Summer re-cap, Vancouver

After the driest/sunniest/most wonderful September on record  in Vancouver (at least in the last 160 years),  fall and extreme rainfall warnings have returned to the West Coast.  Time to re-cap some fun summer activities while they’re still relatively fresh!

Title photo is from a great BBQ+sunset in the West End.  Could it get any more picturesque?  I would have appreciated it though if our neighbouring-BBQers hadn’t put Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call me maybe” on repeat for OVER AN HOUR, but I guess I shouldn’t whine.

In late June Rod and I headed out to Alberta to visit friends and family in Canmore, Calgary, and Sylvan Lake.    Lots of driving in the span of a few days, but at least they know how to build highways out there which has me smiling.

Only in Alberta would I get stuck behind a pick-up with its own quadruple-life-size gorilla reaching out to crush me.

Fun times with Becky and family at Sylvan Lake.  Despite the rain we enjoyed ice cream every day and were serenaded by precocious guitarists every night.

Canada Day bike ride down to Steveston for the festivities and tasty salmon burgers.  We decided to Skytrain it part way back and then bike out to Jericho Sailing Club for some great views and pints.   I bought a touring bike in May and was so happy to have it after my knee injury.  It’s definitely one of the best ways to get around in Vancouver....except when it pours.

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Spoils from berry-picking with Hannah.  These made great strawberry coulis, strawberry smoothies and ice cream toppings.  I've still got a bag or two in my freezer to get my strawberry-fix through the winter.

My sis and I on a lovely evening in Vancouver going for a walk after having stuffed ourselves with sushi.

Visit from Becky and Mike in July – we crammed a lot into a few days including a quick look at the impressive blue whale skeleton at the Biodiversity museum at UBC.  Worth a visit if you’re ever out here!  It’s a pretty crazy story of how they dug up a whale in PEI in 2007 which had beached itself in 1987, found all the bones, figured out how to clean them, and then get them into the museum. If you’re brave, you can even take a whiff of what twenty-year-old dead whale smells like. 

I finally did a good chunk of the Baden Powell trail, taking in the views from Grey Rock near Deep Cove and working my way over to the Lynn Valley suspension bridge which is very cool and absolutely free (unlike the ridiculously expensive Capilano Suspension bridge, currently running at $32+tax to cross).  

For late summer and my birthday I went car-camping with friends at Harrison Hot Springs (/Freezing Lake).  Seriously, this is one chilly lake but it was smoking hot and we braved it for a little while.

Trev and Pat doing their best Bo Derek imitations while the rest of us laugh it up.

The weekend was great with good food (car camping is awesome when you’re used to hauling everything up a mountain on your back and doing without), tasty drinks, and guitar sing-alongs.   Campfires were unfortunately banned although one member of our group brought this crazy contraption he called a “Bubba” which was essentially a propane tank with some indestructible insulation glued on top.  Turn it on and it looks like a fire at night, although the insulation is pretty ugly in the daylight.

The Bubba:

The campground was pretty much what you’d expect from most urban car camping experiences; your tent is two feet from your neighbours who are inevitably on the opposite schedule as you with kids up and screaming waaaaay too early and Grandpa swearing like a sailor trying to retract the awning back into the RV and pack up by 7 am.  But what we didn’t expect were the hordes of Muscovy ducks who lived there.  They were kind of creepy and would hang around the washrooms, sleeping right in the middle of the path and look at you with half slit eyes in the middle of the night and red cancerous growths on their faces.  Although I guess they’re kind of cute during the day.

That’s it for now, but stay tuned for highlights from the 3 weddings I went to this summer. 

Whale Watching, Vancouver Island

I went whale watching with my Mom one sunny afternoon this summer.  We left from the harbour in Cowichan Bay on a speedboat, zipping all the way down to the Strait of Juan de Fuca where two resident pods of orcas were hanging out (J pod and K pod).    It’s too bad they didn’t get more creative with the names!  J and K pod are kind of lame for these magnificent creatures. 

