A hike in Lighthouse Park, North Vancouver, Canada

After the Quarry Rock Hike we decided to check out another short half day hike nearby. I chose Lighthouse Park for this because of 2 reasons. One, I am fascinated by lighthouses and love to visit them.Two, its quite short.

It was a bright clear day when Suyog, Vinamra and myself started for North Vancouver. We took the public transit to reach the Lighthouse Park entrance. Here, on looking at the map we had two options, either we go through the number of trails to the left and right of the central trail or we take the central trail which would lead us directly to the Lighthouse. We choose the mid way, we decided to walk a bit along one of the side trails and then later join the central hike.

We started our walk through the wide path which slowly tapered off to a narrow one. The tree cover was thick and with the sun peeking in now and then from the thick cover. After some time, we came across a small clearing with just green grass everywhere. This was the Salmonberry Meadow.  I chuckled at the usage of the word Meadow for this patch. It wasn't exactly big enough to be called a Meadow.
After seeing the huge Meadows on the Roopkund Trek in the Himalayas this looked tiny.  Anyway this patch offered a nice stop and we sat on a fallen log here and rested for a while.  We resumed our walk and after some walking, we sensed we had reached the end as we could see clear skies ahead in the gaps of the forest cover. As we approached, what we gathered to be the end, we saw the Lighthouse jutting out from the forest. But before approaching it we took a detour to our left and this lead us towards the sea. There was no beach here just big stones directly overhanging the waters. It offered excellent views of the city and we sat here for a while just taking in the sunny atmosphere and having some snacks.

On our right was the beautiful Lighthouse. This place was named ''Point Atkinson'' by George Vancouver way back in 1792 and the first lighthouse was built here in 1874. The current structure was built in 1912 which still makes it more than 100 years old.  There are also a number of defense installations here built during the World War 2. We saw some of these later when we moved towards the lighthouse itself. But we found out that the main structure itself is not open to public which was disappointing. I love climbing up lighthouses and look around the scenery. We strolled around a bit looking at the few log cabins set up there and a few defense related structures but with nothing much to do we started on our way back. The whole hike was finished in a half day. Quite small but a refreshing getaway for university students during exam days.