It’s a good 2.5-3 kilometer hike to get to the vista, so in total it’s a 6 kilometer snowshoe hike which will take you probably 2 to 3 hours to complete in good conditions. Since this trail is part of Mount Seymour Provincial Park it is free of charge unlike the maintained snowshoe trails of the ski area.

If you want to check the view in google maps, just click HERE.

Here are some pictures of our snowshoe hike:

Happy Halloween!

The 21.5 km trail takes you through the Minnekhada Regional Park and finishes at the Pitt River Wildlife Sanctuary. There’s a lot of bird spotting opportunities along the way, particularly bald eagles and great blue herons.

We obviously didn’t walk 21.5 km. We walked until we were able to see Pitt River which was about 5 km (round way). Very easy hike, no elevation gain, but beautiful scenery.

Deboville Slough

One of the reasons we wanted to go was the number of bear sightings in the area. The trail goes through blueberry fields, an excellent food source for black bears.

We were walking for about 2 minutes, when we saw the first signs of bear presence.

Mommy bear with 2 cubs

The previous picture shows the view we had on our left side, looking to the right, this is what we saw:

Pitt River Panorama

And we can’t forget my favorite mountain (see picture below)!

Mount Baker from Pitt River

We were still enjoying watching the bears, when all of a sudden we noticed the bears had another audience:

Coyote and Bear Family

After a little while we decided to head back to the car as it was getting dark.
As much as I love bear watching, something was telling me not too stay there after dark:)

The picture below is taken on our way back to our car.

Deboville Slough, Port Coquitlam

Tomorrow we’re going to one of the nightly Victory Ceremonies where they hand out the medals to the winners and have a concert of a different Canadian artist every night. Tomorrow seems to be Alberta night, so they have an Alberta country artist named Paul Brandt on the schedule

We’ll be Alberta bound when visiting our friends Oli & Saartje in Cochrane, Alberta in a month and a half, so it seemed like the perfect song

On Thursday we’ll be at the Ladies Half-Pipe snowboarding event on Cypress Mountain, which we’re both very much looking forward to and this weekend we’ll spend the whole weekend in Whistler with friends experiencing the Olympic atmosphere over there. It’s going be a great week!

I know I haven’t posted a lot of pictures lately and I’ll try to pick that up again once I get some more spare time.
This picture was taken a couple of weeks ago in Callaghan Valley in Whistler which is right next to the Olympic Nordic sports center where the Ski jumping, Biathlon and Ski Cross events take place.

Alexander Falls, Callaghan Valley

We’ve noticed that the last couple of days, the mountains on the North Shore were getting lots of snow. So today we decided to go to Mount Seymour and enjoy the snow. We were pleasantly surprised with about 50cm of fresh snow!

Of course Grizzly enjoyed this even more than we did! He definitely is a sled dog.

The predictions for next week are really good. They say it’s going to snow a little bit in Vancouver later this week. We’re living up a mountain so chances are pretty high that we’re going to get the first snow up here.

We were told by neighbors to get used to it, because there’s going to be days that we won’t be able to drive down the mountain…

A couple of images taken with my mobile.

Kris and Grizzly

Mount Seymour

Grizzly

Bear Den

Grizzly Paw

Grizzly and me

Rumors are that Whistler Slopes might open next week. Cross our fingers!

Having said the previous thing I can start with the actual post!

We did the Whistler Mountain bike thing and it was amazing! It was really intense and a very good exercise for pretty much all your muscles. We got to ride down a mountain:) A fairly big one even!!!:)
No, definitely worth the energy and it’s a good deal, not too expensive!

We started of getting some basic instructions about stances, braking, steering,…

After that we did some trails, downhill. I have to admit that I didn’t really expect it to be that intense, because up until now I only did some mountain biking in “de Ardennen” and I have to say it’s quite different:). Downhill was new to me (since we don’t really have hills in Belgium). We got into a chairlift with our bikes and that took us all the way up the mountain. And I wouldn’t be Ine if I didn’t hate the chairlift part. Not because I’m afraid of heights, not at all, it’s acutally the part where you have to get your bike on one of those things. Kudos to my sweet husband who offered me the easiest spot to get that bike on the rack!

The video below, made with a helmet camera, is from someone that did the same trail (a little bit earlier in the season): B-Line

Anyway there’s not too much going on right now. Summer is almost over, work is slowing down a little bit so there’s time to enjoy some spare time.

So like I said, it’s less busy, our last visitors have left (at least for a while) and we are really looking forward to tomorrow when we head to Vegas! We’re going to stay in Treasure Island.

Treasure Island 2006

We’ve been there before and I absolutely love it! The pool is amazing (you can drink alcohol in it:)) and they have a DJ playing all afternoon! What’s not to love about that?

I’m pretty sure we’ll do some shopping, clubbing and tourist stuff besides drinking beers and cocktails:) We’re going to meet Koen and Tanja in Vegas so it promises to be a very exciting trip!

Mister puppy is going back to the breeder for a while and mister Freggels is getting his own babysitter (thanks Sabine, we owe you big time!).

