Access:
Adjacent to the district Forest Service office on the east side of
Highway 99, on the south side of the Mamquam River Bridge.
At Brennan Park, a large community leisure center with an indoor swimming pool anchors the playing fields. There are tennis courts beside the Mamquam River and picnic tables dotting the recreation trail. You can explore the Mamquam via this dike path to its mouth at the Squamish River. In summer, when water levels are low, there are also good sandbars to fish from.
Loggers Lane leads south beside the park and its campground for visitors, many of whom come to compete in tournaments or the annual Squamish Days Loggers’ Sports on the first weekend in August. It then meanders past the Smoke Bluffs trailhead to Rose Park, named in honor of Squamish pioneer Rose Tatlow, whose home once stood beside the Mamquam Blind Channel. The recently minted park is dedicated to the memory of Squamish’s pioneer families, such as the Carsons and the Wrays, and their sections of the park are formally planted with flowers, cherry trees, and trellised Interlaken seedless grapes that will soon bear fruit. Rose Tatlow, whose homesite, along with an adjacent property to the north, is more sheltered from the sounds of highway traffic, would have approved of the new picnic table on a small deck by Lily’s Garden, with its views of the slough and the climbing bluffs.
> NEXEN BEACH
Access: From Highway 99, follow Cleveland Avenue, the town’s main street, to its south end. Cross the train tracks, then turn right onto an access road which leads to the beach.
Piles of driftwood lie jackstrawed along the shoreline of Nexen Beach. At first glance, Nexen’s hard-packed, dark surface appears more like a mudflat where it stretches out into the shallow reaches of Howe Sound, the southernmost fiord on the North American coastline.
Bounded by an abandoned wharf to the south and an active cargo dock on the north, Nexen Beach is the centerpiece of an ambitious waterfront redevelopment plan set to unfold over the next decade. A passenger-ferry terminal, hotel, conference center, arts center, and more are envisioned to rise on the 28-ha (69 -acre) site. Dozens of wave riders gather at Nexen Beach in July for the North American Windsurfing Championships. An onshore wind blows here with the same sustained intensity that draws windsurfers and kiteboarders to the Squamish Spit, north of Nexen at the mouth of the Squamish River. Nexen Beach is envisaged as a wind-sport training area. Design modifications in windsurfing boards make Nexen Beach the logical place to launch. These newer boards are fatter, a tad shorter, and more rectilinear than previous models. Their most radical design feature is a meter-long (yard-long) center fin that provides greater stability and allows these boards to carry a much larger sail. Launching one is best done in shallower water than is found at the Spit, which makes Nexen Beach an ideal place to practice.
An extensive paved area behind the beach also offers a place for novice kiteboarders to practice their kite-handling skills. If you find Nexen Beach somewhat underwhelming, for instant relief just raise your eyes to the twin sights of Stawamus Chief Mountain’s Grand Wall and nearby Shannon Falls’ white scarf of cascading water. The view is reason enough to pay the beach a visit. One of the beach’s most novel features is a curved straw bale-and-adobe “fort” above the high-tide line, a legacy of the popular Squamish Equinox Music Festival (SERF) held in June. “Fort Nexen” provides a much-needed windbreak behind which bathers can warm up while at the same time offering unobstructed views of ocean action.
> WHAT ’S IN A NAME?
Although there have been attempts to translate “Squamish” as a First Nations expression meaning “mother of the wind,” there is no linguistic root for the name. The original European explorers rarely recorded the names of the native people they encountered; according to noted Northwest Coast anthropologist and linguist Dr. Wayne Suttles, none can be identified with names used later. The name appeared in a 1907 study as “Squawmish,” referring to the aboriginals who still inhabit two dozen settlements along the Squamish River.
> SQUAMISH SPIT
Access: Windsurfer signs indicate the Squamish Spit turnoff, west from Highway 99 at the traffic lights onto Industrial Way, then guide travelers past the West Coast Railway Heritage Park to the unpaved dike access road.
The Squamish Spit is a 4-km (2.5-mi) finger of dike at the mouth of the Squamish River where it flows into Howe Sound. This narrow piece of land helps keep the harbor free of silt so that large freighters can tie up nearby. But as windsurfers have long known, there’s also no finer place to catch an ocean breeze. As predictable as the sunrise, each day around noon a strong wind carries across Howe Sound. And woe betide those caught out on the turquoise-toned waters unprepared to ride this zephyr. It blows with such force that the unwary can’t right themselves once dunked. Fortunately, there is an emergency rescue service available courtesy of the Squamish Windsports Society (www.squamishwindsurfing.org). Launch fees at the spit are currently $20 per day or $75 for a season’s pass.
At the very tip of the spit is the launch area. You can drive to a drop-off point beside it, unload your board, then park if you’re here for sport. If you just want to watch, come out by bicycle to avoid the inevitable congestion, though be warned: the surface of the dike is loose gravel, not the best material on which to ride.
Kiteboarders are the new kids on the spit, and these high flyers are turning heads and rapidly attracting converts from the ranks of windsurfers, wakeboarders, snowboarders, and even motocross riders. They’ve also created controversy. That’s because laying out the lines of one kiteboard prior to launch takes up the same amount of room that six windsurfers need, and space is already at a premium on the spit, which boasts more high-performance sailing days than almost anywhere else in North America.
Out on the spit, due west of the Stawamus Chief, kiteboarders take wind sports to new heights—literally. These latter-day Icaruses enjoy what are arguably the biggest and best views in the entire Sea to Sky corridor: Shannon Falls, the Stawamus Chief, Sky Pilot Mountain, Goat Ridge, Mamquam Mountain, Atwell Peak, and Mount Garibaldi—all revealed in one 360 -degree panorama. Far below, the dike in summer is lined with pink Douglas spirea, or hardhack, which at a glance can be mistaken for fireweed.
There are often a hundred or more vehicles parked on the shoulders of the spit on summer afternoons. But don’t let that stop you from checking out the action. Find a spot on the bank to watch where you’re not in the way, then marvel at these aerialists as they ride the wind high above the waves.
> SQUAMISH ADVENTURE CENTRE
Access: Turn east off Highway 99 just north of the Cleveland Avenue intersection (38551 Loggers Lane; 604-815-5084; www.adventurecentre.com)
Squamish styles itself as the outdoor-recreation capital of Canada, and that’s what its boldly designed, almost 3,000 square-meter (9,500 square-foot) Adventure Centre silently proclaims to passersby on Highway 99 at the entrance to the city’s downtown core. Designed to emulate a bald eagle spreading its wings, the soaring glass structure is composed of 210 panels of half-inch tempered glass, one of the few building materials not sourced locally. The building’s main columns were milled from Douglas fir, which, along with the crushed basalt granite pad, came from the Squamish Valley.
The center promotes the joys of kayaking, river rafting, mountain biking, eagle viewing, windsurfing, kiteboarding, skateboarding, camping, and above all else, rock climbing, a sport that first put Squamish on the adventure map in the 1960s. Guided
