Day 344: Many paths

I've used three approaches to getting up Grouse Mountain: the gondola, the Grouse Grind and the adjacent BCMC trail. Cleary, riding the gondola is the easiest, but there's no doubt that the BCMC trail is far nicer than the staircase that is the Grind. As the saying goes, "One journey, many paths", which is a comment on life and how there are many ways to lead it. Last night's fresh snowfall meant I could get a picture of the entire mountainside blanketed in white. I like the way that the snow really shows up the deep gulleys and drainage systems on the mountain; not a pleasant place to end up. A surprise was how the snow also highlights the swath of smaller trees marking the path taken by the gondola.

Click through to Flickr to see a couple of notes about where the hiking trails are.

Grouse ascents

Day 343: The Journey

Today's after-coffee wander took me past some blooming oregon grape which I was convinced would be today's subject. But the sleet and bitterly cold wind drove me on in search of other things, eventually forcing me inside the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre. Going through the doors of the old section, I looked around at the stained-glass windows to see if any of those would work. Unfortunately the most interesting panes could only be photographed from an acute angle, so I wandered on until I was stopped in my tracks by a piece of First Nations art on the wall. Striking in its circular simplicity and triangular arrangement of faces and eagle profiles, the mixture of warm-coloured wood and etched glass is just so simple, yet so effective and so appealing (as faces tend to be). I sized up my shot, noting that the camera wanted a 0.4 second exposure. Time to lean on the banister and practice stillness; I pressed down on the shutter release gently, keeping my finger down for three shots in a row. All three worked, so here's the first.

The Journey, by Brent Sparrow

Day 342: Vancouver at night

I'd taken some mediocre shots during the day, but it wasn't until the evening when I saw how calm the water was that I knew what picture I wanted. I drove down to Kits outdoor pool and set up the tripod on a small grassy patch with a clear view of the city. I should have brought the remote shutter release or used the timer as most of my photos showed signs of camera movement as the tripod settled (it's not the sturdiest tripod), but fortunately three photos turned out perfectly. Then it was just a matter of choosing the preferred scene - I like the fact that the mountains can be seen behind the city in this one. One other thing I should have done when shooting this scene: I should have used the in-camera correction for lens distortion, as the curvature of the reflections is pretty obvious near the edges of the photo. I could get rid of that if I processed it from raw but that's something I've yet to get into.

Vancouver skyline at night

Day 341: The otter and the beaver

A wander downtown on a fine but chilly Sunday. Getting a photo of the floatplanes here in Coal Harbour has been high on my photographic to-do list for this project, and today was a good day for it. I could have got closer by walking round to the west side of the convention centre, but that wasn't the direction we were going today. We watched several planes take off and land (do float planes "land" on water?), but it was this shot of two together that I liked best. The smaller plane on the left is a de Havilland DHC-2 Beaver, like the one we flew in to reach the beginning of the Nootka Trail; the larger aircraft is a de Havilland DHC-3 Otter. I've always liked aircraft, and I could watch these all day.

Floatplane greeting

Day 340: Breezy

Wow - Vancouver is rarely windy, but this winter has been quite exceptional. I was woken up by the wind at 5:30 this morning: I thought it was thunder. Knowing what the waves would be like down by the water I dragged Maria to the beach to get sand-blasted. I was disappointed to find that the tide was low, and the waves were far away so I couldn't get the picture I had in mind. On our way back to the car, the wind was whipping up the sand into an ankle-blasting storm, and a family of three was making its way across the beach, heads bowed against the wind. With the city as backdrop it made the perfect second-best shot for today.

A bracing walk on the beach

Day 339: Bagelry

I remember discovering bagels in the late 1990s. They were tough, chewy rings of dense bread that didn't work with standard toast toppings of butter and marmalade or jam. Then I tried them with cream cheese (at Einstein Bagels in Las Vegas if I remember correctly), and haven't looked back. I was delighted to find Einstein Bagels again when we moved to Maryland - we even lived within a block of one store for a while and it was a regular weekend breakfast. Imagine how happy I was to find another good bagel place so close to home in Vancouver. It's a toss-up between Solly's and Siegel's - Siegel's has a bigger range of flavours, and to have one of their bagels fresh out the wood-fired oven is a sublime experience, but Solly's is closer, and they serve Ethical Bean coffee...

And of course 3 times 3 is 9.

Solly's bagelry

Day 338: The upside-down tree

Yes, really. I laughed when I first heard about this - a tree that had apparently been re-planted upside-down so its roots now grew into branches, and its branches established roots. Nonsense, I thought. As it turns out, the label was a nickname for a tree I walk past regularly which has a convoluted (and I mean really convoluted) branch system. A quick Google search turned up some info about the tree, which states that it is a wych elm grafted onto a witch hazel trunk. I've been wondering about getting a good picture of this tree for a long time, so I am more than happy to use it for today.

The upside-down tree