The North Shore Mountains
Before I moved to Vancouver, I had never seen them. Yet now the shape of the North Shore Mountains is imprinted on my brain. Their shape is a wayfinder, a sign that I am close to home.
Viewed from the second floor of our house in Mount Pleasant, they are just there, across the water, stretched across the full width of the northern skyline. A wild, jagged collection of rock formations that have taken millions of years to form — totally random, yet somehow so precise, so definitive. I can close my eyes and trace my fingers all the way from the western end, where the shoulder of Black Mountain starts to rise up above Lighthouse Park, to the eastern slopes of Mount Seymour with the jagged peaks of Golden Ears rising up behind.
At the tip of this western shoulder is Eagle Bluff, a viewpoint that sits some 1,000 metres above sea level, looking down on the Trans Canada Highway as it wraps itself around the headland and turns north toward Squamish and Whistler. Years ago, a work colleague had recommended the hike to Eagle Bluff to me, describing it as a relatively short distance to cover for a big pay-off in terms of the viewpoint. Last summer, I finally got around to doing it.
The first part of the hike was pretty hard work, basically 45 minutes of steep incline up the side of Black Mountain, a small peak that pokes up just behind Eagle Bluff. But once I had completed that, the remaining hour or so of the hike was almost impossibly, surreally beautiful. The forests at the top of the mountain, that begin on the North Shore and then seem to stretch on into the distance forever, seemed so still, so beautiful and so vivid that they seemed unreal. As I strolled through them, with the sun glittering through the trees, and on the alpine lakes that would appear in clearings every so often, I felt an almost overwhelming sense of beauty. I tried to take pictures, but none of them could do justice to how it felt to be among the cedar trees, on that mountain, under the blue skies, walking by those lakes, over those roots and rocks.
The pay-off at the end of the hike was everything my friend had said it would be. From the forest you emerge onto an exposed area of rock, from which you can see east over Vancouver and out way into the distance towards Mount Baker in Washington State, south toward UBC, Richmond, White Rock and beyond to the Olympic Mountains across the water from Seattle, west toward the endless line of mountainous horizon that is Vancouver Island, and even part of the way up Howe Sound, out over Bowen Island and the Sunshine Coast. So much of my life and so many of the places I’d spent the past decade were within my field of vision, yet still the scene seemed impossible to comprehend, to understand that it was real. That there was a city, there were beaches, there were crystal blue, still waters, hundreds of mountains, islands beyond islands, all within reach of where I sat quietly looking down on them. It was hard to tear myself away, but eventually I managed to lift myself up, and hike my way back to the car.
Behind Eagle Bluff and Black Mountain rises Cypress Mountain — or so I thought until I started writing this, and discovered I have been living under an illusion for ten years. As I looked into the geography of the North Shore to ensure I reported it accurately, I realised that what I thought was Cypress was in fact called Mount Strachan. And it turns out I’m not the only one who had been living under this illusion — in fact, two of my co-workers, who were born and raised in Vancouver, reacted as if there had been a rip in the fabric of their reality. One spent hours trying to disprove me, until reluctantly she gave up and accepted the truth — that Cypress Mountain does not exist.
At least as a defined peak. What is known as Cypress Mountain is actually the ski resort that sits in the space between the three peaks of Strachan, Hollyburn and Black Mountain. This area is called Cypress Bowl, which is where the resort takes its name from. But the words Cypress Mountain have become so ingrained into people’s minds — even those who have lived here all their lives — that they have created the existence of a mythical mountain, that is in fact just a collective name for three peaks, none of which bear the name “Cypress”.
The Cypress resort is accessible by car, as a road winds its way up the side of the mountain all the way to the chalet. Despite that, the Eagle Bluff hike was only the second time in ten years of living in Vancouver that I had been to the top — the first a vaguely unsuccessful trip with Ruby when she was barely one and a half. We went in the middle of winter, the snow was deep, and after wandering around aimlessly for a bit we realised we had no idea what to do with ourselves. Ruby seemed a little grumpy about the cold and the amount of layers she’d been forced to wear as a result. And so soon we found ourselves walking back to the car, Ruby clutching tight to a big piece of ice that she had found and decided she had to bring back with us.
To the right of Cypress, the twin peaks of the Lions jut up dramatically, like two giant canine teeth, or the humps of a megalithic camel. The most distinct of all the North Shore Mountains, the Lions were named in the 1880s by a BC Supreme Court justice, who apparently thought they reminded him of the lions of Trafalgar Square, and since then everything from the Lions Gate Bridge to the BC Lions CFL team has adopted the name, too. Yet this is just a small example of how colonialism so easily erases Indigenous history. In the Squamish language, those peaks have always been known as Ch’ich’iyúy Elxwíkn or the Twin Sisters. In the Squamish telling of history, thousands of years ago two daughters of a chief brokered peace between warring tribes. As a result, after they passed away, the Great Spirit turned them immortal, setting them in a high place to watch over the country and the people.
