All posts in category Nature

Land Cruise: 29-31 August

29-31 August 2025 – You’ve had the tease, and my friend Larry correctly guessed: I was about to start an epic VIA Rail adventure. Another friend Blane plaintively asked, “Why not farther east?” and the answer is: I would’ve if I could’ve.

  • Plan A (back in the dreaming stage, in January): coast to coast! Vcr-Tor; visit friends; then back on VIA for Tor-Montreal and on again Montreal-Halifax.
  • Plan B (after time with a patient VIA rep in Pacific Central Station, still January): coast to coast to coast!!! Hop off in Winnipeg for the side-jaunt Wpg-Churchill-return, which would put me on the shores of Hudson Bay; then carry on, as in Plan A.
  • Plan C (after searching train availability with that patient rep across three months): the reality plan. Not possible to book sleeper-cabin on all legs of any one trip. Time to choose — Arctic or Atlantic? Arctic wins.

These first days get me to Winnipeg: 2 days + 5 hours of travel, over 2,485 km.

Just look at it. This trip, as my friends & family already know, is not about visiting cities. It is about seeing again friends farther east, and — given the mode of transport — it is hugely about once again travelling through great chunks of this astounding land. The literal land. By train, which has so shaped this country, and which has featured in many of my own earlier travels in this country, various segments at various times.

I am hungry to see it again, to cherish my own memories, and honour the land. And to be reminded of its complexity, its variety — so easily forgotten or not known, as we live each in our own local world.

But! All of this belongs to all of us. Is part of all of us.

29 August – we pull out at 3 pm Pacific time; I’ll be asleep before we arrive in Kamloops, late at night.

Last bustle on the Pac Central platform…

a train’s eye view of the bridge across the Fraser River at New Westminster…

and then, as that first map shows you, we follow the Fraser north-east.

Into the mountains where, past Yale and close to Spuzzum, I notice not just the craggy heights, but the power lines that top them.

I think about that, too — the trinity of river/railroad/power lines, our historic and present pathways through the country, the ways we connect our small settlements of people across such vast sweeps of land.

Farther along again, fading light, well into the Fraser Canyon and a deceptively calm-looking stretch of the river far below.

Deceptive, because we are just short of Hell’s Gate, where an abrupt narrowing of the river creates churning white water.

And then… and then it’s dark, and I chat a bit with others…

and then I’m asleep. Somewhere in there, passengers come and go in Kamloops, and the train carries on.

30 August – I’m up by 7 am, in the dome car by 7:30. Mountains tower above us and all around.

We clatter along, on through Jasper National Park, the train lines clinging to the cliffs, power lines ditto, with tunnels where necessary.

None of this stunning feat of engineering deletes (or even dilutes) the human cost involved — lives lost not only through the honest limitations of 19th-c safety measures, but also through sheer disdain for some of the people living those lives. (Chinese workers, for e.g., were primarily the explosive crews.) We must acknowledge all that. We can also acknowledge the achievement as well. Life is both/and, not either/or. (In other words, cancel nothing, Acknowledge it all.)

This is a long train — still the full 21 cars of high season.

Two engines, baggage car, crew car, some other utility car whose title I forget, and car after car of all of us passengers: mostly older, but not all; predominantly Canadian and (despite everything) American, but not all, and with a major presence of Aussies; train nerds among us; cruise-goers ditto, ticking their lists of Been There, Done That; and a whole range of people with other motives, from family reunions to curiosity to hikers giving their legs a break to Europeans with some Canadian connection offering themselves a nostalgic return.

We pull into Jasper…

and how telling it is that I’m showing you the rail yard, not a picture-postcard view of the town! (Maybe I’m becoming a train nerd myself…)

With 45 minutes free time in town, we scatter. I get away from the tourist-trap main streets as quickly as I can, walk a loop in-behind, stop to admire a cougar (or something) never seen in the wild…

and climb back on board.

And then, and then, after a while, we’re in Alberta. The land changes, and the uses of the land we can see from our train track also change.

Cattle!

And wheat! And nodding donkeys!

That is, the pump jacks that bring crude oil to the surface, whose rhythmic up-and-down inspired the nickname. You see them tucked into all kinds of locations. (I remember, when new to the west, being stunned to see some within the grounds of the Calgary airport — well away from runways, you understand.)

