View of the buildings and industrial areas of North Vancouver, Burrard Inlet, and Mount Seymour from downtown Vancouver.
View of North Vancouver and Mount Seymour from downtown Vancouver (Purchase)
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I tend to associate North Vancouver with wilderness, mountains, waterfalls, and skiing. My usual destinations in North Van are usually areas such as Mount Seymour and Lynn Canyon Park. Looking at North Vancouver from Vancouver you can see the mountains and the forests, but there is a lot of industrial land along the waterfront as well. The first panorama shows cargo ships picking up grain from various grain terminals on the North Shore. Mount Seymour, as with many photographs of North Vancouver, makes for a good background and is home to one of 3 ski hills on the North Shore. North Shore industries such as shipyards, lumber and coal export, are also present along the edge of Burrard Inlet.
View of North Vancouver Industrial Shoreline from Vancouver (Purchase)
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The second panorama here shows the industrial waterfront a bit further west than the first. One of the more familiar industrial uses that people recognize are the large sulphur piles at the North Vancouver Sulphur Works. Here the “La Bamba” which is registered in the Marshall Islands is docked and loading Sulphur. There are also large piles of coal for export further east in North Vancouver. Crown and Grouse Mountains (which is home to Grouse Mountain Resort) form the background here.
Panorama of Ruckle Farm and the Daniel Henry Ruckle house in Ruckle Provincial Park on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, Canada.
Ruckle Farmland and Daniel Henry Ruckle House in Ruckle Provincial Park (Purchase)
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Last weekend I made my first photography trip to British Columbia’s Salt Spring Island. Salt Spring is the most populated of the Gulf Islands, and I’ll have the chance to explore it more often as some of my friends have moved there. Despite some rain I managed to get enough breaks in the weather to photograph these scenes at Ruckle Provincial Park. Salt Spring is new to me, and so photographing an entirely new place can be a bit more of a challenge as you don’t know where things are or what might be right around the corner (which is also a bit more exciting). I was mostly doing some exploration and scouting on this trip, but the stop at Ruckle Provincial Park was probably the highlight – and I came away with a few photographs too. The panorama above shows some of the still active farmland within the park as well as the farmhouse built by Daniel Henry Ruckle (Henry Ruckle’s son) starting in 1907. The Ruckle Farm has been in continuous use as farmland since Henry Ruckle began farming it in 1872. Ruckle Provincial Park itself was purchased from the Ruckle family in 1973 and established as a park in 1974. For a lot more information about Ruckle Park you can read the following file which I used as one of my sources for the dates and building names in this post: Ruckle Provincial Park Master Plan.
Daniel Henry Ruckle Farmhouse at Ruckle Provincial Park (Purchase)
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Henry Ruckle first started to clear this land for farming in the early 1870’s – and much of it remains the way it was then (though a bit weathered). The first noteworthy building you pass near the entrance to the park is the Alfred Ruckle House built in 1906. Much of this part of the park is lined with no parking signs, so I stopped further down the road near the park headquarters building (a house built by William Norman Ruckle in the 1930’s) – parking by the farm stand. Walking back up the road I made these two photographs of the Alfred Ruckle house. While standing on the side of the road photographing I tried to wave down a passing minivan which had a rather flat rear tire, but he just stared at me as he went by. More about that guy later.
Alfred Ruckle House at Ruckle Provincial Park (Purchase)
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Alfred Ruckle house was built in the Queen Anne style which is certainly a little more stylish than the other wood frame homes (that I’ve seen so far) on Ruckle Farm. I’d like to have been closer to it for photography but it is not in the public area. The one farmhouse I did not photograph and that was the original home built by Henry Ruckle in the 1870’s which is still standing. I would have, and you can get close to it, but I simply didn’t know it was there at the time – despite being only a few hundred feet away. Next time I am on Salt Spring Island I intend to fix that oversight! The second photo of the Queen Anne house here also shows some of the split rail fencing that is common throughout the farm and on Salt Spring Island.
