VANCOUVER - Waltzing with Bears

There are some cliches to travelling, especially I find where France is concerned. When in Paris, you visit the Eiffel Tower. You realise it's tremendously unexciting and really just a pylon with a nice view, then you leave. When in New York you go visit the Statue of Liberty. Which you realise is tall, French and so, therefore, you treat it pretty much like you would the Eiffel Tower. And then you get to Canada with its mountains, pine trees and general French connections and you wonder if the same thing is going to happen again... But it doesn't. Because unlike the Eiffel Tower, mountains and pine trees are awesome. Especially the Canadian ones.

Angus took me wandering through a couple of the local beauty spots. Of course, this being Vancouver pretty much everywhere is a beauty spot but around the coves of West Vancouver there are some standout sights. Lighthouse Park is a deceptivly titled area of slopes and forests which the settlers of the city decided to leave to its own devices when they arrived. A jolly good thing too, as that has meant four hundred years of awesome pine tree growth with relativly little signs of human life to wreck the place. So much so that Aaron (Angus' son) suggested we take a large bear stick with us before heading into the wilderness. And he was only half joking...


Angus and bear stick in the forest. If these trees look familliar, by the way, it's because they used to double for forests all over the US on The X-Files.

There are several stops well worth making in Lighthouse Park but, if you're prepared to walk long and high enough (or cheat and take the access road) then you can make it to the lighthouse itself: stuck out on a rock at the opening of the Vancouver city inlet in a most pleasing typical lighthouse kind of a way. No bears to be seen, though, so the bear stick went unused for another day.


The lighthouse in Lighthouse Park, with added float plane goodness overhead. Well worth an hour's walk of anyone's time.

We had planned to walk up Grouse Mountain the day after (a steep hour ascent affectionatly known as 'the Grouse grind') but the legendary rain of British Columbia put in an appearence so we instead headed for the ski fields of Cypress Bowl. Well, okay, not so much ski fields in the summer rather than good walks amongst the low lying clouds. But we'd been reliably assured that there were good blueberry pickings to be found. And more bears.

We actually forgot the bear stick but once again went unharassed. We also pretty much forgot about the blueberry picking. Funny thing about blueberries: they're really not that nice when you stand around and eat them. They require muffin / pancake type preperation to make them truly unmissable and, well, if you can't eat them whilst you're picking them then fruit picking is a strangely unrewarding pasttime. So, instead, we settled for walking the wet slopes of the mountain in the grey and the clouds. Awesome.


Aaron taste tests the wet blueberries of Cypress Bowl. They failed, sadly.