Leaving Cowichan Bay for our whale watching adventure:

Even during the summer and with our heavy insulated suits on it was pretty cold on the speedboat when it was moving full speed.  While waiting for some whales it was time for a few less exotic people pictures.

I think my Mom looks like a seasoned Arctic explorer in this one:

Quick primer on orcas:

There are two main types: resident and transient orcas.  The resident orcas travel in bigger groups (~20-40 whales per pod around Vancouver Island at the moment) and eat fish (97% salmon in these waters).   They tend to hang out in the same locations and have lots of vocalizations since these don’t seem to scare away the fish.  Transient orcas travel in much smaller groups (2-6) and mostly eat marine mammals.  They’re also a lot quieter since their prey can hear their clicks and chirps.  Based on genetic tests, these two types of orca haven’t interbred for over 10,000 years!

We only saw resident orcas on our tour, although we tried to track down some transients spotted earlier in the day.  Our guide was excellent and had been out doing tours for years and could identify most of the orcas by name based on their fin and dorsal patches.    They are pretty difficult to photograph since they appear all over the place, but only for an instant before diving again, but I did manage to capture a few shots:

Other interesting facts (from Wikipedia and other):

·         The females can live up to 90 years old, and male life expectancy is 50-60 years.  In captivity life expectancy is only 20-30 years.

·         Residents are all mommies’ boys (and girls), living with their mothers their entire lives

·         Orcas have the second-heaviest brains among marine mammals (after sperm whales, which have the largest brain of ANY animal).  Orcas have brains ~5x the size of humans.

·         Orcas will deliberately beach themselves to catch seals

·         They can swim up to ~50 km/hr

·         Orca pregnancies last 13-17 months.  That seems like a long time to me, but I guess they aren't on their feet with their baby-weight.

The two pods seemed to be swimming together and we thought we might be in for a rare treat of a “super-pod” which is when multiple pods merge together.  Apparently these are raucous parties with lots of spyhops, tail slaps, and screeches, chirps and echolocation.  Plus a lot of orcas use the time to fraternize and flirt with each other.  Unfortunately the matriarch of K pod decided to slow the pod down so we didn’t get a chance to see the mega-pod-party.

On our tour we did however catch a glimpse of Tucker, the whale-scat-sniffer-dog.  He’s a black lab who can smell orca scat from over a kilometre away.  He stands on the bow of the ship and helps tell the researchers where to go.  He’s so useful because the research ships can stay further back from the whales themselves (i.e. not stress them) and still scoop up enough whale-poo samples before they quickly sink out of sight.   The samples are jam-packed with genetic, dietary and physiological info.  Useful stuff to countless marine biology PhDs and post-docs.  On a nice day it makes me wish I had studied something cool like orcas!

Tucker has got a funky K-9 Ruffwear lifejacket and special goggles to protect his eyes, and is a graduate of the “Conservation Canines” program at the University of Washington.  They apparently modify methods used to train dogs to find narcotics. 

On our way back we made frequent stops for other wildlife sitings, including harbour seals sprawled out on rocks catching some sun. 

Mandarte Nature Preserve  is a hunk of rock home to thousands of nesting cormorants.  (I think the white rock is mostly bird poo).

A dignified bald eagle posing for us. 

And because I was still on my wildlife photo kick I snapped some hummingbirds gathering at a feeder after a delicious lunch at Genoa Bay. 

Stein Valley, BC

Congrats to everyone who played Canadian Nats last weekend in Victoria.  I’m still out with my knee injury (the current diagnosis is a torn medial retinaculum) but it was exciting following everything online.  Congrats to Zephyr on reaching their goal of top-four in Canada and to my brother Dev who won bronze with Calgary’s Open team “The Ghosts”!

While everyone else was sweating on a field in Victoria I was relaxing next to the beach at Harrison Hot Springs.  This post though is from a backpacking trip to Stein Valley just before my knee injury over the May Long Weekend.  The Stein Valley is a great early season hike since it’s at a low elevation so that the snow clears out by the end of April.  Plus most of the hike is right along the river which means it’s hard to lose the trail (always a concern in the wild, wild BC West).    Unfortunately I’m missing quite a few photos since Rod’s camera met an untimely end.  Only about an hour from our car heading back out we stopped for a break near some steep cliffs and the camera went tumbling down.   That's our offering to the river gods I suppose.

The trail starts a little ways beyond Lytton, but to get there you have to take a ferry across.  It’s tiny with a maximum load of only two cars.  We had to wait awhile for our turn, but it was pretty neat.  It’s a “reaction ferry” which is propelled entirely by the river by angling the rudders into the current.  The overhead cable guides the ferry to the other side.  It’s environmentally friendly operating on just a little man-power to turn the rudders  (there’s an emergency motor which is rarely used) !   We were a bit worried as to high water levels since the spring melt can put it out of commission, but luckily we missed it by about a week.

The provincial park is a rare success story in conservation -  there was a plan in the 80s to log the valley, but there were enough protests raising awareness and public support  that a park was created in 1995.  A strong argument was that it was the last untouched watershed in the southern Coast Mountains.

Entrance to the park through the valley:

Stryen Creek bridge close to the start of the trail:

The park is run jointly between BC Parks and the Lytton First Nation since the Stein Valley has been used for centuries by aboriginals for spiritual purposes.  There are pictographs and petroglyphs, although you have to look closely to find them.  (FYI I didn't know this before but pictographs are paintings, done almost exclusively in red ochre, while petroglyphs are carvings).

Ponderosa pine trees forming a tree memorial for members of the Lytton band, a number of whom helped protect the Stein from development.

I think I’m going to introduce “thar” into my vocabulary. 

This park is also great because there are campsites every 3-4 km.  We decided to push on and go 15 km to Suspension Bridge Camp to escape the crowds and multiple boy scout/girl guide groups.   To get there we went past the “Devil’s Staircase”; this was the most elevation we got on the trail, which wasn’t that bad except that I had Beck’s “Devil’s Haircut” song stuck in my head the entire way up. 

The eponymous suspension bridge of “Suspension Bridge Camp”:

Vancouver’s Clubtread hiking website says of Suspension Bridge Camp “Lots of camping room here, but room for only about 5-6 tents *perfectly* level.”  Ha!  We were the second group of people to arrive.  Not wanting to crowd the first tent and not knowing how many were still to come, we tried to give the first guy some privacy but ended setting up on quite the slope.  I woke up about ten times each night having slid all the way down to the bottom of the tent. 

We settled into camp, enjoying the access to fresh water to soak our feet after 15 km of pounding.  The elevation gain wasn’t much (~300 m), but 15 km is still a long way with full packs!  Rod and I’s packs are snuggling after a long day.

 JS cooked us a delicious meal with lamb sausage, chickpeas and roasted vegetable curry.  We thought we were being a bit ridiculous dragging several litres of wine up the trail to enjoy with dinner, but we were put to shame by a crazy group in their mid-thirties who had whole vegetables (onions, leeks, dill, etc.), a cutting board, beer, a pineapple  (!?) and eggs.   In the morning while they were cooking up their eggs we saw a guy add a splash of amber liquid to the pan.  Olive oil we guessed?  “Whisky” was the reply. These guys had EVERYTHING, except for one member of their crew who did the whole hike in crocs and somehow forgot to pack pants (it was pretty chilly in the evening and you feel bad seeing someone wrap shirts around their knees). 

An amicable guy also brought his mandolin entertaining us all with everything from Acadian folk songs to a cover of Snoop Dogg’s “Gin and Juice” (which I enjoyed much more than the original).  One woman had her own indestructible bear cache barrel which also doubled as a drum for musical accompaniment.   All in all a fun group of hard-core foodies.  

The next day we hiked another ~15 km (7.5 km in and back) to check out some more of the trail.  The trail keeps going another 30 km or so, but we weren’t super impressed beyond the Suspension Bridge; it was pretty much just bushwacking and mosquitoes, although there were some beautiful wild flowers and more glimpses of the river:

Victorious after surviving the Stein Valley!  Let me know if you have any other recommendations for backpacking trails in BC!