Sunset from the dome car, nearing Stony Plain…

and deep night by the time we pull into Edmonton.

Which is all I know about 30 August.

31 August – When I awake, we’re just leaving Saskatoon. (On to that second map, ‘way up above.)

Again, the changing land.

And, oh, the big sky.

Alberta carries on about being big-sky country but, old Alberta girl that I am, I have to confess that for me that sky is at its most glorious across the prairies. (The prairie landscape, period, is glorious. I had forgotten its beauty.)

Right. Back to the sky.

Straight up through the dome…

over harvested fields, near Kelliher…

over a bison ranch, near St-Denis…

over the Young (near Watrous) grain elevator (possibly superseded by now, but its architecture iconic and worth our attention)…

even over a potash mine (this one near Yarbo).

Herewith a nerdy aside about potash. Canada is the world’s largest producer and exporter of potash (some 33% of total world production), and all 11 of our active mines are in Saskatchewan. Yes, there is a lot more to this province than wheat.

And that’s all I can show you for 31 August.

I feel mildly, but only mildly, apologetic. I also spend time talking to people, and eating (very well), and just looking, endlessly looking, out across the land. In fact, maybe I should own up to reverse pride in the fact that, for long stretches of time, I put down the damn camera and just fall into the land.

There is one more fact of note: somewhat after 9 pm Central Time, we pull into Winnipeg, and I get off the train.

For a changing-gears day and a half in Winnipeg. Before the next leg of the train trip.

4 Comments
by icelandpenny on 1 September 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Nature, photography, Travel
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Posted by icelandpenny on 1 September 2025

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Toes to the Waves

26 August 2025 – I’m not usually right smack at water’s edge. But today, I am offered easy access to wild shoreline — just one of the Tatlow/Volunteer Parks enhancements, along with “daylighting” a long-buried creek. Who could resist?

First I walk down these steps…

where, second, I draw inspiration from that lone woman in white, ‘way out in front of me.

I give thanks for my hiking poles and waterproof boots, and follow her example.

Now. Statement of principle. I firmly believe that each place has its own beauty. You just have to be willing to stop making comparisons, open your eyes and mind to what is right in front of you, and rejoice in it. BC is no more beautiful than anywhere else.

But today I happen to be here, not anywhere else. I am in the Vancouver neighbourhood of Point Grey, on the south shore of Burrard Inlet, looking north across English Bay (with its usual complement of freighters) to the slopes of West Vancouver over there on the North Shore.

And it is just terrific! Bright, fresh, with enough breeze to ease the heat and send wave upon wave rolling in to tap my toes.

I look west…

and then blink, and look more closely, tracking my gaze past that final arrow of gravel to a black squiggle in the water beyond. (Spread the image; follow my example.) See? A Great Blue Heron. For once, life is easy. He just opens his beak in each breaking wave, and swallows what it offers him.

I look east…

and this time my gaze takes in the green sweep of Stanley Park, the final knob of the City of Vancouver this side of the North Shore, and, to its right, the towers of the City’s downtown cluster. I’ll be walking east, from here to Kitsilano Beach Park.

So many shades, so many textures…

and the swooping arc of an eagle, passing by.

I break my water’s-edge fixation long enough to veer inland for a bit, drawn by the red fence, its signage thanking us for our patience, and the weathered-jeans-and-T-shirt guy on the inside of the fence, who meets my smiling curiosity with a smile of his own.

He looks like a navvy, he’s inside the fence, I ask if he’s working on the project. He replies, with no particular inflection, that it’s his project, he’s the homeowner — and points upwards, to the house atop the cliff. Being vaguely aware of real estate prices around here, I realize that these workman’s jeans and hands are attached to serious money.

I ask the basic “What are you doing?” and, seeing I’m genuinely interested, he explains. It’s all about the instability of these Point Grey cliffs, their unconsolidated Quadra Sands laid down during the Fraser Glaciation (29,000 to 11,500 years ago) and eroding ever since.

