Forest life

I'm telling you I'm having a hard time keeping up with my folks!

Almost as an afterthought they decided that they wanted to visit one of the local national parks on their last day, and chose Lynn Canyon Park, one of the smaller and less known parks in North Vancouver. My dad planned the trip (and I have to say it's nice that someone else does that for a change!) and we set off after nine, picking up some food from Safeway along the way. We took the seabus from Coal Harbour to North Vancouver and a bus from there, and set on exploring the park.

One of it's highlights is a small suspension bridge - which is free, unlike in Capillano - that was pretty cool, and would have been even cooler without the group of Japanese tourists yapping and yelling who were there at the same time we were. Forest itself was very different to the ones we visited on Vancouver Island - this one is only about 100 years old after "the Europeans" (as they call them here) cut off all the thousand year old trees that used to be here. Still, it has been a national park for the past 90 years so it was still pretty old.

We gave up the hope of seeing any racoons pretty soon after seeing all the people who let their dogs off the leash there (which was - of course - forbidden), but had high hopes for seeing some banana slugs we had seen pictures of drawn by a group of local school children. We knew two things about this creature: the guide called it "aptly named" and the children were delighted about them and had indeed coloured them all yellow. So, you'd think it would be easy peasy to find a yellow slug in a forest. You'd be wrong, it turned out - it was probably too warm (about 20 C) and too dry for the slugs, so they remained hidden - but also bright yellow is quite the usual colour in the forest floor when sun peeks trough the leaves. We did finally manage to find two, and it is quite an impressive sight as you can see from the photo right.

As we were walking back we came across a delightful notice: they were presently filming Stargate: Atlantis in the park. I have to say the thought had crossed my mind when entering the park there was a big "crew parking" arrow sign on the side of the road, but I later put it down to the Fire and Rescue Service who were training on the cliffs. I had secretly hoped it would have been Stargate itself so I might have been able to get a glimpse of the lovely Mr. Browder, but Atlantis was third on my list (after Galactica, of course).

After couple of more steps we came across a thick fog - smoke machine! I screamed hopefully which made my mom laugh - and it turned out I was right! You know all that fog in Stargate? Well, it isn't really in the forest naturally, they have this huge white plastic pipe going on the edge of the forest with holes in it, and a guy at the end of it stuffing smoke into it - get the idea from the photo on the left. We passed a set in the forest, a wardrobe van, a generator, lot of trucks and the catering - unfortunately didn't get a glimpse of the delightful Mr. Flanigan. Still a treat for a sci-fi nutter like myself.