Hopkins Landing to Gibsons
I'm back home now, but I just went on a fun excursion! My friend Donna and I had wanted to do a low tide walk for a little while. Actually, it was her idea and it turned out to be a GREAT idea!
The plan was to walk from Hopkins Beach all the way to Armours Beach, which is in Gibsons. I'm going to guess that's about five kilometers, but I'm not too sure. You could probably walk it in about an hour-and-a-half, but it took us under two hours because I was stopping and taking photos and videos along the way.
It's a great walk! You walk all along Hopkins Beach before getting to a rocky point at the end of the beach. From there, there was a little bit of hand-over-hand on the rocks. It’s not overly steep or treacherous but four points of contact helps me to keep my balance. It wasn’t bad at all.
It’s a gorgeous walk, as long as the tide is low enough. Today’s four foot tide was ideal. You wouldn’t want it be much higher than that or you might run out of beach in some places. We had a lot of fun being out. We chatted along the way and really enjoyed all that beautiful weather! We packed some water and some snacks and had a little food break at Soames Point.
There’s lots to see along the way! We saw a whole bunch of starfish, and that’s always neat. Then we actually saw a sea lion, but he didn’t stick around long enough for me to get a good photo of him. Walking along the beach, you always get to see a bunch of seagulls and birds and boats going past. The North Shore Mountains were amazing!
As we stopped at some of the many beaches along the way, I was a little surprised to see that there were so many people. Well, not SO many, but for the Sunshine Coast, there were what I’d consider to be a lot of people hanging out at the beaches. Armours Beach was pretty busy, too.
It was a fabulous walk that went by fast! It was so good that I was a little sad when it was done. I wanted to stay outside and walk and walk and walk!
Cliff Gilker Park
One morning in February, Paul suggested that we go to Cliff Gilker Park. There's a loop of trails to explore and there are a couple of pretty good waterfalls. One waterfall is at the top of the trail and the other is closer to the bottom. We follow creek along the way and have lots of cool things to look at. Lots of water sounds! Paul and I both like waterfalls and moving water and running creeks and all that good nature stuff. We each were playing with a camera and trying to get a bunch of fun, different shots.
It sounds lame, but there was a bouncy tree in one of the creeks that kind of cool hypnotized us. The wind had grabbed the tree and thrown it into the creek at some point in the past. It was just sitting right on top of a few big rocks, perfectly balanced so that the small end was in the waterfall. As the water flowed over it, the tree would bounce up and down and we were both kind of enthralled by it. That meant that we had to go take a photo from pretty much every angle to get a 360 view of a log bobbing in the creek.
We like Cliff Gilker Park because it's got a little bit of everything. You don't have to drive very far to get to it. It's easily accessible from the road. And there are some really nice, well-maintained trails. There's waterfalls, there's little bridges, there's creeks.
If you're into soccer and that kind of thing, there are fields at Cliff Gilker Park for that , too. There’s a pretty good public washroom, which seems like not a big deal, but a lot of parks on the Sunshine Coast have a single outhouse, if that. If you’re spending the day at the park, having a picnic, seeing some waterfalls, and walking the trails, having a public washroom you don’t need to stand in line for is a pretty nice luxury.