This bit of surface remediation is just the current example of his on-going battle — financed by him, but every step City-approved and with City authorities — to protect the environment and in the process protect his home. An early step was to excavate on the land side of his property behind the cliff face, and stabilize the cliff, invisibly, with I-forget-how-many-zillion tons of concrete. More recently, again with City approval and monitoring, he paid to have several mounds of large local rock arranged in natural patterns on this section of the beach, their job being to break up wave action and mitigate impact on the cliffs. “Last week,” he says, his eyes crinkling with delight, “a Fisheries inspector told me that two different species of mussel are now colonizing the rocks!”

I express my admiration with a tease: “You could’ve taken your great gobs of money and lived large in all the casinos of Europe. Instead… what do you do? You bury your money, literally, in the ground.” He grins, then shrugs a kind of “Yeah-but” shrug. “You have to do what you can. To help. This is what I can do.”

I walk back down to the water impressed, a happy day made even happier.

Bands of colour, look at them: all the greys of the gravel at my feet, green seaweed just beyond, butterscotch sand beyond that, then blue water, white curls of wave, red among those distant freighters…

and, closer to shore here on the right, red also in the Kitsilano Yacht Club dinghies (or whatever they are) — a whole line of them, each full of kiddies being taught boating skills, whose excited voices carry on the wind.

A mysterious imprint in a rock, surely that can’t be natural?

and a blaze of colours, certainly not natural but also not mysterious, on the stones that line the entrance to a path up from the beach.

The stone wall is official; the colours, anonymous and unauthorized. I sidestep both the path and the bronzing bodies beneath it, and return to water’s edge.

But eventually, though water’s edge continues, there’s no longer any way to follow it.

I’ve reached the Kitsilano Yacht Club, just this side of Kitsilano Beach Park. My choice now is to swim around, or scramble up.

Blue Shorts Guy is about to scramble up his section of rock mound; I then scramble up mine. (Less elegantly than BSG, who does it all upright. My scramble involves hands and knees. But it works!)

Suddenly, I’m back in the urban world.

With its fences and notices and CCTV. It is discombobulating.

So much so that, as I walk south on Arbutus Street, this notice tacked to an old wooden pole seems no stranger than anything else.

I too am waiting for coffee — but, unlike Z, the remedy is in my own hands.

Just as soon as the bus drops me back home.

5 Comments
by icelandpenny on 25 August 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, City, Nature, photography, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 25 August 2025

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Discoveries

22 August 2025 – I mean to walk right through Dude Chilling Park, en route farther east. Instead, I stop to admire a brand-new hopscotch chalked into the park’s northern pathway.

Squares a bit on the mingy side, true, but lots of them. And so carefully executed. With European cross-strokes for the 1s and 7s. And the flourish of two colours, not one.

Instead of walking on, I settle myself on the bench just beyond…

curious to see if anyone yields to the temptation, and starts to hop.

First up, a very young toddler and her mum. The child is clearly new to the act of walking, let alone leaping around. She does not attempt to hop. She stops, frowns slightly at this unknown design, and then, intuitively, gets the idea.

Very slowly, very carefully, she obeys the visual clues: just one foot here, but both feet there. And then one, and then two… Until she loses patience, that is, and a laughing mother carries her off.

Next up, by complete contrast, a geezer. (Being one myself, I can say that.) He also stops, contemplates. Then, with a grin, he tucks his cane under one arm and starts to hop.

Hippity-hop! And again!

Until… whoops. A wobble corrected, a tumble averted, and his cane is prudently back in use.

He grins at me, amused. “Maybe I’m a little old for this.”

My mind flashes to a particular cartoon in Searle’s Cats (Ronald Searle, Dobson Books Ltd., 1967)…

and its caption: “Acrobatic cat discovering quite unexpectedly that it is too old for the game.”

I grin right back at him.

We are complicit, he and I — fellow adventurers in this demanding but rewarding late stage of life.

5 Comments
by icelandpenny on 22 August 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in City, City Walks, Nature, photography, Uncategorized, Vancouver
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Posted by icelandpenny on 22 August 2025

https://icelandpenny.com/2025/08/22/discoveries/

Atmospheric River

15 August 2025 – Here we sit, In mid-River.

There’s the Very Big Picture, literally picture, of the River streaming across western North America…

and the Local Big Picture, with its Rainfall Warning & stats…

and its 6-day forecast.

But there’s also the Local Small Picture.

