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A Tale of Two Canoe Routes

To satisfy that nagging Nature craving, you don't have to go far.

Why drive for hours to paddle in a secluded wilderness area when you can find one so close to the Greater Vancouver area?

Urban-dwelling canoeists with a jones for undeveloped mountains and forests can drive just 16 km north of Maple Ridge to Grant Narrows Regional Park. Here you have the option to canoe to the northeast on Pitt Lake, or go northwest via Widgeon Creek.

Websites with details on these routes are as underdeveloped as the area itself. The bcadventure.com site provides some good statistics, such as the varieties of fish available and the birds you'll see in the area. For photo essays, check out seatoskytrails.com or trudelsknapsack.com. Otherwise, you're pretty much on your own to form an impression.

Well, you're not entirely on your own at Widgeon Creek. It can be popular with other paddlers. The camping is free and it's an easy day trip. The trip up the creek takes anywhere from 45 minutes to two hours. We stopped a couple of times, including once on a small beach near the entrance to the creek to have a picnic. As we munched on our sandwiches amid tracks of deer, the kids played in the shallow water.

After a short break we got back to paddling through a narrower passageway with overhanging bushes. Naturally, the kids loved the enchanted feeling. They loved it so much they were oblivious to the mosquitoes biting them. When we returned home, we were amazed at the number and severity of the welts. Next time, we'll bring bug spray.

The water is quite shallow through some parts of the creek. We frequently touched sandbars that ridge the bottom, but no significant problems held us up.

Widgeon Creek outranks Pitt Lake as a canoeing destination by far, at least as much as I have been able to investigate at this point. Yet this large tidal lake also has merit. Canoeists should hang to the west side, which is too shallow for the many power boats that need to follow the deeper channel to the east. However, if you risk the east side, you can canoe close to rock walls, a spectacular and completely different experience from Widgeon Creek.

Pitt Lake has three marine access campsites, including one near a waterfall. You can camp for free and undoubtedly, the water access makes the camping experience less popular than most other Greater Vancouver campsites where the people are crawling all over each other for their small bite of Nature.

The final feature of the access point to both is the canoe rental shop at Grant Narrows Regional Park. The sign says the shop opens March to October.

Yet another thing to love about the mild weather on the West Coast! Accessible wilderness and you can canoe until October.