Walkabouts
V: Deep Cove
-
courtesy
Tourism Vancouver
Looking for a great walk? Check out our walkabout trip
suggestions in and around Vancouver that make for a wonderful way to spend a day
outdoors.
Be sure not to miss our other articles in the series:
Walkabout
I - Stanley Park
Walkabout II - False Creek
Walkabout III - Point Grey & UBC
Walkabout IV -
North Shore
Walkabout V
- Deep Cove
Get out your hiking boots. Crossing the Second Narrows Bridge
means you're heading into the mountains.
At Deep Cove, the easternmost corner of the North Shore,
mountains, trees and ocean converge. This is still an urban area, where modest
post-war summer cottages sit cheek by jowl with post-modern West Coast mansions,
but the terrain remains untamed and often precipitous.
Between
Cates Park on the Dollarton Highway to the east and Panorama Park to the
south-west is the eastern end of the Baden-Powell Trail. It's 42 kilometres (26
miles) long, and ends at Horseshoe Bay, where huge, gleaming-white passenger
ferries ply. Tackle all or some of it depending on your level of fitness and
your footwear; trails are indicated with coloured markers and ribbons. This is
West Coast in all its brilliance: rocky bluffs with spectacular views of Burnaby
Mountain and Salmon Arm, ravines running with snow-fed streams, and of course
trees, trees, trees.
At the Cates Park-end is Malcolm Lowry Walk, a thicket that in
the 1940s concealed a shantytown, once the down-and-out North Shore home of the
dissolute writer. Closer to the Panorama end is the community of Deep Cove, a
little harbour with big, big views as well as the expected gift shops,
restaurants, picnicking spots and boat slips. After a brief dalliance with the
wild, it is always nice to return to civilization.
