My Wet Coast Life

Living on the wet coast, we are surrounded by forests. One of the benefits of living here is the ease of access to local and regional parks. Last weekend, a friend from work, RobotRogue, and I took my dog Wallace and went for a trek through Pacific Spirit Regional Park. It is located in the University Endowment Lands, west of downtown Vancouver and has over 54 km of walking/hiking trails, 38 km of which are designated multi-use.

As a little background to this, RobotRogue and I, like many techs, sit at a desk all day long. As with any sit down job, over time you get lazy and de-motivated and some people get fat as well as an indirect outcome of sitting all day and snacking. Now RobotRogue's goal is to get in shape and lose some of weight and eat healthier. He has traversed the net and found various useful sites such as Couch to 5K, which helps lazy people slowly get back into the work out routine and nerdfitness.com, who's slogan is "Helping nerds and average joes get in shape the right way, one day at a time."
Over the last couple weeks, i hear of his improvements and motivation. Now me on the other hand, i've gotten lazy over the years due to a back injury 10+ years ago and working more with less time to workout. I am lucky that i have a metabolism like a race car and don't gain weight really no matter what and how much i eat (yes, you can hate me now). I am at the other end of the scale for being under weight and standing over 6'1", i am commonly referred to as a stick, bean pole, someone who should eat more....well, you get the point. So when most people are losing weight, i want to gain it. This tends to tick off the weight loss people...

Follow up:

Well, based on RobotRogue's motivation and results, i am joining the bandwagon and this year hope to pack on some good, healthy weight, improve my back and overall health and life style. Now what better way to start it than a nice hike through a local park.
There is a great site call VancouverTrails.com that has great write-ups, info, maps and pictures of various trails available in the lower mainland. After coming across the pictures and trail info for Pacific Spirit Regional Park on VancouverTrails.com and the fact it is dog friendly, we have a winner.

Based on the map, we were expecting about a 10KM hike and didn't appear to exhausting. Now Saturday turned out to be a beautiful sunny day and only slightly cool, perfect for a hike. We started off early so as to not waste too much of the day. Our planned route was supposed to be about 10KM and take under 3 hours. Unfortunately, we didn't make a crucial right turn and ended up doing an extended route ending up at Spanish Banks (BTW, great for skim boarding). This took us into intermediate trails with some steeper elevation change. Once at Spanish Banks, we acquired a park map, realized where we made the wrong turn and started out trekking back to my truck. Over 4 hours and 23,861 steps and approximately 11-12km later, we were done. Only slightly exhausted, we agreed this was a good hike even with the "detour" and will do it again and maybe in the future, jog it...

The route we took and just after the #2 marker is were we "should" have turned right

One other thing i noticed was the volume of people enjoying the park walking, jogging and biking. This is good as it shows the land has been put to good use and is being utilized by the locals. We ran into 2 by-law officers and they were rather annoyed with some of the visitors and i would have to agree with them. Some of the trails require the dog to be on leash where other trails are leash optional. Works for me as my dog stays on the leash the whole time. The reason is if someone is running the opposite direction with a dog and my dog was off leash, i would spend my time running after him to stop playing and continue the walk with us instead. The other reason he is on a leash is he is very friendly and will approach anyone and any dog. Problem is he is a decent size dog (around 100lbs) and not everyone likes dogs, or large dogs, so this is out of respect to other visitors he stays on a leash controlled. I was greeted by a lot of dogs who should have been on a leash but weren't. The good thing for those dogs, being an animal lover, i don't care if i get dirty or have a dog in my face and expect to get some muddy paws on me but others on the trail may not share that love for animals. Unfortunately, i can only assume, not everyone at the park literate or can read signs or understand pictures. If they can read, some did not comprehend the text and abide by the rules. The by-law offices thanked us for respecting the signs as the dogs off leash were slowly but surely destroying the vegetation and scaring the local wild life in the leash required areas. We continued on our hike and they continued looking for more ignorant people to give them the "fine of ignorance" for disobeying park rules.

Hopefully people will realize if the rules are abused enough, they will just ban dogs completely from the park, which would be a sad day as so many parks already ban dogs completely. To anyone visiting the park or any other park, please obey the dog rules so as not to ruin it for the others who do abide by the rules and enjoy the parks just as much as you do.

Now the only spoiler to this great day was an inconsiderate neighbor who lives next to the park. I had already gone through the couple water bottles i brought for my dog. This neighbor was standing in his driveway making a pathetic attempt to wash his truck and was watering, yes watering, his concrete driveway. I approached him and asked if i could fill up the water bottle for my dog. He said "No". I said "Please". He still said "No". I said "Seriously?" He said "Yes". WOW, i guess this guy had someone pee in his cornflakes that day or just an typical a-hole who has been soured by bad park visitors. I told him to "try" and have a good day and walked away biting my tongue trying not to tell him how inconsiderate and un-neighborly like he is and how he is wasting water vainly cleaning his driveway. What ever happened to doing one act of kindness a day? What harm would have come from filling up my water bottle?

Well, this is the start to hopefully an active and productive year getting my body back to normal. Expect more adventure posts and maybe even status updates for my weight and health...

You can check out RobotRogue's blog to see his progress which so far has been good for him. You can check out the couple pics i snapped, in a much larger format, on my Flickr page.