The self-proclaimed “Outdoor Recreation Capital of Canada,” the town of Squamish, British Columbia – located approximately halfway between Vancouver and Whistler – has just about everything any lover of adventure and the great outdoors could possibly want. During a four-night stay last summer, I had time to for a diverse array of activities, from hiking the Stawamus Chief, the granite monolith that is Squamish’s most famous geographical feature, and mountain biking the trails around town, to kayaking on a tranquil lake and whitewater rafting on the wild Elaho River. Along with these adventures on land and water, I also took to the skies on a flightseeing trip over the rugged Tantalus Mountains looming over the Squamish Valley.
Fortunately, the conditions on the morning of the flight were absolutely perfect. The sharply etched peaks and ridges punched into the clear blue sky, glaciers cascading down their sides. The weather was so fine that the airplane’s wings even reflected the snow and rock as we flew over the mountains.
The mountains almost felt close enough to touch as we soared past them in our four-seater plane. Several of the high valleys enclosed azure alpine lakes ringed with dark evergreen forests clinging to the slopes. Higher up, there was only exposed rock, snow, and the jagged, pale blue ice of the numerous glaciers.
Words like spectacular and magnificent are overused, but I can’t help but want to apply them to the landscape we flew over on this flightseeing trip. I leave it to those reading this post to decide, based on these photos, whether they are justified.
My trip to Squamish was hosted by the Vancouver, Coast & Mountains regional tourism organization in partnership with local tourism suppliers. This flightseeing excursion was operated by Glacier Air.
In another section of the garden I saw these lovely two-toned flowers – something in the aster family.
One of Victoria’s best-known attractions, Butchart Gardens was created more than 100 years ago by Jennie Butchart in an exhausted limestone quarry that had been mined by her husband, Robert. It has grown into an extensive collection of gardens filled with color all year long. It is still owned by the descendants of Jennie and Robert Butchart.
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The coastline of Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula is dotted with lighthouses; in fact, it seems as though almost every town has one. On my recent trip to the region, we drove along the shore road that hugs the St. Lawrence River and stopped at one of the most distinctive lighthouses, a fire-engine-red beacon that stands on a cliff in the village of Le Martre.
The Le Martre lighthouse has been in operation since 1906 and still uses its original timing system controlled by a cable and weights. There is a permanent exhibit about lighthouse design and history in the adjacent building.
Overall, there are 45 lighthouses in the maritime Quebec region, which includes the Gaspé and other areas along the St. Lawrence River and the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
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For photos from another of my adventures in the Gaspé region, see Gannets Galore in the Gaspésie.
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Last summer, I had the opportunity to visit Quebec’s beautiful Gaspé Peninsula, a lobster-claw-shaped piece of land that juts into the Gulf of St. Lawrence north of New Brunswick. The Gaspésie, as it is known in French, had long been on my travel wish list, although I didn’t really know a whole lot about it other than that it was said to be a beautiful place. Those rumors proved true.
I loved every bit of my time in the Gaspésie, but one of my favorite experiences was an excursion to Bonaventure Island (Ile Bonaventure), a little chunk of land just off the coast at Percé on the peninsula’s eastern side. The island is known for its huge colony of northern gannets, the largest such colony in the world, with somewhere in the vicinity of 120,000 individuals.
Seals lounged on the rocky beach below the cliff where the gannets nest and birds swooped overhead as we cruised past on our way to the disembarkation point on the more gently sloping other side of the island. From the dock we hiked for about 30 minutes back across the island to see the gannet colony close up.
The colony was a noisy, smelly mass of birds, squawking, jostling for space, fighting over grasses for nest-building, and fencing with their beaks in courtship displays. But here and there were quieter scenes: an adult bird sheltering its chick, a solitary gannet taking a moment to rest.
I could have watched the birds for hours, but we had only a short time before the last boat back to the mainland. I snapped all the pictures I could, doing my best to capture both the enormity of the colony and the details of individual animals. When we had to leave, I was nowhere near ready to go. So after my trip, one thing hasn’t changed: The Gaspésie is still on my wish list. Only now I know from personal experience the beauty that awaits.