It consists of the literal pictures right here on your balcony, the ones that translate stats & science into nature’s own response, in your personal here-and now.

The horizontal/vertical interplay between your gleaming balcony deck and the appearance of that deck though your rain-splattered glass door…

and the vertical-beyond-vertical of the mist-shrouded city block immediately north of your balcony, further blurred by your glass balcony wall.

There is also — as you step into the rain, to explore — the Balcony Small Picture.

Literally at your feet.

Your Autumn Fern, side view, each frond hung with droplets…

that same Autumn Fern, top view, every shade now moisture-rich…

and the neighbouring Heuchera, always its showy best when droplets glitter on those big fat leaves.

There’s even the Red-winged blackbird and the Dragonfly.

Eastern transplants like yourself, they are forever resident on the vintage garden screen that first looked out across the Bay of Quinte to Prince Edward County in south-eastern Ontario, and now stands guard over East Vancouver, looking north across Burrard Inlet to the mountains.

Fronds arch; droplets gleam; clouds explore the shifting dimensions of grey.

And bird/dragonfly/bullrushes — though made of metal — oh yes, they also dance the rhythms of this great River.

3 Comments
by icelandpenny on 15 August 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in City, Nature, photography, Vancouver
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Posted by icelandpenny on 15 August 2025

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Snagged

10 August 2025 – Seven moments, over the past few days, that snagged my attention. If these images snag you as well, I’m glad, and thank you. But here’s the rabbit hole: what now snags my attention is the phenomenon of attention-snagging. Of engagement. And the fact that your reason for lingering with any one of these images will be different from my own, and equally valid.

For the image is just the starting point, isn’t it? Each of us makes our own journey, after that. (And never the same journey twice.)

Saying this already has me on a journey.

  • Memory of Harold Town, at a reception for a 1960s display of his art in the Glendon College Junior Common Room, being asked the meaning of one of his paintings. “I just paint it,” he shrugged. “The meaning is up to you.”
  • Memory of Will Gompertz’ observation, in his 2013 book about 150 years of modern art (What Are You Looking At?), that one of the many factors comprising “art” is the engagement between the object and the viewer.
  • Memories of my own frequent observation, back in the day, when addressing a J-school class or mentoring a neophyte writer, that topic and focus are two separate things. (“Banff National Park,” for example, is a topic; “wildlife corridors” is one possible focus within that topic.)

Enough! On with the images. And on with our journeys, mine and yours.

Downtown construction (Main & East Broadway)

I’m snagged by one detail: the muddy power shovel. I remember my dad, during a family 1950s drive holiday in Cape Breton, stopping the car to photograph a steam shovel (as they still were) being used to widen and stabilize the road. His company made that shovel! I was a very little girl, properly in awe both of her daddy and of that huge piece of machinery.

Urban playground (Emery Barnes Park)

When I was a kid, we had concrete underfoot. Now little feet (and my own) bounce gently on a more forgiving surface. Finally! A use for all those discarded car tires.

Evening reflections (Burrard St. south of West Pender)

The snag is less visual than aural — the echo of baroque music. Christ Church Cathedral is just up the hill, a regular venue for Early Music Vancouver concerts. My post-concert walk is back down the hill, with this sparkling visual one more sensory delight, along with everything else I have just experienced.

Urban park contrasts (a Stanley Park pond, looking out to West Georgia)

The bull rushes flip me back to Grenadier Pond in Toronto’s High Park; the larger dance of nature and city reminds me of ravine walks in that city, with nature Down Here and urban life visible Up Above.

Waterfront (Devonian Harbour Park)

I could see heat-parched grass, or bobbing boats, or mountains beyond, or even (admittedly just out of frame) the helpful tourist-info kiosk. Instead, I fixate on the split-rail fence — “snake fence,” we called it, an everyday staple of rural Ontario-Quebec landscapes in my childhood, not the conscious design choice that it has now become.

Memorial name-walls (Komagata Maru memorial, Harbour Green Park)

The wall honours the 376 British citizens aboard this Japanese vessel, which was denied entry in a 1914 stand-off that lasted two months (the people being fed solely by private initiative) before the ship, under duress, returned to its Kolkata (“Calcutta”) starting point. The problem, you understand, was not that the people were British citizens; the problem was that they were also South Asian.

