Expanse of Pale Blue

The first of Laurie's photos from the Kwomais Park area are in. Here are a few views from the lookout at the corner of the Park.

That's Point Roberts over there, and beyond it, islands in the Strait.



Dried weeds


Shade to full sun: such an extreme contrast that the camera registered it (almost) in black and white.

Great spot for dreaming!

You see what I mean about not being able to choose! More tomorrow.

Embarrassment of Riches

We got Laurie's photos from the other day's jaunt yesterday. Three whole rolls of film. And they are good ones; too many really good ones; it was almost impossible to narrow them down for posting here.

Tomorrow they go to London Drugs for scanning to the web. Maybe as early as tomorrow night (depending on LD's schedules), they will be ready to post.

In the meantime, I will tell you what happened, and post a few samples from my digital.


We were trying to find the shorter steps down to the Kwomais Point area that the deli owner had told us about. Following her tentative, maybe-laden instructions, we drove as far south as the roads would take us, around the curve onto a residential street that soon ends in a cul-de-sac, watching the seaward side closely for a hint of a trail. Not here, not here, not here, not here...

We backtracked. At the extreme point, the map showed a green space, maybe a park. We checked out both ends, and finally stopped where there seemed to be a gate of some kind.

No-one sits here any more.

It was a park; Kwomais Park, with a sign: Temporarily Closed to the Public. Chained and padlocked. We parked anyhow, and skirted it, toward the cliff face. No way down, unless you didn't mind being scooped up in pieces at the bottom.

As close as we got to the water.

Still, we were out of the car; we walked around the block for a look-see. And Laurie used up the afore-mentioned 3 rolls of film.

The street had a "feel" of stopped time. An aroma of leaf-mold, of damp wood. An end-of-the-year sleepiness. In the distance, we could hear sounds of traffic, but close at hand, just the murmuring of the trees, the rustle of their leaves underfoot.

Shady porch



A hint of yellow leaves


The makings of winter ground protection


Fading hydrangea



Red leaves far overhead


Red apple


Watch your feet!


Deep shade

When Laurie changed film for the third time, we headed back to the deli.* Where we were made much of by the owner, fed, watered, and given more oh-so-vague instructions as to the whereabouts of those steps. We'll try to find them next time.

For now, we were well satisfied.


*Salt Cellar Delicatessen, Ocean Park Mall, 128th St & 16th Ave, Surrey. Drop in sometime, if you're in the area; good food, great service, "interesting" directions.

Rocky shore, with loons

... Following along in our attempted peregrination around the Lower Mainland shoreline ...

A week ago, before the bad weather hit us, we went looking for the "1000 steps" that Cicero had told me about. Starting at the Ocean Park mall, we explored the streets to the west and south. Most end in a few blocks at big houses built right on the bluff, occasionally at wild bush hiding muddy cliff faces, unclimbable except on all fours.

But at the end of 15A Avenue, there it was; a place that looked like a parking area, with prominent No Parking signs, a trail head, and a notice; "1001 STEPS". We found parking a block up the hill, and walked back.


It was a steep climb, but didn't live up to their advertising; there were only 236 steps in all. Enough, though.


(The lighting was strange; bright, dazzling sunlight, shining straight in and reflected off the water, but deep shade under the brow of the hill. My camera couldn't handle it very well, and Laurie's seems a little off. Even my old eyes protested.)

On the slope, the trees, a mixed bag, respond to the lop-sided exposure by twisting and angling themselves into the light and out of the wind.





Almost at the bottom. Below us, just the railroad track, a short scramble over tumbled rocks, and the shore. Not a beach.


Difficult walking. But quiet, so very quiet. Just the rustling of falling leaves, and the lapping of a retreating tide.

There were only two other people on this segment of coast, a man and a small boy. They walked ahead of us, almost to Kwomais Point (marked by a heron silhouetted against the water), then crossed the track into the bush.


