Today seemed like an excellent day for a hike and, since we have some spectacular hiking just steps from our front door….”where” was a no-brainer.
Kirk mapped out a route using part of the Baden Powell Trail, part of the Trans Canada Trail, the Brothers Creek Loop Trail, and part of the Brothers Creek Fire Road Trails.
On the app, it didn’t look too bad, 13km, but a good chunk of it was dead straight.
Dead straight doesn’t mean easy, and I need to teach Kirk to look at map contours or at least graph the elevations change over distance …”before” heading out.
In other words, it was not an easy hike and that “straight” bit? Yeah, some of that was practically straight UP.
But it was pretty, and there were next to no people, and the weather was perfect.
The first part of things was familiar and straightforward – a walk down into Capilano Canyon and across the Pipeline Bridge to the West Van side of the watershed. There were a fair number of people out and about in this section, some of them in questionable dress for walking in the woods. Like the woman in the pretty knee length black dress wearing a white purse over her shoulder and a pretty pair of slingback leather sandals with a low heel.
Once across and out of Capilano Regional Park we hung a left onto a section of the Baden Powell Trail, a sign pointing the way and confirming our planned route.
Once into the deeper woods, the trails become a little more challenging to discern and it’s easy to see how people unfamiliar with being away from city limits can get themselves lost and in trouble. In many places the canopy is so thick that little sunlight hits the forest floor and, as a result, there is little to no undergrowth to identify clear paths. Everything can look like a reasonable path. And that’s why I’m always glad to see those trail markers tacked into the trees. The Baden Powell Trail markers are harder to see at a distance than the orange flagging squares, but they are there if you know what to look for and you keep your eyes open.
Lately we’ve been watching “The 100” on Netflix. One or two episodes in and it was so clearly apparent that the show was filmed around here. A quick search turned up that much of the filming is done on the North Shore and in Lynn Canyon, just to the east of where we stand. We half expected to see grounders come running through the forest towards us.
Along the way I noticed a plant that I’d never seen before, at first I thought it was a fungus because it was ghostly white, not a drop of chlorophyll. But something about it, although it looked like it had the texture of a mushroom, didn’t quite seem mushroom-like enough.
What did we do before smartphones?
A quick photo and a search in PlantSnap and I had my answer.
It turns out that they are not actually fungi, but a parasitic native plant called by a few names; ghost plant, ghost pipe, and Indian pipe among them. The species name is Monotropa uniflora. It is a fairly rare, pure white plant that turns black with age, native to the Pacific Northwest. The stems are fleshy and unbranched, with small, oval, colorless scales. They bear a single flower, to 1 in. long; a cylinder-shaped bell formed by 5 overlapping petals. They grow in humus in deep shaded conifer forests at low elevations.
They are also parasitic; it has short, stubby roots that contain fungi. And the fungi, extend in a web-like way through dead rotting leaves and connect up to the roots of conifers. The conifers provide sugar, which the fungi carry to the Indian Pipe plant. So it’s a parasite, but on fungi.
And they are pretty darned cool!
The next section, once we left the Baden Powell Trail, took us onto a stretch of the Trans Canada Trail. This was the straight bit. At first it seemed pleasant enough. The reason it was straight turned out to be that it ran along a single pole power line that created a narrow greenbelt between some spectacular West Vancouver mansions in the British Properties.
I’d say that we quietly passed unnoticed, but I am rarely quiet when I hike, I’m usually complaining bitterly at every hill…and when we emerged from one section and I looked ahead, I really just looked up, and up, and up. I think I muttered something along the lines of “You have GOT to be kidding me!”
But it’s like swimming…I mutter and whine and complain until I am in…and then you can’t get me out. Kirk asked if I wanted to turn around but I was invested now and we were more than halfway done the “in” portion, I can’t give in at that point.
So up we went, with me cursing and grumbling with every scramble….. #upishard.
As we passed the last of the manymultimilliondollar homes and entered the section that took us into the deep forest we could hear someone coming down the trail. We stood aside and waited since the trail wasn’t really wide enough to pass easily, it was barely a goat trail at this point. A fellow popped out of the bush with his pack, his pole, his bear bell, and his SPOT hanging from his pack.
We definitely paused for a moment when we saw his kit. I’m not going to say that we are citiots, but there is definitely a sliding scale of preparedness for problems and we weren’t really at either end of it. Time to keep the eyes and ears peeled for forest creatures.
Eventually we turned off the goat trail and onto a new goat trail that zigzagged upwards and eventually deposited us onto a section of the Brother’s Creek Forestry Heritage Walk, though there were a few moments of confusion as we tried to figure out which was the trail we were looking for went. Two sides of the same post, two arrows, pointing different directions. A quick check of the mapping app and things were infinitely more clear and we were off onto the Brother’s Creek Fire Road….not much of a road now though.
Along that trail was a small post with a little blue square on it “Mill site 1912”. A few remains of the shingle mill site still exist, but if you didn’t know what you were looking at you’d just walk on by and hardly notice; a rectangle of concrete, a pile of rocks, a piece of cable used to lower logs from reaches high above.
It was humbling to look around at the trees and see the ghosts; the stumps of long logged massive cedars stand like monoliths between the thick and dense second (third?) growth trees. Kirk pointed at one and quipped that they reminded him of the Ents – the talking trees of J.R.R. Tolkien’s world – because they looked like they had faces. Someone had placed rocks in spaces on one, accentuating the resemblance.
Kirk asked me why they all had holes in them. I explained that, long before chainsaws were around, the monster trees were cut by hand. But the fellers had to get above the lowest sections, so they chipped out holes in the trunk and jammed planks (called springboards) into them as a foundation on which they could stand and either pull and push their side of the massive crosscut saws they used, or chip away with their axes.
The old forgotten giants….it made me a bit sad to think about what we humans destroy in the name of progress.
At the top of our loop we pulled up a log and enjoyed the peace and quiet of the forest while we ate our lunch. I noticed a spot of bright red up above the trail a bit and went to investigate. At first I thought it was a trail counter, but those aren’t usually a visually eye catching colour.
As I moved closer I thought it looked like a child’s toy fire truck…but wat on earth would that be doing in the middle of nowhere?
A geocache…. it was indeed a little firetruck, with a metal geocache box settled into the back of the truck, waiting for someone to find it and, make a note, and possibly both take and leave a trinket. We aren’t geocachers, so we left it alone and took only a photo.
From there, it was mostly downhill, though that isn’t always a good thing. In some sections we were walking down a creek and I made the observation that perhaps the trail actually has two names/interpretations. When dry…it is the Brother’s Creek Trail, and when wet, it’s just Brother’s Creek. Either was, covered in loose rock and ankle attacking roots.
Down was faster, but the knees were definitely wobbly at the bottom. The forest lower down is greener, with a carpet of moss and ferns. It feels lush and fresh; full of life and birdsong.
When we popped out back into the Capilano Regional Park at the top of the dam, we crossed over into Cleveland Park.
It was busy, and full, with hordes of people ….. it was a bit of an assault on the senses after 4 hours alone in a forest largely empty of people.
The final trek home involved sore feet and tired muscles….but the beer in the fridge kept us moving 🙂