We hope everyone has a good time and we won’t be able to update our blog until we get back so, again, you’ll have to wait for a while.

The first picture is a panorama from Canada Place, Vancouver, which is the main cruise ship terminal in Vancouver. It also hosts the Vancouver convention and exhibition center, the Pan Pacific hotel and the 3D Imax theater.
If you look closely, you can see the “Island Princess” cruise ship docked in the middle of the picture. If you ever want to do a cruise to Alaska, Vancouver is your starting point

Canada Place Panorama

The next three pictures are taken during a visit of Fort Langley, “The birthplace of BC”, a former fur trade post of the Hudson’s Bay Company. It is called the birthplace of BC because it played a key role in the establishment of the 49th parallel as the international boundary with the U.S. and was the staging point for prospectors heading up the Fraser Canyon in search of their fortune.
The fort is now a museum explaining the history of the fort and showing life in and around the fort. They have presentations of weapons used during the 1800′s, explanation on the fur trading routes,… Definitely worth a visit if you’re in the area.

Fort Langley

Fort Langley

Fort Langley weapons demonstration

The last picture is taken during a hot day in Lynn Canyon. After a short walk over the suspension bridge and down some rocks, you hit this small natural pool with a waterfall in the back, which is very popular with locals during summer.

Lynn Canyon Pool

That’s it, hmmm… I guess I talked more than I planned to…

This weekend was really cool (but warm…), we got some new visitors over, so we got back to doing touristy things. On Saturday we did the mandatory Whistler trip which was nice, but no bears and the biathlon shooting range was closed due to construction The town was very lively due to mountain biking and summer ski on the glacier so it was still very nice walking around in downtown Whistler.
We headed back to Vancouver in the evening and started seeing lightning flashes after dinner in Squamish. On the way back we saw the most amazing thunderstorm of which I only have one picture before all hell broke lose since the rain was just too heavy to stop for pictures (and tripods in the middle of a furious thunderstorm seems to be asking for it…).

Thunderstorm disrupts Lion’s bay sunset

The combination with sunset and thunderstorms proved to be an incredible sight as everything you could see was colored orange/red. At a certain point I had to put my car in the forest to protect it from the huge hail balls which were bashing the car.

On Saturday we went whale watching again, this time with much better luck then last time. We saw about 20 Orcas including some calves (baby whales ), Ine managed to capture a great movie of a calf breaching. (It seems like flickr video screwed up the framerate of the movie or so, but well…)

This is a picture of another calf doing a mini breach, damn those guys are hard to capture…

Orca Calf breaching on the BC coast

Update: Comment by the people from the Orca Network:

“This is the strangest breach photo we’ve seen! It creates a sort of “optical illusion” – the whale is upside down, with its head turned away from the camera (which means it must be a young whale that has the flexibility to move its head in that manner – adults can’t turn their heads like this!”

That’s all for now, good night!

Update: One more thing I somehow forgot last night. I got this really cool GPS gadget from Ine’s brother (Thanks Jeroen!) which allows you to track and store the route you took just by having it on you. You can afterwards plot your route, synchronize camera data with it, …
Here is the route we took on our whale watching trip:

Whale watching route

Thursday after work we met up with a friend of ours in downtown Vancouver, had a lovely walk on the seawall, ate some great takeaway Shawarma (it took me some time to actually figure out that it was Shoarma…) on the beach and finished it all of with a Marble Slab ice cream (Best ice cream ever).

English Bay in Downtown Vancouver

Last weekend we decided to due a quick day trip to Seattle. The morning started out great with some deer standing near our house (it seems to be deer season, we’ve seen about 10 of them around our house in one week), drove over to Seattle and did a quick visit to the city. We only stayed in Seattle for 2 hours and decided to drive to Bellevue where we saw Bill Gates’ house and ended the day with a great fondue menu at The Melting Pot.

Mount Rainier rising up behind the Seattle Thunderbirds’ home, Qwest field.

Below are some more pictures of when my parents where visiting and we visited Cypress Mountain. It was strange to see the Vancouver 2010 Olympic half pipe in summer. This winter, we’ll be more or less at the exact same spot as we got tickets for the woman’s halfpipe event.

My parents, Ine and Grizzly posing in front of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Halfpipe on Cypress Mountain.

My father on the Cypress mountain viewpoint overlooking the lower mainland and the Georgia Straight.

In a few days we’ll have some new visitors, so we definitely have more to look forward to!

My mother in Vancouver

We also did a short day trip to Whistler where we visited the Olympic skijump and biathlon area. At the Biathlon shooting range you could try out a biathlon rifle and shoot at the targets. Ine beat me with a perfect 5/5 score against my less perfect 4/5. I had a bad bullet… On our way we saw 2 bears (see previous post for picture). We ended the day with a very nice dinner at the Rimrock Cafe.

Ine at the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Biathlon Shooting Range

Vancouver 2010 Olympic Skijump

Below are two more shots from the previous weeks, I still have a huge backlog to process and I’ll try to post some more soon.

Bald Eagle on the rocks in the Georgia Strait

Grizzly smiling for the camera in Golden Ears Provincial Park