Parks And Nature Places Around Vancouver

Public Transit Directions Included for Every Site!

In early December 2006, a powerful windstorm ripped through Vancouver’s Stanley Park. The storm transformed the city’s most treasured landmark into a tangle of splintered trees, and shattered a decades-old vision of the park as timeless virgin wilderness. In Inventing Stanley Park, Sean Kheraj traces how the tension between popular expectations of idealized nature and the volatility of complex ecosystems helped transform the landscape of one of the world’s most famous urban parks. This beautifully illustrated book not only depicts the natural and cultural forces that shaped the park’s landscape, it also examines the roots of our complex relationship with nature.

Exclusive online content, photos, and more, available here Parks are importantly fertile places to talk about land. Whether its big national parks, provincial campgrounds, isolated conservation areas, destination parks, or humble urban patches of grass, we tend to speak of parks as unqualified goods. People think of parks as public or common land, and it is a common belief that parks are the best uses of land and are good for everyone. But no park is innocent. Parks are lionized as “natural oases,” and urban parks as “pure nature” in the midst of the city — but that’s absurd. Parks are as “natural” as the roads or buildings around them, and just as political. Every park in North America is performing modernity and settler colonialism everyday. Furthermore, parks are not private property, but while they are called ‘public’, they are highly regulated spaces that normatively demand and closely control behaviours. Parks are a certain kind of property, and thus creations of law, and they are subject to all kinds of presumptions about what parks are for, and what kinds of people should be doing what kinds of things in them. Parks — as they are currently constituted — are colonial enterprises. On This Patch of Grass is an investigation into one small urban park — Vancouver’s Victoria Park, or Bocce Ball Park — as a way to interrogate the politics of land. The authors grapple with the fact that they are uninvited guests on the occupied and traditional territories of the Musqueam (xwməθkwəy̓əm), Squamish (Skwxwú7mesh), and Tsleil-Waututh (səliľwətaʔɬ) nations. But Bocce Ball Park is also a wonderful place in many ways, with a startling plurality of users and sovereignties, and all kinds of overlapping activities and all kinds of overlapping people co-existing more-or-less peaceably. It is a living exhibition of the possibilities of sharing land and perhaps offers some clues to a decolonial horizon. The book is a collaborative exercise between one white family and some friends looking at the park from a variety of perspectives, asking what we might say about this patch of grass, and what kinds of occupation might this place imply.

In early December 2006, a powerful windstorm ripped through Vancouver's Stanley Park. The storm transformed the city's most treasured landmark into a tangle of splintered trees and shattered a decades-old vision of the park as timeless virgin wilderness. In Inventing Stanley Park, Sean Kheraj traces how this tension between popular expectations of idealized nature and the volatility of complex ecosystems helped shape the landscape of one of the world's most famous urban parks. This beautifully illustrated book not only depicts the natural and cultural forces that shaped the park's landscape, it also examines the roots of our complex relationship with nature.

Birding is one of the fastest-growing hobbies in North America--one in five Canadians enjoy identifying, photographing or filming birds. With easy access to coastal mountains, marshes and mudflats of the Fraser delta, temperate rainforest, and rocky shores of the Pacific Ocean, the Vancouver area is a wonderful destination for birdwatchers. Of the 450 species found in Canada, over 400 can be seen in the Lower Mainland. Now expanded with all-new colour maps and more than 100 additional colour photographs, this guide explores thirty-three local birding areas that attract significant numbers of species throughout the year. Each area has a description, brand new walking map and information on the seasonal variations in species. Driving directions are also included. Information is also organized by species, and the final two sections of the book include graphs of the seasonal status of local birds as well as tips on where to find certain sought-after species at different times of the year. Compiled by local experts, The Birder's Guide to Vancouver and the Lower Mainland has long been considered the bible for Vancouver-area birdwatchers and essential reading for visiting and local bird enthusiasts alike--and it's now better than ever.

A guide to the most beautiful short and easy hikes around Vancouver Now in its seventh edition, Easy Hiking Around Vancouver is the indespensable guide to exploring Vancouver’s beautiful wilderness. Featuring sixty-eight superb hikes through forests, up hills and along rivers, many within an hour’s reach of downtown Vancouver, this updated and expanded edition once again provides full descriptions of trails and nature highlights, easy-to-follow maps, atmospheric photos and helpful indexes indicating duration and difficulty. Including nineteen new circuits, this perennially popular guide also includes hikes that can be reached by public transit, those situated close by public campgrounds and those that are wheelchair accessible. And, for the first time, Easy Hiking Around Vancouver features a hike on Galiano Island as well as a hike on a portion of the new Sea to Sky Trail along Howe Sound. Written for both novices and experienced hikers, this well-loved guide is a no-excuses introduction to exploring Vancouver’s outdoor world.

Active Vancouver offers the reader a variety of pursuits—cycling, trail running, hiking, snowshoeing, paddling, walking, and nature treks—all within a day trip of Vancouver, British Columbia, one of the most vibrant urban regions in the world for access to recreational green space. The myriad activities featured in this unique guidebook are for locals and tourists alike who have beginner to intermediate skills in each sport. Here you’ll find all the year-round information needed to plan a fun, energetic and educational adventure day in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Readers are able to scan activities quickly for timing, distance, elevation and accessibility. Equally important, each activity also provides an “Eco-Insight” into the natural history of the locale to give the user a deeper connection with the environment. Complete with colour photographs and maps, Active Vancouver is the ultimate resource for both exciting and family-friendly outdoor recreation in and around Vancouver throughout the year.

"This book features 100 destinations in BC for nature lovers, from national parks to regional conservancies to beautiful trails. The authors discuss the features of each destination as well as the natural histories of the animals found there."--Provided by publisher.