I honour the memorial, but my own engagement is elsewhere. I remember the 1982 unveiling of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, which arguably established the tradition of naming names as the most powerful way to acknowledge the importance of every individual. My memories include AIDS walls, Toronto & Vancouver; Ireland Park, waterfront Toronto, with its few known names of the 38,000 famine refugees who arrived during the summer of 1847 (when the city’s population was only 20,000); and the 2013 presentation at the AGO of Ai Wei Wei’s powerful memorial to the victims of the Sichuan earthquake, with members of Toronto’s Chinese community reading aloud, in groups of ten, every single name.

All those memories come later. As I stand at the Komagata Maru wall, I flash to the wall in Humber Bay Park East in Toronto. It honours the 329 people who, in 1985, boarded Air India flight 182 in Toronto but never reached Delhi. Over Ireland, a terrorist bomb hidden in the luggage blew the plane apart.

I remember standing there, some time in the early 2010s, aware of the intensity of the man standing next to me. His finger hovered mid-air as his eyes scanned the lines of names. Then his finger landed on the name that his eyes had sought. He patted the name, sighed. He turned to me. He just had to say it aloud, to someone. “We worked together. Such a great guy. He didn’t really want to go, but it was a big family wedding, you know? His wife and daughters, they were so excited…”

Windsock (Vancouver Harbour Flight Centre, Coal Harbour)

Oh my, all those years. From CUSO volunteer in the Peruvian high jungle through Oxfam & other NGO travels and then time among our own northern hamlets. All those sturdy little aircraft, all those airstrips, all that varied terrain. All those people. All that they taught me.

I tap my heart, and walk on.

4 Comments
by icelandpenny on 10 August 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in City, City Walks, Nature, photography, Toronto, Vancouver
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Posted by icelandpenny on 10 August 2025

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Rail Yard. And Other Invisibles. (And Visibles.)

31 July 2025 – I’m on the N/E corner of Quebec St. and East 2nd Ave., and I read the little plaque at my feet.

Really??? I say — but very quietly, to myself. (No point startling others.)

Look up & I’ll see a rail yard? Or an elk? or a forest? or a convoy of Canada geese?

Pfft!!! (My genteel raspberry is also very quietly expressed, to myself.)

Rail yard is historic fact right here at False Creek, not current reality. The first CPR railway station opened in Vancouver in 1887, but the railway-related industrial era boomed after the World War I project to fill in the tidal flats of False Creek, from Main St. on east to Clark Drive, to provide a site for two new railway terminals and associated rail yards. Various changes along False Creek since then, most recently the transformation to parkland, Seawall and residential/knowledge industry occupation, triggered first by Expo 86 and then the 2010 Winter Olympics.

So, no, I am not going to see a rail yard from this street corner, no matter where I look. But I don’t care! I am all for looking, while I walk, not for stomping along in a trance. I am perfectly happy to be reminded to swivel my head and pay attention.

I start swivelling.

Look Up, East: the MEC building, a 2020 arrival in this historic neighbourhood…

and once again (spring 2025) back in Canadian ownership, though no longer a cooperative.

Look Up, West: an even newer new-build.

Look Sideways, East: the eco-conscious alley behind MEC, with watercourse and plantings to attract insects and bees.

Look Sideways, West: the alley behind that new-build, with an historic reference right there at the corner.

Namely, one of the City’s remaining H-frame hydro poles.

Look Down-Along, North: this block’s stretch of bioswale…

which “collects and cleans the rainwater that fall on Quebec Street.”

Look Straight-Across, West: tail end of a straggly crocodile of kiddies (yellow T-shirts) plus their volunteer monitors (green T-shirts)…

crossing Quebec and hurrying to catch up with the croc’s main body, all those children already walking on north along Quebec’s west side.

I have to wait for the next light. After that I’m following in their somewhat distant footsteps, not sure where they’re headed but with my own Best Guess in mind. (Science World, I think to myself.)

Sure enough!

Like them, I turn west on Switchmen St. — a necessary detour while the end bit of Seawall is under repairs — and, from my vantage point at Pullman Porter, watch all those yellow & green T’s double ’round the parking lot & veer back east toward the geodesic dome of Science World. (An aside to you: you have noted these further railway tributes? Of course you have.)

