A trip to Bowen Island

We’ve been talking about doing a day trip to Bowen Island from Vancouver for a while now, and finally we decided to actually go for it. It seems my vision of a chilled out drive to the ferry and potter around the island did not quite match Andrew’s expectations, however, and so we embarked on our first bike-hike-bike expedition since we moved over to Canada.

After some persuasion (I’m not a morning person) we set off on the 26km bike to the ferry at Horseshoe Bay which would take us over to the island. It was a beautiful ride through Downtown, over Lions Gate Bridge, and then along Marine Drive past the ridiculously fancy houses backing on to the ocean. It was also a big throwback to Norway, racing to catch a ferry on our bikes!

It’s just a quick 20 minute ferry journey over to Bowen Island, so we arrived at Snug Cove (my favourite place name) with plenty of time to hike up Mt Gardner – which takes hours according to Google. The route took us past Killarney Lake and then turned up a road leading to the Mt Gardner trail head. We somehow took a wrong turn up and ended up bushwacking through fallen trees a couple of times as we mistakenly took the tactic of heading uphill as we figured this would eventually lead us to the summit. Turns out, it’s lot easier and quicker to take the trail than scrambling over trees and boulders!

An hour and a half later, we made it to the north summit of Mt Gardner! Not as high as the south summit but this has been cleared of trees to place helicopter pads so the views are stunning. To the north and west we could see out to the Sunshine Coast and Vancouver Island, and to the south we could see Vancouver and most of our route we’d cycled in the morning.

After spending a while gazing at the views we continued onwards. We went over the south summit (although didn’t realise at the time as we don’t think it was labelled) and headed down the south summit trail back to the trailhead. This was a lot easier to follow than the north trail we had attempted to do on the way up and was pretty perfect for a it of trail running. I was trying out my new trail runners so delighted in bounding down the mountain!

Back at Killarney Lake, we decided to walk the long way around the lake since we’d done the mountain a lot faster than expected and made our way back to Snug Cove to catch the ferry back bringing it to a 20km hike. I’ve been told many times by Andrew how good the fish & chips are at Trolls in Horseshoe Bay. Being a Brit, I obviously needed to see if they match up to the standard back home, so we treated ourselves to dinner. A large portion of haddock and cod later and I can safely that they were delicious! Especially with the homemade tartar sauce, a must in my books.

Fully stuffed, we took to our bikes and made our way back home. Once again, Marine Drive was a really great cycle and we took some detours along the Spirit Trail (a lovely bike/pedestrian trail along the North Shore) and around the Sea Wall in Stanley Park. It was such a fun day exploring a lot of the local area I’ve never seen before!