January 2022
And some clever quip...
Upper Mountain Path, West Vancouver
In November I heard about this trestle
bridge in West Vancouver that had just opened. This is on
the road up to Cypress which is seeing quite a bit of
development. We decided to check it out. Sunday
afternoon is of course the worst time to visit these kinds of
attractions, so we had to park a ways down the road and walk up.
The trail itself is wide and flat - easily wheelchair
accessible. The rock has been neatly cut and anchored so it
won't fall down after a freeze thaw cycle. We found a small
side trail that lead up to the housing development that is in
construction. Eventually all of this land will be covered in
matching expensive homes like the other side of the road up to
Cypress.
We return to the trail and walked out onto the
trestle. The trestle is brand new - no graffiti, no locks
attached, no names carved in and nothing broken. The views are
great, but even here you are reminded that there will soon be more
houses here too.
It's Fog Season in Vancouver. We usually get a week or two of
fog as the weather goes from cold to wet and back. A Sunday
night just happened to be the right combination so I took a sequence
from Granville Island. The moon was supposed to rise in this
shot (not that I was setup for that), but the fog and the clouds
above removed any chance of seeing it.
Coopers Hawk in Stanley Park
I quite like the walk around beaver lake in Stanley Park. On the far
side of the lake there is a small bridge where people feed the birds
and squirrels and indirectly the predators. I've seen hawks in
the trees here before and his morning there was a Coopers
Hawk. I took a brief video:
Yew Lake in Snow
COVID (the Omicron wave peaked a few weeks
ago and I got my third shot - the kids are still on first) has
closed a lot of the usual seasonal attractions - the boat show
isn't happening this year and the Chinese New Years parade is
again canceled. The weather on weekends is far from
reliable, but when it's raining in the city, it's often snowing in
the mountains. I decided to take the kids up to go snow
shoeing at Cypress Provincial Park! As expected, we had to
park a good distance away from the trail head, but the walk wasn't
too bad.
They have nice signage to get you to the trail head and the trail
itself is well marked.
The straps on my 20 year old snowshoes immediately failed (I should
have checked before we left), but the snow was packed down well
enough that my big boots kept me on top of the snow. The kids
would probably have been okay without snowshoes as well, but that
doesn't make it much of a sport.
The air was just above freezing so the snow was quite wet when it
fell. Nara and Claira really enjoyed knocking the snow off
branches, but I don't think either was really able to drench the
other in snow.
I'm pretty sure we actually made it to Yew
lake. We were getting pretty wet by this point so we turned
around and headed back to the car.
We were back in the car by noon and came home for lunch. What
a great start to a day!
Tags: snowshoeing(5), Cypress Provincial Park(2), trail(2), Vancouver(2), bridge(2), fog(1)
People: Claira(6), Nara(5), Helen(1)
From: John Harvey Photo > Blogs for 2023 to 2005 > January 2022
Last Modified Monday, April 10th, 2023 at 18:39:07 Edit
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