I am charmed by the sight — by my knowledge of how much fun the children will have, and by my respect for all the organizations and all the volunteer support that collectively make these vacation-time excursions both possible and safe. (Flashback memory: the impish YMCA volunteer in Toronto, who explained that when they took 10 kids out, they were expected to bring 10 kids back. “Preferably,” she solemnly added, “the same ten.”)

I head on west. Bye-bye, kiddies.

I am still sufficiently Paying Attention to my surroundings, to notice the fresh-fruit stand near Olympic Village Plaza. I buy strawberries, my fingers guided by the young attendant to the boxes just trucked in this very morning from a farm in the Abbotsford area.

The day is warming up.

I find a shady bench in Hinge Park, and allow myself one strawberry. Just one.

It was…

really, really good! I hustle back home with the rest.

3 Comments
by icelandpenny on 31 July 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, City Walks, Nature, photography, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 31 July 2025

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That Nice Mr. H

21 July 2025 – Busy morning, the day is clipping along, but surely there’s time for a short afternoon walk? I think False Creek (yet again), and then try to freshen the idea with a new combination of component parts.

Cranky Self objects: “I’ve already done all that!” Philosophic Self saves the day, quotes that nice Mr. Heraclitus: “You cannot step in the same river twice.”

Albeit by attribution, and much translated and much paraphrased, but the idea is clear. Everything (you included) is always all new, so go get it.

I haul out my much-creased False Creek map, and make a sort-of plan.

Walk down to The Village ferry dock (south-east end of False Creek, by Olympic Village Square); ferry to David Lam Park dock; walk on west along this portion of Vancouver’s Seawall, on past George Wainborn Park; then up-over the Granville Street bridge; down-around Granville Loop Park… and whatever.

The day is so mid-summer!

Music festival in the City Centre Artist Lodge forecourt as I walk past; patio umbrellas shading crowds on down Quebec & Ontario streets; and here in Olympic Village Square as well…

keeping all these customers cool, as well as one lop-eared dog (front & centre).

Onto an Aquabus, which is surprisingly empty until we stop at Yaletown Dock and pick up an extended family of Brazilian tourists. As we pull away, the driver, for fee-setting purposes, turns his head to quiz them on destination and demographics.

“Round-trip to Granville Island, six adults, two seniors and one child,” says the matriarch. She’s prompt with the data, but loses the credit-card quick-draw contest with one of her sons. She plays to her audience with a “What-can-I-do?” gesture, and is rewarded with amused laughter.

I hop off at David Lam; they carry on to the tourist (& resident) attraction that we call an “island,” even though it isn’t, not quite.

I’m always amazed at the diversity of traffic on and in the water — everything from whopping private vessels in the marinas to ferries to kayaks/dragon boats/paddle-boards to wildlife — and nobody seems to hit anybody else.

Even when they’re a couple moving very slowly on an isolated little paddle-board.

I turn my attention landward.

Thistles old & new, backed by ripening blackberries…

which cause a passing teen to tell her boyfriend about the berry patch behind her house, when she was growing up. “They’re awfully bitter until they’re really ripe,” she warns him.

The Seawall, like False Creek, has a mixed-use culture. Pedestrians here; cyclists there. In between David Lam & George Wainborn parks, I also get a good look at the Granville Street bridge, up ahead.

Closer still, almost opposite Granville Island, a good look at Giants — the six concrete silos painted for the 2014-16 Vancouver Biennale by the Brazilian twins known as OSGEMEOS, and now a lasting icon in the Biennale’s Open Air Museum.

This north-facing façade in shadows, mid-afternoon, but compelling even so.

Once I’m almost beneath the bridge, my next challenge is to find my way onto it.

Please, you’re thinking, how hard can that be? Not impossible, I grant you, but it does involve discovering that the west-side pedestrian path is closed for repairs, and orienteering my way up-along Weedland…

aka Waiting-For-Development-Land, to find the east-side path.

Which I do.

So here I am, heading toward centre bridge. With an overhead view of Creek traffic and a different angle on Giant.

Almost directly overhead, a reminder that this is a working concrete facility, not just a mural backdrop.

Starting down the bridge’s southern slope, I look back. Now I can enjoy the Giant‘s sunny faces and the long eastern view of False Creek behind them.