After they had gone, we moved away from water's edge, and tried to work our way up to the heron and a bit beyond, to be able to get a clear photograph. He sat, unmoving, until we were almost there, then squawked once and left. Oh, well.



Laurie, at the Point, wishing for a heron.

As for other live things, this shore bears a different mix than the sandy areas to the north, and around the Point into the White Rock beach. The rocks were bare, well-scrubbed. There were few crabs, no dead crab shells, no sign of seagull feeding. A few white clamshells, sun-bleached. Barnacles, small ones, at the water line. No mussels. And none of those invasive batillaria mud snails. (Yay!) The few snails among the barnacles were smooth and dark, fatter and shorter than the batillaria.


At the high tide line, dead kelp wound itself around the bigger rocks. I don't remember seeing eelgrass, and there was no sea lettuce, which shows up on every other stretch of beach in the area. But in the cracks between some of the bigger rocks at the water's edge, I found a few small clumps of these, that I had never seen before.


Deep purple seaweed. Growing only in the deep shade in cracks between the rocks. I had to put the camera right into the crack and rely on the flash to show it up; to my sun-dazed eyes, this looked almost black. When the flash was too close, edges of the weed flared orange.

Back over the rocks, we climbed to the railroad track, under a fence, and through a bit of bush, making a shortcut to the steps. Up, all 236 of them, up the hill to the car -- my legs were aching -- and back to the mall for a bite at the deli. Where the proprietess told us of another set of steps, a shorter one, that would take us to the south side of the Point.

More on how we tried to find them yesterday, in the next post.

Oh, and the loons? Here they are, doing what loons do; diving as soon as you get anywhere near, coming up 'way over in the distance.

Kwomais Point

We're still continuing with our project of walking the whole shoreline of the lower Mainland. Yesterday, we went down the 1001 steps* off Ocean Park, and walked to Kwomais Point.


And I'm tired, it's late, and we have a big day planned for tomorrow. So here are a handful of random photos from the Point. I'll have more to say later on.

On the trail down to the beach. Maple leaves everywhere!


Off the trail. Bindweed, old burned log, and tiny flower.


On the beach. Not a snake.


Rocks and tiny snails.

'night; I'm off to get some beauty sleep. I need it.

*They lied. There were 236 steps. I counted.

Semiahmoo: More than meets the eye

For years, going 'way back to when I was a kid walking down the hill with my brothers and my towel, I have been exploring the White Rock beach. It's a big beach, though; I have never been on the beach east of the end of the promenade, down the railway tracks towards the U.S. border.


We decided last week to end that oversight.

We parked as close to the Semiahmoo Reserve as we could, found a trail through the rosebushes and blackberries, and crossed the tracks to the beach. The tide was low, but still going out. The pier, our usual eastward ending spot, was a good distance away.


Not much in the way of scenery, is there? Low hills, houses, flat sandy beach. It is more or less the same looking east.


We walked along the beach, zigging and zagging from shoreline to waterline, until we came to the outfall of the Little Campbell River. The water level was low; I read later that it is extremely variable.

River outlet on the right. A straight channel, here.

This "road", for such it seemed to be, made of smoothed gravel and outlined with barnacled posts, goes from the railroad bridge to ... nothing. The edge of the water. It does not extend beyond the railway; I think it is probably a retaining wall for the river, below the high tide level. Why it was made, I have no idea.

It was colder than we had expected; we turned back.

Ah, but I am missing out the most interesting part of the walk!

This was the most diverse beach I have seen in some time, in terms of the types of sand and the life we found on it. There is clean, sand-box sand, muddy sand, black, slimy sand, piles of brown, dead eel-grass or unidentifiable furry fibers, surf-smoothed stones, sharp-edged, clean gravel and barnacly gravel. Shallow pools may be dark green with eel-grass or yellowish with sea lettuce. A few areas support the invasive battillaria snails, although sometimes, bending to look at them, I found their shells mostly housing tiny hermit crabs. Yay, hermits!

