The first rule of Hike Club? You do not talk about Hike Club!
That’s what I learned after my last column, which included an innocent request for suggestions of good hiking trails on the North Shore.
This story, like most in my life, began with my wife’s idea that we should be a healthy and fit family, which I suppose is better than my idea that we should be a use-waffles-as-hamburger-buns family.
We (she) resolved that we (we) would go for a hike every sunny Sunday this summer. The way the weather has been going in North Vancouver this year, I reckoned that could end up being as many as three (three) Sundays.
We started our “summer of walking” about a month ago with a mid-morning outing to Lynn Canyon, and as we finished our hike we were surprised to see that the suspension bridge had since become jammed with people. After squishing past them we noticed dozens and dozens more people lining up just to get to the trail, and even more cars creeping by looking for a place to park.
Welcome to the grate outdoors!
It was then that I put out the call to the masses for info about other North Shore trails that were a little more walk-y and a little less wait-y.
The most common response was “Yeah, I know where the great trails are and I’m not telling you because then they wouldn’t be great anymore.” Ouch! But fair. The second most common response was “Yeah, the North Shore sucks – that’s why we moved away.” Collective ouch!
My favourite was the guy who brought up the old joke, which fits some North Shore trails perfectly: “No one goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”
The responses really were great, and not helpful at all! Striking out with the general public, I went private with a call to the man who wrote the book on North Shore hiking. Literally, in fact. Norman Watt has lived on the North Shore for about half a century. A few years back he wrote hiking columns for the North Shore News, later turning those write-ups into a book called Off the Beaten Path: A Hiking Guide to Vancouver’s North Shore.
When I caught him on the phone, Watt had just gotten home from, what else, kitesurfing. Just kidding – he was hiking. The North Shore, he assured me, has plenty of hikes that do not resemble a Disneyland lineup. In fact, he’d just taken a trail that started in the exact same spot as the sometimes impossibly crowded Grouse Grind, except Watt went right when the rest of the folks went left, and he ended up walking for four hours without bumping into more than a half-dozen other souls.
And he was happy to tell me the name of the trail! Watt, it turns out, does not subscribe to the Fight Club theory of hiking that you must never talk about hiking.
“I think that’s kind of an odd attitude to take,” he said, “but on the other hand I can sort of understand that people around here have their favourite trails and maybe they don’t want hundreds of other hikers out there to sort of spoil their solitude.”
He also said that the trails have indeed gotten more crowded in recent years. So would he ever line up for a hike?
“Yeah, no. I’d rather avoid that.”
There are easy ways to avoid that, said Watt, in particular simply by skipping tourist traps like the Grouse Grind and Lynn Canyon on sunny weekends. The Deep Cove resident will even skip his favourite neighbourhood jaunt, Quarry Rock, if it gets too crazy.
“The silliest things are what I’ve seen people wearing up to Quarry Rock. High heels and flip flops, nice dresses – people that have probably never hiked anywhere in their lives. It’s just nonsensical.”
Take those Disneyland trails out of the equation, however, and there are still more than 35 other hikes on the North Shore listed in Watt’s book. They’re all easy to get to, and assuming you’ve given yourself enough daylight and are suitably prepared for hiking, you should easily be able to follow Watt’s instructions without any calls to North Shore Rescue.
So here are all of the best-kept secret hikes on the North Shore:
Just kidding, Hike Club trail hoarders. You can stop poking me with your Nordic poles because I’m not going to give away all your secrets here (ahem: Norvan Falls/Bridal Path/Seaview Walk…).
If anyone wants the real deal they can shell out $20 for Watt’s meticulously detailed and well-presented book, or email-transfer me $10 and I’ll send you a hand-drawn map.
There’s plenty of room to walk around out there, Watt said, and I agree, as long as we all follow the second rule of Hike Club: no high heels.
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