through Vancouver’s downtown.  You can take transit, but it leaves you with an extra 1.6 km to the Tunnel Bluffs trailhead.  However, there’s limited parking at the trailhead.  Regular travellers to this trail recommend avoiding weekends due to it being busy. The parking lot is pretty small and often full but because we got there early we got a spot. The trail is popular due to it being accessible all year long.  […]

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Spruce Lake, a little-known gem just a few hours north of Vancouver, offers an opportunity for stunning scenery and hikes. Make the area around Gun Lake, British Columbia your base. From there, you can hike, bike or ride on horse back into the lake within South Chilcotin Provincial Park. I chose to hike, and I survived… I have the blisters to prove it! My cousin and I started our 26 km round-trip trek at the Jewel Creek Bridge, at the northeast end of Gun Lake, about 240 km from Vancouver. We left our car at the Jewel Creek parking lot. […]

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Our second Salt Spring Island beach walk on our trip (see Jack Foster Trail) was at the south east part of the Island. To find the access point to this trail, from Ganges, take Fulford-Ganges Road, turn left on Cusheon Lake Road, right on Stewart Road, left on Beaver Point Road, left onto Bullman Road and then right onto Meyer Road. There’s a cul-de-sac at Meyer Road where you can park. The trail soon becomes this mossy magical location. In March the moss was so profound and wet and green that it felt like a scene from The Shire in […]

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On Salt Spring Island, at the intersection of North End Road, Southey Point Road and Sunset Drive there’s an access point to Jack Foster Trail. We were lucky that the trail access was walking distance along a country road were we had a chance to feed grass to a couple of horses in a pasture. It’s a wooded trail, bound by moss-covered decaying snake fences that lead to the ocean. Technically this is an easy trail, which means you can easily use running shoes (preferably ones you don’t mind being covered in mud), but be aware that there are a […]

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Deep Cove is technically in the District of North Vancouver, but don’t tell any locals that. Deep Cove has the feel of a small village at the end of the road. In this case, the road is Dollarton Highway, which is slightly east of the Second Narrows Bridge as it leads into North Vancouver. You follow the highway until you can go no further. The village has a series of shops, bistros, ice cream Parlours and so forth. The real reason for going is Panorama Park, which is not naming hyperbole. The view onto Indian Arm is spectacular. From there […]

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I suggest visiting this park on a cold wet day in March when the kids are out of school because you’ll have the whole place to yourself. If you are like me, you think of potholes as something in the road that you don’t want to drive over. In the case of Sooke, this city’s potholes are geological formations that make deep pools in the Sooke River’s rock that offer excellent freshwater swimming, or when it’s really cold and wet, some of the best waterscapes around. To reach Sooke Potholes Regional Park, you head north from Highway 14 east of […]

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