The sand was sometimes ridged, sometimes smoothed by retreating water. In places the fecal castings of lugworms dotted the surface. In one area, every tiny valley was filled with what looked like those chocolate sprinkles they decorate cookies with.

Wave patterns on clean sand, with a few sprinkles.

Turning over rocks, I found some of those spunky crabs waving threatening pinchers at me. Another rock exposed a fistful of tiny shrimp. They squirmed and twisted in the light, but didn't dig themselves down into the sand, as the shrimp-like creatures on Boundary Bay beach do. Instead, they milled around within their little hollow like dancers on a stage. I put the rock back carefully once we had taken a couple of photos.




And, of course, we found shells. I brought home a couple of oyster shells, a tiny pink clam, and this one, that looked, sitting there in the sunshine, more like a butterfly than a clam.


A week ago, I had been wanting, for what I no longer remember, a bit of sand. Real sand, beach sand. On our way back to the car, I remembered, and collected a pill bottle full.

At home, spreading it out to dry, it occurred to me to look at it under my hand microscope. And that sand was alive! Everywhere I looked, it was squirming and bubbling. I saw tiny, transparent worms, gliding gracefully or waving to and fro. Something that jittered across my field of vision and disappeared. Tiny, tiny, shrimp-like animals. And a creature more like a barrel with streamers out the back.

I have no photos. I tried, stacking lenses over my tray of wet sand; all I got were bright points of light that were in a different position in the second of every pair of photos. And many tiny circles of deep red. In one photo, I can see -- almost -- what looks like segmentation in a red tube.

In the morning, I checked the tray again; something had raised little hills in the wet sand. Busy little beasties.

We covered barely a third of the Semiahmoo beach area; Laurie says we'll have to come back soon and look at the Ahmoo beach. Sometimes I wonder about him.

Protest in Semiahmoo

Friday afternoon on Semiahmoo Park beach. (White Rock)

I take it he didn't appreciate the dry bread I threw him.

You woke me up from a nap for this?

(More on this beach tomorrow.)

Weird and weirder

An afternoon on Boundary Bay beach. But definitely not the usual.

It started out more or less normally. It was high tide, and we walked along the rough at water's edge. I stopped to take a photo of the mosaic patterns the shallow waves made on the rocks underneath.

Click on this to see the "grout" lines.

Laurie picked up a stone-and-barnacle encrusted piece of metal, solidly compacted and rusted into place. A heavy "souvenir", but it went into my bag, along with a 2-inch-tall snuff bottle look-alike I found, also "fossilized".

Not an antique snuff bottle.

On the way back, we walked along the front of the houses. And got to looking at reflections in their humongous windows.


A driftwood sea serpent and background mountains that just weren't there; the house faces the empty bay with a bare hint of Mount Baker in the far distance. Mystifying.


Laurie trying to shoot the sea behind him in the glass wall of a deck. He is on the empty sand dunes, not in the shrubbery. Reflections are deceptive.

And Laurie again, shooting me shooting him, with fiery grasses in between.

At the entrance to our street, a crowd had gathered; all adults, not going anywhere, just milling around. As we approached, a man with a tag on his shirt came over to introduce himself. I noticed that everybody facing me had the same sort of tag.

"This is the International Bocce Competition. We're training for the Olympics," he told us. I had never heard of the game, but I noticed that a man was aiming a small ball along the path we had just taken. "Are we on your pitch?" I asked. "Not any more," was the answer. Oops.

Not that I could see, even after I knew about it, that there was a "pitch". They were just throwing their balls down on the rough sand, debris an all.

Off to the side, a couple of women were tossing their balls down the slope, towards the water. The first thrower had a can of beer in her left hand. (Accepted procedure, I read later, boning up on the game.)

There was a rough chart of rounds taped up on the fence, a couple of scorekeepers in chairs, a couple of coolers. Very business-like, except for the seeming lack of any standardized playing field. "Free form", this blogger calls it.

We-ird. I think my family would like it; I'll pass the word on.

We went for coffee and tea. Across the street, someone was drying/desanding his sandals: