Terra Nova Rural Park and the West Dyke Trail

I ride the West Dyke Trail most mornings, which means my opinions about it are out of proportion to its actual importance. It is a gravel path on top of a mound of earth. That is the whole thing. It is also the best five and a half kilometres in Richmond BC, and Terra Nova Rural Park, sitting at the north end of it, is the piece most people in this city have never walked into on purpose.

Biscuit and I disagree about direction. She wants to go south toward Garry Point, where the people are and where dropped french fries live. I usually win, and we go north into the park instead.

Where Terra Nova actually is

Far northwest corner of the island. Westminster Highway runs west until it runs out of road, and where it stops, the park starts. If you know Richmond mainly from No. 3 Road and the malls, this end will feel like a different municipality. Ditches, blackberry, hedgerows of old trees, a couple of farmhouses, and then the dyke and the water behind it.

There is a parking lot out at the end of Westminster Highway. It fills on a sunny weekend afternoon and it is close to empty at seven on a Tuesday, which tells you most of what you need to know about when to come. Getting here without a car is honest work. Nothing on the Canada Line puts you anywhere near it, so you are either taking a bus west and walking the last stretch, or riding out along the dyke from somewhere else, which is what I would do.

Plan for a rural park rather than a manicured one. Washrooms are basic and seasonal in the way that park washrooms always are. Bring water. There is no coffee out here and I have never once remembered that in time. The small shopping centre back east where Westminster Highway meets No. 1 Road covers groceries and errands, and Terra Nova Barber is in that cluster if you have been putting off a haircut and want to make the trip count for two things.

The play area is better than it needs to be

The adventure play environment is why most families come, and it earns the drive. It is built out of timber, sand and shaped ground rather than the moulded plastic we all climbed as kids, with slides set into a rise and structures that children have to work out for themselves. Nobody is being guided through it. That is the design.

My honest read, as a person with no kids and a dog who is not allowed in the sand: it is the rare playground where the adults do not look trapped. There is enough room that a five-year-old can be twenty metres away and still be fine. Children come out of it filthy. Plan for that, especially in the wet half of the year, when the sand turns into something closer to a substance than a surface.

The farm half of a rural park

The rest of Terra Nova is farmland that stayed farmland. Richmond's agricultural land reserve has been argued over for decades, and this corner is one of the few places where you can walk around inside the argument. There is a community farm operating in the park that grows food for the food bank and runs a stand in season. There are old orchard trees. There is a nature school program using the site, so on a weekday morning you can come around a hedgerow and find a dozen small children in rain pants doing something extremely serious with sticks.

Walk the inland loops before you go up onto the dyke. The paths wander through what used to be farmyards, and some of the plantings are old enough that they clearly predate anyone's plan for the place. There are fence lines and foundations that do not correspond to anything you would build now. It reads as land that was used hard and then left alone, which is rarer than it sounds and very pleasant to walk through.

The dyke, north to south

From Terra Nova, the West Dyke Trail runs about five and a half kilometres south to Garry Point Park in Steveston. Flat, crushed gravel, wide enough for two bikes and a stroller, and almost entirely without shade.

Going south, Sturgeon Bank is on your right: marsh grass first, then mudflat, then the Strait of Georgia. On a big low tide the water pulls back a long way and you can read the channels in the mud like veins. On your left it is ditches, then fields or backyards depending where you are. The whole west side of Richmond sits behind that berm. A handful of streets dead-end at it, so you can join partway instead of committing to the full run. Francis Road is the one I use when I only have half an hour.

Walking it one way takes most people a bit over an hour. On a bike it is twenty minutes if you are actually moving. It is not a technical ride and it is not a hard walk. What it is, is exposed, and that matters more than the distance does.

Wind is the real variable

There is nothing between that dyke and Vancouver Island. A northwest wind will give you a lovely ride south and then a grim forty minutes coming back. I have made this mistake as a grown adult holding a phone that shows me the forecast. Check which way it is blowing and go into it first, so the reward is at the end.

Winter is when the trail is best, which is a hard sell in a city that mostly walks it in July. Low light, no crowds, the mountains sharp across the water on a cold clear day, and the birds. Sturgeon Bank in the cold months is one of the better places in the Lower Mainland to simply stand still. Great blue herons work the shallows all year. Raptors hunt the marsh, and at dusk in winter there is a real chance of short-eared owls quartering low over the grass, which is the thing that turns people who do not care about birds into people who care about birds. Bring binoculars if you own a pair. Everyone else out there in December is carrying far better optics than you, and in my experience they are happy to tell you what you are looking at.

The south end pays you back

Finishing at Garry Point is the right way round, because the south end has food and the north end has a parking lot. Garry Point itself is driftwood, grass, wind, and the best sunset angle in Richmond. Garry Point Grill & Fish 'N' Chips is the closest thing to a finish line, and it is fine, and on a cold day it is more than fine.

If you have another ten minutes in you, keep walking into the village. Pajo's Fish & Chips down on the wharf is the version I actually think about later, eaten standing up while gulls make their intentions clear. Steveston Bakery is my default when I want to carry something home rather than eat it immediately. Sweet Surrender Gelato and Screamers Soft Serve & Treats split the summer lineups between them, and Timothy's Frozen Yogurt is where you end up when both of those are twenty deep. If you are walking rather than driving, Britannia Brewing Steveston is a reasonable place to stop moving altogether.

If you only do one version of this: park at Terra Nova, walk the inland loops for half an hour, then take the dyke south as far as your legs feel like going and turn around. You do not have to finish it. It is a path, not a task.

One limit worth admitting. I have not been through the play area on a hot August Saturday in a couple of years, and everything I hear says it is busier now than it was. If you are bringing kids in high summer, go early or go late. The trail itself does not really have a bad time, only a windy one.