Lynn Canyon, Vancouver, B.C.
March 5th, 2010While out in Vancouver, we were able to take a short trip north to Lynn Canyon, a wonderful municipal park known for their suspension bridge.
Vancouver is blessed with a warm Pacific stream which makes the weather much more mild than other places around the globe at the same latitude. The Northwest has a number of temperate rain-forests, with Lynn Canyon being a second-growth forest, but still very much influenced by the weather.
The first thing you notice is that everything is absolutely covered with several different types of moss. Some trees are 100% covered from the base all the way to the top. It’s pretty incredible!
Besides the moss, ferns are prominent throughout the forest there. We were hiking with a couple of locals from Vancouver, and they said that this was the greenest they’d ever seen the ferns. Of course, it was pouring down rain while we were out walking about. (Our friends told us that if we let the rain stop us from doing things in Vancouver, we’d never see or do anything.)
We followed a trail up above the canyon, about 3-4 stories up from the water, for awhile before heading down toward the river.
As I mentioned, it was raining pretty hard that day, so the water was very high and very rapid. Large rocks lined the sides of the water, leading to some breaks with sandy and peddle bars near the still areas.
Moss even covered the rocks by the river, despite getting more sunlight than under the tree cover. It made for some very pretty scenes, that reminded me of Riccia fluitans stones used in an aquarium.
We spent some time exploring the various nooks and crannies along the river, and at times hit sections that were impassable. In several instances, we had to climb 4 flights of stairs up the side of the canyon in order to continue following the water.
The folks in Vancouver are really lucky to have such a nice public forest so close to them in North Vancouver. If we had more time, I could have spent several days exploring the trails throughout this park.
Of course, that’s just reason to come back another time!
March 5th, 2010 at 9:10 pm
As a Vancouverite, I’ve taken several visitors through Lynn Valley myself as it’s one of my favourite places to explore. I’m glad to hear you liked visiting the city….perhaps you’ll can visit again sometime.
The mosses that grow here are quite beautiful. I’ve often thought about creating a terrarium of sorts using different types of local mosses but I haven’t ever gotten around to trying it out. I think you may have just pushed me over the edge with that moss closeup photo.
March 7th, 2010 at 7:34 pm
That moss looks way cool! Hope you, er, collected a sample for purely scientific purposes.
March 7th, 2010 at 7:48 pm
Nah, left everything in place… I’m pretty sure they were all terrestrial mosses, but who knows….
March 11th, 2010 at 8:41 am
[…] more photos – including some lovely macros of the mosses and more of the river and trees are over on Kris’s blog. He also did a great post about one of our other events – our trip to the Vancouver […]
March 11th, 2010 at 2:43 pm
Lovely photos, and that was a fun day! Hope your shoes recovered 🙂
March 16th, 2010 at 10:37 am
I’m glad to see that the B.C. rainforest made a good recovery from the drought it was experiencing when I was there last fall – it was still beautiful when I was there, but a lot of moss was turning brown in places (most trees and ferns seemed to be doing fine, although there was one species of pine that was really struggling).
I did see submerged mosses growing in streams in some of the places I went hiking (a bit further north, and slightly inland, from where you were), but they were in very cold, highly oxygenated water – don’t think they’d fare well in a typical planted aquarium!
I definitely concur with your comments in the previous post about the Vancouver Aquarium – their local biotope displays were really excellent, as was most of the scaping in the other tanks. I’d like to know what species of Nymphaea they had growing in their Mexican livebearer tank – do you happen to know?
March 31st, 2010 at 12:09 pm
Hi, came accross your photos through Lolly Knitting around, I am a knitter, live in North Vancouver, found the pics from your olympic visit, great shots, our surroundings are so beautifull – you made me want to go hiking!!!!which I love, but knitting is my new obsession so it’s hard to devote/split the time…….thank you for making my coffee break so enjoyable!!!! Sonja
April 24th, 2011 at 11:35 pm
I loved this park, and thank god most people respect the adage: take only memories – leave only footprints. I also remember squirrels as well as the luscious green moss, and gnarled roots made visible by erosion. Great photo ops and time-bending memories. The Chief