From our current house we have a perfect view of the immortal sisters. I am constantly trying to get the perfect shot of them from my bedroom window, and frequently someone in the house will be heard to say, as they lift the blinds in the morning and catch sight of the dawn light falling on their snow-covered beauty, “oh wow look at the Lions.”
Perhaps the classic place from which to view the North Shore Mountains is the lookout at Queen Elizabeth Park. The tallest point in the city of Vancouver, the viewpoint allows a panoramic view of the mountain range, over the top of the city neighbourhoods as they sprawl down the hill towards the glass towers of downtown.
When viewed from here, Crown Mountain is the one that first draws the eye, forming the visual centre point of the North Shore range. Just to the right, despite being more than two kilometres closer to the city, Grouse Mountain is almost completely lost in the backdrop of its more dramatic neighbour. In fact, Crown and Grouse appear part of the same geological structure. The giant turbine known as the “Eye of the Wind”, perched on the peak of Grouse mountain, is a man-made marker that helps the viewer distinguish Grouse from its wilder, taller cousin.
After the Lions, Crown is probably the most easily recognisable mountain. Where the ski hills of Cypress, Grouse and Seymour have relatively rounded peaks, Crown is sharp-edged and dramatic. The western peak is an almost perfect triangle, which rises up from the valley created by Capilano Lake. After this first peak, the mountain ridge dips down to the east before rising again into the higher, more rugged up-and-down main summit. Along with the Lions, Crown is usually the last to lose its snow cover, its jagged shape meaning there are many gullies and rock faces that escape the sunlight, and so streaks of snow are visible deep into June and even July. If you stand in the middle of Main Street and look north, it is Crown Mountain you see at the end — and for that reason, given I have lived around Main Street for most of my Vancouver life, it’s what I consider the middle of the north shore, the north pole.
Grouse Mountain is the most touristy of the three resorts in the north shore, but despite this it is still a classic Vancouver experience. From the dramatic views from the gondola, to the trails, skiing opportunities, panoramic views from the true peak, and from the chance to see grizzly bears to having a beer overlooking the city, it’s always a must on my list of things to do with a new visitor from out of town.
As we trace the skyline further east, after Grouse Mountain there is a ridge of peaks that wraps itself around the back of Grouse Mountain towards Crown, before the mountain line drops down into the second major valley, Lynn Valley. To the east, the distinctive shape of Seymour dominates the next section of the skyline, a wide mountain with three rounded peaks piled on top of each other at the summit. After Grouse, Seymour is probably the peak we have visited most. We have been up there for short summer strolls, winter tobogganing and most recently took the kids for their first hike, to the aptly named Dinky Peak, a summit a mere 20-minute walk from the car park that nevertheless gives stunning views south over the city and out toward Vancouver Island and the Olympic range in the State of Washington.
Seymour is the most easterly of the North Shore Mountains, and therefore the last distinctive shape. However there is one more I can trace, at least as long as I live in a house with a view far enough east. Golden Ears is a dramatic collection of three peaks that jag up from behind the gentle eastern slopes of Seymour. Often the last to lose its snow cover, Golden Ears isn’t always visible from the city, but its presence is a reminder that the wilderness behind the North Shore Mountains is something that stretches on for thousands of miles — and that the mountains we look at every day from our bus to work, from our office window, or from the downtown waterfront as the water gently laps at the shore, are just the first uprising of one of the most unparalleled wildernesses in the world, a seemingly endless march of ever more dramatic rock formations that can only ever be seen from above, and whose vastness stretches on beyond the limits of human comprehension.
For this vastness not only dwarfs us in size, but in time. The North Shore Mountains look down upon a collection of humanity gathered in front of them, knowing that they have been here long before us, and will still be here long after we have all gone. And perhaps that’s why hiking in forests and lakes and peaks of those mountains can feel like such a religious experience. You are only a short distance from Vancouver, but in a sense you have travelled a much longer distance — away from the everyday minutiae of to-do lists and chains of approval, of piles of washing and untidy bedrooms, to a world where all of that is reduced to laughable insignificance. Here is a landscape that carries millions of years within it, everything that came before and everything that will be.
And for the rest of my life, I will always be able to recognize the horizon that marks the dividing line between impermanence and permanence. The North Shore Mountains are both the end of a journey home, and the beginning of forever.