Over land now, over the Granville Island Kids Market and playground, backing onto Alder Bay.

More orienteering required, to get myself off this bridge!

I place my faith in this zebra crossing over these lanes, then this path and down these steps, and yes! it works.

I’m in Granville Loop Park, with a waterfall sculpture that reminds us yet again that, all those centuries ago, Heraclitus got it right. An ever-constant “V” of water, created by ever-changing water molecules, in ever-flowing cascades from the two upper corners.

Across the kiddy play area, with the yellow Coyotes in Area sign to my right and tennis players straight ahead…

and down and around and out to the West 2nd bus stop…

where, from a shady bench, I look up at the bridge I have just crossed.

4 Comments
by icelandpenny on 21 July 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, City, City Walks, Nature, photography, street art, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 21 July 2025

https://icelandpenny.com/2025/07/21/that-nice-mr-h/

A Tree

13 July 2025 – I stand there on the sidewalk, having myself a Joyce Kilmer moment.

If you now find yourself chanting “I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree,” then you may be of my generation — someone who also grew up somewhere in North America and learned that poem in elementary school.

The 1913 language may now strike us as a bit over-heated. We’re more likely to respond to the approach taken by UBC Professor of Forest Ecology, Dr. Suzanne Simard. Her 2021 seminal work, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest (now published in 21 languages), has propelled us right to the frontier of work being done in the field of plant communication and intelligence.

Kilmer or Simard, it’s about respect for trees, each pursuing that respect with their own language and skills.

My respect today is visual — for the sheer beauty & majesty of this tree. The textures of the bark, the play of colours.

Wonderful details, up close.

Tiny golden leaves, caught in bark crevasses at the base of the trunk…

a sprig of new leaves, erupting mid-trunk…

spider webs! …

and the bark itself, needing no adornment.

Yet, there is one final adornment.

Of nature, but added by human hands.

9 Comments
by icelandpenny on 13 July 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in City Walks, Nature, photography, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 13 July 2025

https://icelandpenny.com/2025/07/13/a-tree/

“Thank You”

9 July 2025 – You already know I’m a great fan of Vancouver’s Green Streets Program, the pilot project with 15 volunteers that now numbers hundreds of volunteers city-wide, tending traffic-circle and street-corner gardens.

So I always notice them, as I pass — including, earlier today, the one in the traffic circle at St. George and East 10th.

But even I, doting as I may be, have to acknowledge that this one is pretty scruffy.

It’s definitely a work in progress. “Shaggy” is the kindest word I can offer for the state of the foliage.

On the other hand! There’s a metal table and two chairs, and flagstone pathways that invite pedestrians to step out of the city and enjoy a quiet moment in the garden.

The furniture is graceful, a pretty ceramic mug rests on the chequered table-top, and, look, flowers bloom in a ceramic plant pot hanging on the back of that directional sign.

Even so, I would not bother to show you any of this…

but for the words written on the back of the opposite directional sign.

“To the people who have been taking care of my traffic circle, Thank You. I’ve been too busy so far this year. Love your work!!! Hope to meet you”

Pretty terrific, eh?

5 Comments
by icelandpenny on 9 July 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in City, City Walks, Nature, photography, Vancouver
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Posted by icelandpenny on 9 July 2025

https://icelandpenny.com/2025/07/09/thank-you/

St. George & the ‘Hood

19 June 2025 – Forget the dragon. That is so 10 centuries ago! These days, St. George — or, anyway, our St. George — is all about urban/eco sustainability and livability.

I’m first bounced onto this theme by a graffito on a waste bin. One that I initially think disrespectful of the human origins of the slogan…

but then reconsider, as I look smack across the street.

I’m on East 7th, heading farther east, and I’m staring into the busy abundance of this community garden stretching on north to East 6th. All lives matter, yes? We humans and plants are woven into the same eco-system.

This little local garden is very much of this neighbourhood, with its neighbourly values. A place with low-rise homes, many of them vintage wooden structures; a place where a kicked-off toddler’s shoe…

is carefully displayed at sidewalk’s edge by some later passer-by, in the hopes it may yet be retrieved.

