Redwood Park contains a replica of a tree house where the founders of the park once lived.

Tiny Redwood Park in Surrey rates high on the list of undiscovered gems in our best-selling 52 Best Day Trips from Vancouver. Here’s why, including an update on its innovative and universally-accessible  children’s playground.

ACCESS: Redwood Park lies 35 kilometres south of Vancouver. Follow Highway 99 south to the King George Highway (Exit 10) in Surrey. Go south on King George to 16th Avenue, east to 176th Street, then north to 20th Avenue and east one block to the park’s main entrance. Alternatively, enter at the trailhead and small parking area on the north side of 16th Avenue just east of 177th Street.

To reserve the tree house, contact the Surrey parks and recreation office, 604-501-5050.

For information on Hazelmere Organics, visit the company’s website or stop by their produce store on the west side of 184th Street just north of 16th Avenue beside Redwood Park.

A palpable peace hangs in the late autumn air.

With the fall harvest now all but complete, it’s time to reflect on the natural bounty that surrounds Metro Vancouver.

One such place to experience these offerings lies in South Surrey.

Even long-time residents  are still amazed to discover hidden corners of this semirural landscape.

Visitors will heartily agree with a quotation from Robert Louis Stevenson on one of the park’s interpretive markers.

“It’s not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim on men’s hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air, that emanation from old trees that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit,” declared the Scottish novelist and travel writer.

A century ago, twin brothers David and Peter Brown were given adjacent acreages by their father on the logged hillside above Hazelmere Valley, where they dwelled until 1958.

Over the years, the twins set about reforesting the slopes with 32 species of trees native to North America, Europe, and Asia.

Among the most successful was the giant sequoia, or coast redwood, from which the park takes its name.

Other evergreens, such as incense and blue Atlas cedars, also thrived and attained sizable proportions.

At the moment, chestnuts, maples, and elms are displaying the final touches of fall colour, mimicking the squashes in bordering fields cultivated by Hazelmere Organics.

One of Redwood Park’s recent additions has been a play space custom-designed for children with mobility challenges.

Surrey parks department operations manager Tim Neufeld told us that  over the past five years, the focus on Redwood Park has been to meet universal access standards.

“We’ve improved the trails with better grades and made accessible picnic shelters; we’re slowly evolving the park into a destination for those with special needs,” he said.

The Browns probably would have approved of the inventive playground as much as the replica of a tree house where they once lived and which Surrey rebuilt in the 1980s for use by school groups, Boy Scouts, and Girl Guides.

The bachelor brothers were driven to build a cabin in the boughs of a Douglas fir after fire destroyed two previous dwellings.

Neufeld said the cabin could see better utilization, and plans are underway to use it to stage interpretive programs highlighting the park’s heritage and arboretum.
Original Article
Text CR Louise Christie
Photo CR Louise Christie

Fraser Island’s attractions include the shipwreck of the luxury passenger liner S.S. Maheno.

ACCESS: Fraser Island lies 300 kilometres north of Brisbane on Queensland’s east coast. For details on day trips and extended island tours, visit www.fraserexplorertours.com, www.frasercoastholidays.info, and www.queenslandholidays.com.au. Daily ferry service to Fraser Island destinations, including Kingfisher Bay, departs from River Heads, Hervey Bay, and Wanggoolba Bay. For details, visit www.fraserislandbarges.com.au/.

Crikey!

Queensland’s Fraser Island is one big sand pile.

In fact, the 123-kilometre/74-mile-long strand ranks as the biggest sand island in the world.

For those familiar with B.C. sand islands, such as Savary near Powell River—surely one of Canada’s, if not the world’s, smallest examples—no visit to Australia’s east coast would be complete without a journey to Fraser.

Quick access by ferry from the mainland makes for a relaxed day trip.

For those with enough time, the Fraser Island Great Walk leads the length of the platypus-shaped island, with rudimentary campgrounds strung along the way.

Much of the easy-to-moderate route traverses hard-packed beaches.

Budget a week.

Australians are big on long-distance walks, hardly surprising for a nation steeped in the Aboriginal tradition of walkabouts.

Tens of thousands of backpackers each year journey to Fraser to experience the natural wonders of the island’s ecosystem; therefore, reservations for walkers’ camps are a must.

Water is in short supply, and trekkers must be fully self-sufficient.

One galling aspect of Fraser Island is that although surrounded by warm Pacific Ocean waters at the southern extremity of the Great Barrier Reef, swimming in the sea is emphatically discouraged.

Tiger sharks lurk in the swells that pummel the shoreline.

To stay out of reach of the sharks, the dark-hued manta rays float as far forward in the swells as possible.

Profiles of their white-sided predator kin can be glimpsed offshore in the walls of breaking surf.

Kite-shaped rays are easily spotted from elevated perches, such as the seat of a tour bus.  That’s where we met guide Murray Wessling.

A resident of Fraser Island for 35 years, the former fisheries officer became a tour guide five years ago “because I wanted to make people happy rather than hassle them”.

Wessling had a lifetime of harrowing experiences to relate, from surviving an adder bite to shark and jellyfish encounters.

At one stop, he dipped his hand in the surf and drew out a tiny blue-bottle jellyfish, or Portuguese man-of-war.

“These blokes are often confused with jellies,” he drawled. “Blue bottles are actually a colony of four kinds of highly modified marine invertebrates joined together as one. Despite their minute size, their stings cause painful welts that last for days. Be careful where you step. Even when dead, they’ll still burn you.”

Wessling said he’d been stung so often that his skin was immune to the venom. To demonstrate, he held the “bluey” long enough for it to inflame his palm, then he deadpanned: “Despite what you may have heard, urinating on a sting actually makes it worse, not better.”

Wessling’s firsthand knowledge, combined with cautions regarding potential dangers—such as snakes that look like fallen leaves and spring tides capable of overwhelming SUVs—would prove invaluable to first-time visitors who might otherwise be tempted to rent a four-wheel-drive vehicle and head off to Fraser Island on a camping trip, the favoured approach of many Australians.

Aside from endless beaches and a plentiful food supply, Wessling cited equally compelling reasons why the indigenous Butchulla people named the island K’gari’, or paradise.

As he drove uphill and inland from the beach along rutted sand tracks scoured by recent rains, a startling azure expanse rose into view.

Perched among bleached columns of eucalyptus trees—Fraser is the only place on Earth where towering rain forest grows in sand—Lake McKenzie is the most impressive and easiest to reach of more than a hundred such dune lakes that freckle the island’s subtropical environment.

To further heighten the effect, white silica sand collars the foreshore. You can shine up silver or gold jewellery with silica—instant lustre renewal.

Rub some on your skin to achieve a tingly effect.

Fraser’s wonderland extends beyond the lake to sacred streambed birthing places at Central Station, a former logging camp that now serves as a peaceful sanctuary for both trekkers and day-trippers keen to learn more about the island interplay between nature and humans.

Water filtered through sand is some of the cleanest in the world, and here it provided an antiseptic medium in which the island’s indigenous women once delivered children.

The last group of resident natives left Fraser for the mainland a century ago.

Treaty negotiations have recently seen ownership of a portion of the island returned to the Butchulla.

Newly installed bronze totems along Central Station’s boardwalk trail, sculpted by aboriginal artists, silently witness the reclamation.

Ferries constantly shuttle across the Great Sandy Strait between the Queensland coast and Kingfisher Bay, the major port of call for Fraser Island tours as well as one of two island locations offering overnight accommodation.

Passengers are welcome on the bridge to chat with the captain during the one-hour crossing.

Crew members are prime sources of insider information on geographical details and the best chances of sighting marine wildlife such as humpback whales, considerable numbers of which frequent the strait from July to November.

Seems like all creatures great and small gravitate to Fraser Island.

Original Article
Text CR Jack Christie
Photo CR Louise Christie

Burns Bog Conservation Society's Katie Bianchin (right) leads students from L.A. Matheson Secondary on the annual Shoreline Clean Up in Delta Nature Reserve.

We’ve covered the Burns Bog saga for almost 20 years. Here’s our most recent report that compliments a more extensive write-up in our guide 52 Best Day Trips from Vancouver

ACCESS: To reach the Delta Nature Reserve, take the River Road exit at the south end of the Alex Fraser Bridge, turn right on Nordel Court, and park beside Planet Ice at the end of the road. Follow a paved pathway east from the south side of the building that leads beneath a highway overpass and beside Davies Creek to the reserve’s entrance, a 10-minute walk.

