-
Posts
-
Especially during the year of Covid, I’ve been doing a lot of urban hiking where I connect the available green spaces with short walks through neighbourhoods, which has led to a number of fun discoveries: walks with a variety of things to see, often following paths through wild, forgotten patches that only neighbourhood kids would know about. Now and then, if you don’t feel like driving very far to hike and don’t have all day, there’s much to see and do within the Lower Mainland municipalities. A look into urban design, blooming gardens, street trees, forests and parks big and small, industrial environments, urban streams and bogs with very few people around, and that’s good under the circumstances when our three main Northshore mountains are so overcrowded.
This Wednesday I shared one of these little-known routes with some NSH hikers. We went along the south side of Burnaby Lake via the Brunette River greenway and back on the south side of Hwy. 1, via largely ‘informal’ trails connecting to Robert Burnaby Park.
Ye Chu did some research and found that at some point, we were on the overgrown track of the old interurban tramway that used to run between Commercial Drive and New West. She supplied a wonderful vintage film of the tram traveling through 1950 Vancouver (the first 15 minutes show the ‘Burnaby Lake Line’):
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrMEQbeviwo
Tender greens; you could almost hear the plants burst out of the forest floor to welcome spring; fields-full of skunk cabbages and trilliums, as Bengul’s photos attest:
Happy hikers sitting in the midst of this urban wilderness, having lunch in the sun: our first short-pants and T-shirt day of the year! Mariken
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.