I drop down to East 6th, look north as I cross Guelph, think how much I like this human scale — but have no illusions it will last much longer. Let your eye travel down the row of modest bright-painted houses…

to that equally bright-painted construction crane down below. That’s the future, and increasingly the present.

But!

St. George is at work.

Well, the St. George Rainway. It’s been a long time coming, but now here it is, nearing completion — with its (and I quote} “green rainwater infrastructure features like rain gardens that incorporate plants, trees and soil to manage rainwater…”

I step up to the mini-plaza with its rock, its signage mounted on a plinth…

adorned with a Wood Sorrel cut-out…

and lots of information.

Go ahead — spread the image, track its elements; I’ll wait.

Together, we learn that the Rainway along St. George celebrates a Lost Creek, a tributary to False Creek that has long since been buried underground. (For that matter, this final eastern end of False Creek, into which the lost creek ran, no longer exists either.)

While you’re exploring that handy map, please note not just the Lost Creek, left-above “You are here,” but also China Creek on the far right, and E. Broadway (East Broadway), three streets to the south.

I admire the rain garden that parallels the sidewalk immediately to the south …

then cross East 6th to admire this sign in the rain garden running on north…

and feel more vindicated than ever in making my peace with the “Plant lives matter” graffito. “Thriving in diverse communities” sounds like the prescription for healthy life, period, whatever form of life we happen to be.

You’ll understand why, with that thought fresh in mind, I fall over laughing at the dumpster graffito I see immediately afterwards.

On I go, on to China Creek North Park. (See? That’s why I wanted you to locate it on the map.)

I am heartened, as I approach the edge of this large park, to see fresh new vine fencing woven into the woodlands periphery. (It had become very scruffy.)

At first, looking down the slope, the basin of the park appears generic and banal. Old fashioned, even.

All that mown grass. And baseball diamonds.

But then, as always, I reconsider. The top of the slope is lined with benches, and they are well used, in diverse ways. At the moment, for example, the bench on the left hosts Headset Guy, who in fact is reading a real, physical book…

while the bench on the right hosts Music Man, who strums his acoustic guitar so softly it is almost subliminal. A woman just out of frame is hunkered down, motionless & meditative, and the woman you can see walking past the benches is about to start down the winding path that snakes its way to the playground at the lower level.

And I am about to join her.

This park is another “Lost Creek” — or, more precisely, a Lost Watershed. Before this last bit of False Creek was filled in, a whole network of creeks tumbled through here to feed its waters. Once filled in, the area at one point became a garbage dump, but was subsequently rescued and turned into parkland.

The slope is now naturalized, and it is wonderfully, exuberantly, messy.

With signage to justify the mess.

At the bottom of the path, I peer down the final bit of slope, the bit with a slide and (here) a mesh climbing ladder…

and, down there at the very bottom-bottom, swings and a pirate’s ship and other kiddy delights.

All this diversity! Social plants, social humans, thriving in diversity.

Walking homeward, more happy plant/human interaction…

in this volunteer-managed street corner garden, part of the City’s Green Streets Program.

And then… a reminder that not everything is happy-happy.

That some current trends are jarring and disruptive, and will damage both humans and nature.

Taped to a tree on quiet, residential East 10th just west of St. George — with its fellow trees all around — a warning about the effects of the redevelopment now being pursued under the City’s Broadway Plan.

I may know more about the correct use of apostrophes (i.e., not to form noun plurals) than the author of this plea, but these tenants, in the adjoining notice…

teach me a new word. “Demoviction.” As in, the eviction of tenants from a building, so that it may be demolished, usually for redevelopment. A phenomenon integral to the Broadway Plan. And gaining pace.

I read a testimonial, also taped to the tree, the words of a woman who has been a tenant here for 22 years: “This affordable home allowed me to continue to raise my daughter here after my husband passed away. It provided a safe community and a stable, comfortable home.”

Right next door, the specific redevelopment being proposed: Rezone from Residential to Comprehensive Development category, and, on this street of two-storey homes, put up a 17-storey tower.

Hmm. Used to be, dragons breathed fire and wore scales. Now they may instead breathe rezoning, and clad themselves in 17 storeys.

9 Comments
by icelandpenny on 19 June 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, City, City Walks, Nature, photography, Uncategorized, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 19 June 2025

https://icelandpenny.com/2025/06/19/st-george-the-hood/

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