An entire city has built up around St Paul’s Hospital, which has been providing patient care and advancing medical technology over the last century in downtown Vancouver. Thinking ahead to the holiday season, and the legendary St Paul’s light display, I have chosen the iconic hospital for today’s photo feature that includes modern and archive […]

For fall colours on the North Shore, snow-capped mountain views and to stare at the legendary lions all afternoon, Capilano River Regional Park, featuring Capilano Lake and the Cleveland Dam, is the place to be. Photo credit: Morisawa81 on Flickr Cleveland Dam, built in 1954, blocks Capilano Lake which supplies fresh drinking water to the […]

We’re into our second week of fog in Vancouver as a cloudy blanket drapes across the downtown peninsula and surroundings, parting occasionally mid-afternoon to let in a few rays of sunshine before swallowing us up again at night. Foghorns every 60 seconds in the harbour add ambiance (and to some, annoyance), as orange and red […]

Cathedral Grove is a trail network looping through an old growth forest in MacMillan Provincial Park on Vancouver Island. 50 minutes north west from Nanaimo, and about 20 minutes from Parksville, it’s split by Alberni Highway 4, which is the route to Port Alberni and Tofino. The name “Cathedral Grove” appeared in correspondence to the […]

The Stawamus Chief, commonly referred to as “The Chief” is about 50 minutes north of Vancouver along the Sea to Sky Highway, as you approach Squamish. Currently in the running to be named one of the 7 Natural Wonders of BC, it is the second largest granite monolith on earth and a very popular spot […]

A new month has arrived with rain, winds, and Halloween preparations. In Vancouver history, October has had some defining moments, some of which have been captured and preserved in the Vancouver Public Library and City of Vancouver Archives, while others live on through the words of Chuck Davis’ History of Metropolitan Vancouver. Here’s a quick […]

The Stanley Park Seawall officially opened on September 26, 1971 although it had been under construction for decades — and wouldn’t be declared “officially complete” until 1980. That September though, the loop was 9 kilometers around Stanley Park and it completed James Cunningham’s vision for the Seawall, which he began working on in 1917. View […]

Before heading down to Disneyland in Anaheim from San Francisco this August our group took a 1-day detour up to Napa and stayed in Calistoga. Keeping with the family-friendly theme of our trip, we visited a winery where children are welcome and even get their very own local drink (non-alcoholic of course) to swirl, sip, […]

Fully prepared to put together a Vancouver Icons photo post today, I browsed the Miss604 Flickr Group for some inspiration and I found a beautiful shot of a cruise ship at the terminal in downtown Vancouver by Nattawot Juttiwattananon (below). While cruise ships don’t quite fit my Vancouver Icons series, there are enough colourfully composed […]

One place I have always wanted to visit when in San Francisco is Alcatraz, which is as notorious as some of its former prisoners. The 9 hectare island sits about 2.4kms from San Francisco and has had many lives. First as a lighthouse, military fort and military prison in the 1860s, then as a federal […]