A big day of walking in Vancouver
I really got carried away with this post – it has 66 photos and 1,972 words, and took me two days to write, but it was a crazy day. I had taken my new “travel” laptop with the intention of writing briefer-than-usual posts each day, then just couldn’t do it.
I was in bed early on Tuesday night (April 14th) so was up very early the next morning. The day was looking good by 05:30, so at 05:42 I took the first photo from our room at the Westin Bayshore and headed out for a walk, with no real goal or destination.
The hotel is located right on the world’s longest uninterrupted waterfront path. This 28-km-long pathway is commonly called the Seawall to honour the stone wall around Stanley Park whose construction began in 1917. The Seawall would be my start, and I walked towards the Canada Place cruise ship terminal. The first cruise ship of the season, the Norwegian Jade, was only 4 days away!
Looking back towards the hotel and Stanley Park, with Liz Magor’s aluminum sculpture “Light Shed” in the centre. Created in 2004, it’s a half-size replica of one of the simple wooden buildings that were common along the harbour in its industrial days.
Vancouver is a safe, people-friendly city, and is a photographer’s dream. A waterpark along the seawall stopped me for a few minutes, and I took a few photos of it in different ways.
I continued up those stairs then turned onto West Cordova Street as the morning sky was lighting up some of the buildings beautifully.
The Oakridge Park Gallery on Thurlow looks like an interesting place to check out.
At 06:15 the float plane base, always a magnet for me, of course, was still silent.
Looking back to the west from the upper level of the seawall pathways above the float plane base.
The Trans Canada Trail looks very different here than in much of the Yukon! 🙂
06:30 – the Food Court would be waking up very soon.
I wandered around the Canada Place area for a while then turned back. The entire Convention Centre was fenced off and guarded, apparently because of a major TED Talk – “a landmark gathering celebrating ‘All of Us’ and marking our final year in Vancouver before TED’s next bold era begins.”
By the time I got back to the float plane base just after 07:00 the light was wonderful and I spent quite a while there shooting all sorts of photos including portraits of specific aircraft.
At 07:20, Harbour Air’s de Havilland Twin Otter C-GHAP began another busy day.
Nearing the Bayshore at 07:35.
This walk logged as 4.75 km and 7,028 steps at Strava. Not bad for my first logged walk since November.
Going back to my room, I stopped to get a photo from the window outside the elevator on the 6th floor. That roof of part of the hotel looks like it was designed as bird habitat. It’s certainly popular.
The view at 08:05.
We took a taxi to St. Paul’s Hospital for my noon appointment – $10. My surgeon is excellent – he reported that everything looked good, and asked if I wanted to go for a tour with the scope on the big HD screen. Hell yes – who isn’t intrigued to see what their insides look like? 🙂
We were only at St. Paul’s for about 90 minutes – they can sure bang people through in a hurry!
From there we went across the street to the Sheraton Wall Centre for lunch, as we’ve had excellent meals at the Cafe One there before. I’ll copy-and-paste the 3-star review I left on Google: “We went in for a light lunch and both our meals – a salad for my wife, soup and sandwich for me – were extremely good. BUT we got taken advantage of and may not return. We each ordered a coffee. ‘Coffee.’ We were surprised by what arrived and that no refills ever happened. Not until we saw the bill did we realize that our server had up-charged us to Americanos ($7 each) without asking – such a request would have been declined. We really hate getting taken advantage of at a place we’ve stayed at and eaten at several times.” 🙁
We took a cab back to the Bayshore. Just before 3:30, pretty pumped by the good news from my surgeon, I decided to go for another walk, along the seawall in the other direction – to Stanley Park.
I left the hotel by a back door that led byn the pool, and was very pleased to find their Coast Salish Indigenous Pollinator Garden, which has 15 plants traditionally harvested here.
The showiest of the flowers in the hotel gardens were the rhododendrons and azaleas, which were at their peak.
Near the edge of Stanley Park is a marsh, where I spotted a Great blue heron (Ardea herodias) hunting in the distance – it took about 700mm of zoom to get a photo of him/her.
At the entrance to Stanley Park is Rodney Graham’s sculpture “Aerodynamic Forms in Space.” It was created in 2010 for the City of Vancouver to celebrate the 2010 Winter Olympics.
At the head of Coal Harbour is one of Vancouver’s most-photographed heritage buildings, the Vancouver Rowing Club clubhouse. Originally located on the other side of Coal Harbour, it was floated to the present location in 1911 and rebuilt on pilings in mock Tudor style.
I walked over to see the horse tour operation, and thought an hour seeing Stanley Park that way might be fun for Cathy and I the next day.
Near the horses, there were lots of bikes available.
A badly-weathered sign introduced me to the BC Hydro Salmon Stream, a man-made creek that was built as both an educational tool and an attempt to bring salmon back to Stanley Park. The project began in June 1998 with the release of the first of an eventual 30,000 salmon fry into Coal Harbour, followed by construction of the creek which opened in October 2000.
