Iona Beach Regional Park: Richmond's Quietest Shoreline

There is a walk in Richmond BC where you can go four kilometres in a straight line with water on both sides of you and pass maybe six people. It is at Iona Beach Regional Park, out on Sea Island past the airport, and the reason nobody is there is the same reason it is quiet: you have to drive past a wastewater treatment plant to reach it, and on certain days you can tell.

I go anyway, four or five times a year, usually alone. It is not a pretty park in the way Garry Point is pretty. It is a big, flat, strange, windy place and I like it a great deal.

Getting out there

Sea Island is part of Richmond, which people forget because they only ever cross it on the way to a flight. Iona is at the far northwest end of it, at the end of Ferguson Road. You follow the road past the plant, and then the road ends and the parking lot begins, and that is the entire approach.

Transit does not get you close. There is no bus that drops you at the gate, so this is a drive or a ride. If you cycle, you can get there from the Middle Arm dyke and the roads across Sea Island, and it is a genuinely good ride, flat the whole way with the river on one side. Just know that the last stretch has no shelter of any kind.

Two practical things before you commit. The park gate has posted closing times, and they change with the season. Read the sign on your way in, because being locked in is an inconvenience and being locked out after a long walk is worse. Second, the treatment plant next door has been in the middle of a long upgrade project, and that work has affected access and parking at various points. Look up the park's current status before you drive out, especially if you are bringing people who will be unimpressed by a closed gate.

The jetty

The main event is the jetty, a causeway that runs about four kilometres west into the Strait of Georgia, built to carry the outfall pipe. There is a path along the top of it and the pipe running beside you, and that is it. Water on the left, water on the right, and a line of grey stone stretching out ahead further than seems reasonable.

Out and back is roughly eight kilometres and takes most people two hours at a walking pace, more if you stop, which you will. It is completely flat and completely exposed. There is no shade, no bench worth the name for long stretches, and nowhere to duck out of the weather. That is the whole character of the thing.

What makes it worth doing is the disorientation. About twenty minutes in, the land behind you stops being the point of reference and you are just a person standing on a line in the middle of the water. Freighters sit at anchor. The north shore mountains stack up behind Vancouver. On a clear day Vancouver Island is a low blue smudge on the horizon. The tide changes what is around you completely, so the walk out and the walk back are not the same walk.

Turn around whenever you want. There is no summit and no viewpoint at the end, just the end. I would say the honest sweet spot is somewhere past the halfway mark, where you get the full effect without the last stretch of grinding into the wind.

The beach and the dunes

If four kilometres of causeway sounds like a lot, the beach itself is the short version. It is coarse sand and gravel piled with driftwood, and behind it there are dunes with grass holding them together, which is an unusual thing to have on this coast and worth staying off. The trails through that section are short and easy and you can do a decent loop in under an hour with a dog.

On dogs: check the signs at the lot for where they can be off leash, because the rules are not the same across the whole park and some of that ground is nesting habitat. Biscuit has views on this that I do not act on.

The birds are the real reason

Iona is one of the best birding sites in the province and probably the least glamorous. The ponds by the plant, the mudflats, the beach and the jetty together give you an unusual amount of habitat in one small place, and it sits right on a migration route, so unusual birds turn up here regularly enough that people drive from other cities for them.

Spring and fall are the migration windows and they are the best time to come. Shorebirds work the flats in numbers. Raptors hunt the open ground. Winter brings its own list and the occasional owl, and the parking lot in cold months is full of people with tripods and lenses the size of a forearm. I am a person with cheap binoculars and a rough idea of what a dunlin looks like, and I have still had mornings out there that I remember years later.

If you do not care about birds at all, come in the fall anyway. The light is better and there is more happening in the air.

The planes

You are directly under the approach to the airport's north runway, and depending on which way the wind is sending traffic, aircraft come over low and constant. Not distantly overhead. Low enough that you can read the livery and hear the flaps.

Some people find this ruins the quiet. I think it is half the appeal. There is something genuinely odd about standing on a stone jetty in the middle of the water watching a widebody drift down over the marsh every couple of minutes. It is the most Richmond thing I can think of: agricultural silt, migrating birds, and international air traffic in the same frame.

The honest part

The treatment plant is right there. Most days you do not notice it. Some days, usually warm still ones, you notice it a lot, particularly near the parking lot rather than out on the jetty. I would not bring a first date here in August. I would bring a friend who likes walking, in October, with a thermos.

There is also nothing to buy. No concession, no coffee, nothing. Bring water, bring more layers than the temperature suggests, and bring something to eat if you are doing the full jetty, because the exposure makes it feel longer than the distance is.

Where to eat, since it is not there

Pick up food before you turn onto Ferguson Road. A banh mi from Banh Mi Tres Bon travels beautifully and does not need to be warm to be good, and if you want coffee and something baked before the drive, Little Fox Bakehouse is on my way whenever I am coming from the No. 3 Road side.

Afterwards, the Sea Island options are close and slightly surreal after two hours of nothing. The Flying Beaver Bar & Grill sits on the water with float planes coming and going practically at the railing, which is a good decompression chamber. If you have kids in the car and need a bribe, the outlet mall over on the Templeton side has Soft Peaks Ice Cream and The Praguery, last I looked, and neither of those has ever failed me.

Best version of this trip, if you want mine: a cold clear October morning, coffee in the car, an hour out on the jetty until you are sick of the wind, then the beach loop on the way back, then somewhere warm.

One limit worth stating plainly. I have not walked the jetty end to end since the construction work started up in earnest, so I cannot tell you what the far half is like right now. Check the park status, go with low expectations about facilities, and the place will still be quieter than anywhere else you could stand in Richmond.