Last week was a series of vet visits while getting Leia’s health issues back under control (she’s OK, just old dog stuff) and this week was a mix of long working hours, recovery from last week, and poor sleep due to Leia needing to go out to pee more often now with the new meds. Here she is zonked out having a good sleep in a weird position:
Oh, I almost forgot another reason we were feeling it this week, the time change where we lost an hour. That’s a big contributor and it was an unforgiving week to have it as I had two days with early meetings to boot. However it does mean later sunsets and the photo below was taken after 7pm.
We also had snow (nothing that stuck at sea level though) and lots of new buds and blooms to watch come to life.
About all I managed for a bike ride was this short one to the PNE ponds not far from home. Now that I’ve started tracking what birds I’ve seen (and making note of where to find the local ones I haven’t), I was paying attention while here and heard a couple that I’ve been after: varied thrush and brown creeper. I heard them both repeatedly but never saw them, so nothing added to my tally this day.
Today’s ride was a plan with pals Dave and Rob with two goals in mind: visit the site of the first skate park in Canada (maybe North America?) and also to find the hidden statue a few blocks away I had been tipped off by an Instagram follower.
Both were exceptionally anti-climatic.
I was meeting said friends at noon, but decided to take the long way there since I was ready to roll at 10:30. I ended up having to push much harder than I planned to because of brutal headwinds; we had heavy westerly winds all day. I stopped at the shipyards for this photo:
Below is where the skate park was. It was built in the ’70s, when skating was surf-inspired, so it didn’t resemble a modern skate park, instead being a concrete stream of sorts, with sloped sides that could be surfed from top to bottom. This video is what inspired our visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4lrt99GsMI
Alas, there isn’t much to see currently, no visible indication.
I’ve been working on a fresh version of my Burnaby route dubbed the Burnabop XL; the 2025 version was 76 km long but I’ve whittled it down to 56 km now – though it’s mostly the easier sections that have been removed, so it’s hardly any quicker to ride. The new starting location (complete with a bathroom!) is Confederation Park, specifically this spot:
Within the first kilometre there are multiple grass surfing opportunities.
Towards the end of the 2025 version route is Beecher Creek, which is such a gem of the Brentwood area. The problem was, being late in the course, a lot of people skipped it to head home. So in the 2026 version, I’ve placed Beecher right near the start.
I wasn’t riding the full course today but I wanted to try out the first 10 or so km to see how natural the connections felt. I was familiar with it all but hadn’t ridden it exactly this way before. It was pretty decent! It’s somewhat awkward to connect the best bits around town but this will do.
I skipped the south section due to time (and energy) constraints and headed over to the powerline section – a pretty silly part of the route where it just literally follows under the powerlines diagonally across a stretch of Burnaby. There is a hint of a path in spots, other parts are just riding on grass.
The pre-ride came in handy as there was a short stretch of powerline path that also coincided with an off-leash area; I’ve ridden it a few times and never seen a dog but today it was pretty packed with large-breed dogs that did not like bicycles, so I’ve since re-routed to avoid this spot. The two photos below are from before and after that spot.
The next section is Robert Burnaby and George Derby parks respectively; the former is home to the biggest black cottonwoods I’ve seen. Below is the second largest here that I know of. This is a favourite stretch of semi-urban trail for me; it traces around a couple big ravines and serves as a reminder of what the terrain was like before we flattened it all around here.
In the 2025 route there was a somewhat awkward section of sidewalk between the aforementioned forest and the next section, an old interurban rail bed. I’ve “solved” this by including a 200m section of trail I previously felt was unreasonable to include; it’s overgrown and has several creek crossing with steep and greasy embankments either side. I brought along my shears and folding saw and did a bunch of trimming of the prickly shrubs that line much of the trail but it will need more work and routine maintenance.
After the course work I stopped by Dageraad for a burger and beer, then took the north trail home. I stopped by this tree fort which has an impressive amount of hard work put into it, including a staircase that feels rock solid.
All in all it was 50km and about 800m elevation for the day.
Another evening ride in the last week of Standard Time here. This time I popped over the bridge to Harbourview Park, a linear waterfront park near the Second Narrows bridge. It’s 15 km round trip, so a good length for an after-work ride. The blossom trees are waking up:
This is a good sunset spot but today was grey and it just kind of slowly got dimmer. This is also an off-leash dog park, so I got to say hi to a few puppers as well.
This is it, the last week before Daylight Savings kicks in. To make it sweeter still, our province announced that this will be the last time we have a time change, and we’re sticking with Daylight Savings – so never again will the sun set before 5pm here!
I rode out to this pier near Railtown, about 5 km from home, for a beer. With both Rivs torn apart at the moment, the choice to take the Twenty was pretty easy.
I went out for the sunset but it was the moonrise that stole the show. The moon was full and bright, and appeared huge while it hung near the horizon – the photo was the best I could do with my phone camera, but appeared twice as big in real life.
I’ve been telling people Leia is 13 years old for almost two months now, but today it’s officially true. As we’ve been doing for a bunch of years now, Aimée made dog cake (in cupcake form this time) and we went to Pandora park and invited dog friends out to join. About a dozen folks were able to make it out, helped by the great weather this day.
We were at the park from 11am to 1pm for the birthday celebration, but with the sun still high in the sky I decided to ride the Evasion out to Deer Lake – my first ride of any substance in two weeks. In that time the early bloomers have started to put on a show and remind us that spring is not far off now!
I spotted this bridge from the road, one I hadn’t seen before, so naturally I had to ride over it – and nearly endo’d off the end not realizing the second “step” was about 18″ tall! This does not seem like a compliant bridge…
My favourite tree to sit in was unavailable at Deer Lake due to the influx of park goers brought in with the warm air and sunshine. Can’t complain. I found another spot which was also quite lovely.
The grasslands around the lake are somewhat unique in this area these days, though I imagine this would have been a more common scene before we developed just about the whole land mass. The land was so beautiful before we got our hands on it, and I will cherish what still remains.
I spotted this little hummingbird in a blooming tree while exploring a dead-end fence line trail. The trail shown below is a little hidden gem in Burnaby that I always like to work into my loop.
I couldn’t join this edition of parkbagging on my bike, but the finish park was only three blocks from my place so I walked over with the dogs. Leia has been having some health stuff but is still spry and enjoys being outside.
This weekend I decided I’d finally do a full tear-down and rebuild on the two Rivendells in my possession. The primary reason for going right down to a frame was actually so I could weigh them – I’ve always been curious. The Hillborne frame was 2144g while the fork was 860g, which is really quite light. The Bombadil on the other hand, a rather stout 2826g for the frame but a respectable 940g for the fork. Not a huge surprise.
The differential was bigger than I expected though and it helped solidify my plan to rebuild the Hillborne into the sporty drop bar bike again, after the Bombadil’s been filling this role for almost a year now. The Bombadil will resume “mule bike” duties with the pannier rack and the upright KT bar and become my commuter once again.
The high proportion of bird photos recently are more to do with me being sick and unable to go for proper rides than the increased interest in birding, though the latter is certainly a factor as well. In order to prevent my remarkably long activity streak on Strava from lapsing (306 weeks! Only missed a week during lockdown!) I drove down to a large park along the Fraser River, where I could bike around slowly on the flat pathways. There are also a lot of birds here, and as I realized today, a lot of birders too. I guess I never noticed them before.
And onto the bird photos! Some new ones for me – first downy woodpecker, first white-crowned sparrow, first nuthatch too. I am still very much a newbie but I’ve noticed my ability to talk to a birder I come across and sound like I sort of know what I’m talking about is growing rapidly. I’m looking forward to springtime even more now with this newfound hobby; I already appreciate a lot about spring, now I’ve got one more aspect to enjoy.
I’m currently too under the weather to ride, so instead I went for a walk around Maplewood Flats in North Vancouver with my old DSLR and photographed some birds. As you come into the nature preserve, there are these scale models of the now-gone squatter shacks that used to exist along the mudflats. Pretty cute.
I mostly saw pretty ordinary birds, as expected. Lots of black-capped chickadees and spotted Towhees, as well as song sparrows. A couple eagles, and then the one bit of proper excitement was this pileated woodpecker which I heard at first, waited a few minutes, and then it swooped in and landed right by where I was standing. It then moved over to another dead tree even closer to me. They’re pretty big! Anyway, I guess I’m a birder now. I would have rather gone on a bike ride, but this was good too.
After a reasonably challenging ride yesterday, I managed to get out for a bit bigger one today (albeit flatter) to see off the Patullo bridge, whose decommissioning work begins in two days. A few friends were also interested so we met there, and apparently many others had the same idea – it was packed! They had a big line to get onto the bridge deck even, though that fell apart after a while (and I’ll admit I challenged it and ended up just cutting in). I think they vastly underestimated how many people would want to walk along a bridge deck in the sunshine on Sunday, knowing its imminent demise.
On the way there I took a bit of a meandering route so I could visit a few spots I haven’t been in a while. First was Kaymar Creek, pictured below. It’s a fairly short but sweet ravine, tucked away in a bit of a sneaky spot so few know about it – making it feel all the more special.
I also came across a flock of very friendly red-winged blackbirds, which for people out east is no big deal, but here they’re somewhat less common and I’d never managed to get up close to them before. Happy to check that off the list.
From there I wanted to check on a construction closure in Fraser Foreshore because it was a part of my Burnabop XL route but has been inaccessible for the past year and a bit. Turns out it’s going to be a while yet unfortunately.. large scale utility work going in. Guess I’ll need to plan the route accordingly – shame, this connection was rather wonderful.
A little while later we arrived at the bridge .. and I was floored by the crowds. I feel a little bit naïve that I was surprised – of course, on a sunny Sunday, the second-to-last day that it’s possible to walk the newly closed-to-cars bridge, it’s going to be popular. I guess word got out!
No photos of particular interest for the 25 kms from here to home, but once home I made a quick change to drive over to Burnaby Lake for a dog walk outing with my Mrs. Managed to fit in a ~60 min walk before it got too dark; an action-packed day for me.