Alfred Ruckle’s Farmhouse at Ruckle Provincial Park (Purchase)
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This building *below) is known as “The Forge”. It is the oldest building at the Ruckle farm and was constructed in 1878. This location is only about 200 feet from Henry Ruckle’s original farmhouse, but for some reason I never looked in that direction and never saw it. While I was photographing the Forge (amidst some chickens scratching around in the grass) a man walked through on one of the trails with his dog. The dog, to it’s credit wasn’t at all excited about chickens and didn’t react much when he saw them so this wasn’t an issue. A park employee immediately came out of the nearby building and told him that he wasn’t allowed dogs in the area. I think this guy must have passed 20 signs in the park saying the same thing. I take it they have had a lot of problems with people’s dogs scaring and chasing the farm animals.
After photographing the farm area I drove the short distance to Beaver Point and went for a short walk to a few viewpoints. Rain drove me back to my car but I noticed the minivan I mentioned earlier that had a flat. I put a note about it in a sandwich bag and walked over to the van but I heard a whirring noise as I got there. The owner was using a small pump to fill up his tire. I said he could probably get that repaired in Ganges but he said it was okay, he’d been doing this frequently since he left Quebec! I wouldn’t have the patience to pull over and pump up a tire all the way across Canada! That along with the dog thing makes me wonder about this guy’s decision making skills, if they exist at all!
For all of my photos of Ruckle Provincial Park please visit my Ruckle Provincial Park Gallery.
I have been catching up on editing some older images I made in 2010 at Mount Rainier National Park. Below are two images of historic buildings in the Longmire Historic District. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ve been to Longmire since I made these photos back in 2010. I tend to enter the park from the Stevens Canyon entrance now due to its proximity to Tipsoo Lake, Sunrise and relatively quick access to the Paradise area. Sadly, Longmire gets left out most of the time now.
This is the entrance to the historic Longmire Administration Building built in 1928.
Historic Longmire Administration Building
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This is the Longmire Service Station which was built in 1927.
Longmire Service Station
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Between Longmire and Paradise lies a small loop road at Ricksecker Point. I have photographed many of the views from Ricksecker Point including this telephoto image of the peak of Mount Rainier itself. The glacier on the right hand side of this photo is the Kautz Glacier, which in part forms Kautz Creek many will be familiar with crossing if entering the park from the Nisqually entrance.
Burnaby’s Metrotown and the North Shore (Pacific Coast Range) Mountains. Photographed from Blackie Spit in Crescent Beach, British Columbia, Canada
Burnaby and the Northshore Mountains from Blackie Spit (Purchase)
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Last week I went to Blackie Spit in Crescent Beach to photograph birds, the estuary, and whatever else I could find. I specifically chose an evening at high tide as I have previously been here and sometimes the canals and flats are not nearly as photogenic with mud, dry/crusty algae, and other low tide qualities. This was one of the views near sunset – the buildings of Burnaby’s Metrotown area with Boundary Bay in the foreground, and the Northshore Mountains in the background. A friend initially thought this could be the buildings of downtown Vancouver but Google Earth confirmed this is indeed Burnaby. This photo illustrates one of the things I like about this region, mo matter where you are there is likely a view of the mountains even when many kilometers away. The panorama below shows a bit of a wider view of the area I photographed, including more of the mountains and some of the old dock pilings (I presume) left over from old infrastructure.
Northshore Mountains and Burnaby’s Metrotown from Blackie Spit (Purchase)
HMCS Discovery and the buildings in the West End of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Photographed from Vancouver’s Stanley Park.
HMCS Discovery and the West End of Vancouver (Purchase)
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HMCS Discovery is a Royal Canadian Navy Reserve facility built in 1944 on Deadman’s Island in Coal Harbour, Vancouver. The view of HMCS Discovery is better from the Stanley Park side, though the island lies just south of Stanley Park itself. I made this photograph in the early evening with the lights of both the Deadman’s Island buildings and the tall apartment buildings in West End of Vancouver reflecting on Coal Harbour.
While I am usually looking at downtown Vancouver when I photograph in this part of Stanley Park, I usually point my camera towards North Vancouver as well. On this evening in April there was still some snow on the North Shore Mountains, which made for a great backdrop to North Vancouver’s lights in the early evening. Crown Mountains is the peak in the background above the lights of North Vancouver.