The 300-meter-long creek empties into Coal Harbour just below this spot.
I met a female and male Wood Duck (Aix sponsa) at a rest area along the creek.
Mother Nature has turned the creek, whose headwaters are near the aquarium, into an amazing natural wilderness. Most of it in now inaccessible due to the thick growth of vegetation, as is natural in this coastal rain forest.
A little-used path through the forest took me to a big surprise – the old polar bear pit, built to house a total of 6 bears that were brought here in 1962. By 1993, few people supported keeping wild animals caged like this, and the Stanley Park zoo was closed. The final two polar bears, one badly injured in a fall and one in poor health from old age, were both euthanized, one in 1993 and the other in 1998. I remember the polar bears well.
A water feature and a sculpture drew me up to the aquarium, but I wasn’t interested in going in. I was hoping the people would leave so I could get some good photos of the sculpture, but though I hung around for a few minutes, they didn’t.
I shot many photos of flowers. You probably need to live in a world of black-and-white (mostly white) for several months to understand how incredible colours like this are in the Spring 🙂
It was a sign pointing to the Japanese-Canadian War Memorial that had initially drawn me into the heart of the park, and I finally reached it. The monument was dedicated on April 9, 1920 “in lasting memory of more than 222 who answered the call of duty for Canada and to the 54 who sacrificed their lives in defence of freedom in WWI.”
Changes and additions have been made to the memorial, and I spent a few minutes there, reading plaques and thinking about what a waste war is – created by the worst of our species, fought by the best 🙁
Walking back down the slope towards the seawall, I spotted the Vancouver Police horse patrol coming. I only had to wait 3-4 minutes for them to be framed by Lumberman’s Arch 🙂
Back on the seawall at 4:40, with very few people around.
For this part of the walk, much of my attention was drawn to boats and ships. I love machinery, especially machinery that moves, and ships have a special fascination. I took a lot of photos.
Nauticapedia reports that the Amia X was built in Vietnam in 2017 by Damen Song Cam Shipyard. Last year she was employed carrying personnel and cargo to project locations in support of Woodfibre LNG construction in Howe Sound.
The sulphur piles in North Vancouver add quite a pop of colour.
A raft of buffleheads (Bucephala albeola).
The car carrier Dream Dina beyond the replica of the figurehead from the S.S. Empress of Japan, which sailed between Vancouver and the Orient from 1891 until 1922.
A close look at the figurehead, which was cast in 1960 from the restored original carving.
“Girl in a Wetsuit” is a life-size bronze sculpture cast in 1972 by Elek Imredy.
The tug Seaspan Resolution was built at Tacoma, Washington by J. M. Martinac Shipbuilding Corp. in 2009 (Nauticapedia).
A fiddlehead fern distracted me from the water…
…and that led me to the memorial for the 8 people who died when the Princess Victoria struck their tug Chehalis (a Union Steamship Company boat headed north on a 3-week pleasure excursion) and cut her in half on the afternoon of July 21, 1906.
Brockton Point, with its lighthouse that was built in 1914, offers one of the best views in Stanley Park. Wikipedia provides some interesting tidbits: “Francis Brockton was the ship’s engineer of HMS Plumper under Captain Henry Richards when, in 1859, Brockton found a vein of coal in the Vancouver area. After the discovery, which Richards reported to Governor James Douglas, Richards named the area of the find Coal Harbour and named Brockton Point… after the engineer.”
Vancouver harbour is a busy place!
My next stop was the famous Nine O’clock Gun. This naval 12-pound muzzle-loading cannon was cast in 1816 in England and was brought to Vancouver in about 1894. In the early days it was fired each night to signal the start of the nightly fishing curfew. Housed in a protective shelter since 1986, it is still fired nightly.
HMCS Discovery is a Royal Canadian Navy Reserve division located on Deadman’s Island in Coal Harbour.
This bronze sculpture cast in 1986 by Jack Harman honours track and field hero Harry Jerome OC (1940-1982). In 1970, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. The following year he was named British Columbia’s Athlete of the Century, and was inducted into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame. He was posthumously inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame in 2001, and was named a Person of National Historical Significance in 2010. He died of a brain aneurysm at the age of 42.
My final photo from this walk shows the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club in Coal Harbour.
This walk logged as 7.55 km and 11,364 steps at Strava. That was actually about a kilometer or so too far – I was done by the time I got back to our room!
Dinner that evening was at the Bayshore’s H2 Kitchen. This was the Date Night Meat Sweats for two – “½ lb smoked CAB brisket, ½ lb slow smoked pulled pork, half a rack of St. Louis ribs, cornbread, house pickles, choice of sauce & 2 sides.” It was at least as good as it looks 🙂
At the end of this day, my health monitor showed that I had walked 20,783 steps – my second-best ever. Wow…
Whoops, one more photo from our room right at 8 pm as I was about to go to bed.
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