Most Vancouverites would never guess that they live beside the largest undeveloped urban landmass in North America.

If the North Shore’s Lower Seymour Conservation Reserve springs to mind, guess again.

Burns Bog, apparently, takes the cake, at least according to information posted on the Corporation of Delta’s Web site.

Perhaps that claim should be further qualified with a notation that the bog, like much of the LSCR, is also a relatively inaccessible piece of urban geography.

Since being acquired by a consortium of four government agencies in 2004, principally Metro Vancouver, the 2,042-hectare wilderness—featuring the largest raised peat bog on the west coast of the Americas—has been kept off-limits to visitors.

Metro Vancouver Parks spokesperson Mitch Sokalski, chair of the Burns Bog Ecological Conservancy Area scientific advisory panel, related why. “In 2007, our panel identified the highest priority as raising water levels in the bog. Opening the bog to public tours is our lowest priority and probably won’t happen for at least 15 to 20 years.”

Sokalski’s reasoning irks the likes of Delta South independent MLA Vicki Huntington, said that “Nahanni [Northwest Territories] and Gros Morne [Newfoundland] national parks have boardwalks that run through their bogs. There are a lot more visitors there than here. People need to get to the heart of the bog to appreciate and protect it.”

As one of the most outspoken proponents of preserving the bog from development since the 1990s, the former Delta council member knows whereof she speaks.

Actually, a small portion (60 hectares) of Burns Bog—Delta Nature Reserve, located on the northeastern corner of the bog—is open to the public and well warrants a visit, whether to explore on foot or by bike.

Over the past year, Sarah Howie, urban environmental designer with Delta’s engineering department, has been studying the bog’s forested transition zone, formally known as a lagg, or ecotone.

When I contacted her  the doctoral candidate said her research has focused on whether or not the ecotone can be restored.

“One way is looking at other natural bogs in B.C. to compare them with what logging and peat mining have done here. I’m examining the broad landscape—the hydrology, chemistry, and ecology—but not current anthropogenic influences, such as the South Fraser Perimeter Road.”

Although construction of the controversial highway—part of the provincial government’s ambitious Gateway Program intended to link the Delta Container Terminal at Roberts Bank with the new Golden Ears Bridge—is two years behind schedule, its impact on the bog’s delicate hydrology is still squarely on the minds of scientific advisory panel members and visitors to the Delta Nature Reserve alike.

Katie Bianchin, the Burns Bog Conservation Society education development officer, told me that on guided tours she often fields questions about the impact of the new road.

“The bog occupies 40 percent of Delta,” she noted. “A lot of people don’t realize when they cross the Alex Fraser Bridge that the massive green patch they see is Burns Bog.”

Throughout the year, Bianchin introduces school groups—from elementary to university levels and drawn from as far away as the U.K.—to the bog’s unique ecology.

Several times each month from April to October, she also guides public tours of the Delta Nature Reserve.

A recent graduate of UNBC’s environmental-studies program, the outgoing Bianchin said that leading tours fits perfectly with what she likes to do.

“I grew up in Richmond and remember visiting the bog on a field trip in elementary school. Fall is a great time because the wet season is here and, after dry summer months, visiting the reserve becomes a truly boggy experience again. Mushrooms are popping up and there are still plenty of salal berries to taste.”

Remember to bring your rubber boots, she cautioned.

As soon as you enter the reserve at one of four entrances along a 2.8-kilometre network of boardwalks, the landscape immediately transforms.

No comparable environments in Metro Vancouver spring to mind.

A ground cover of evergreen Labrador tea thickly blankets the spongy forest floor, intermingled with salal bushes heavy with fruit.

The boardwalk rarely follows a straight line for long, as it zigzags between stands of stunted pine.

“This is a globally unique ecosystem,” Bianchin observed during the annual shoreline cleanup earlier in September.

“The bog’s size is the reason most people have heard of it, even if they haven’t actually been here. Our tours are highly interactive. We bounce on the moss to make the trees shake, visit old bear and fox dens, stop at a sunken tractor—a big hit with boys—and touch, smell, taste bog plants.”

Come along and get tuned into the ecotone.

Original Article
Text CR Jack Christie
Photo CR Louise Christie