Crescent Beach Bike Ride, Saturday March 21st 2026

Mar 22

Rainbow colours, image by helpful passer by.

Iain writes:-

The idea for this ride was to use Transit to allow us to go further afield without the ride turning into a marathon. South and west from Vancouver often leads us into flatter territory so that was another advantage. We chose a meeting point of King George Skytrain and ten of us (nine members one guest) converged on that from as far away as West and North Van. Getting there involved some carrying of bikes as the elevator is out of action at Waterfront for the Expo line so that was a nice warm up exercise for most of the team as two flights of stairs needed to be negotiated.

Even a start time of 0900 at King George meant that those leaving early were only just setting out in daylight with sunrise at 0713. However we did have a whole day ahead of us with twelve hours of daylight, the joy of the Equinox. High point of the transit journey was to see the progress at the stal̕əw̓asəm Bridge, the approach ramps are taking shape and now the line of the bike/pedestrian approach is clear. Roll on summer for that to open for cyclists and pedestrians, it’ll open up a lot more territory for our bike rides.

*The Route, a figure of eight, more or less, anti clockwise at the top and clockwise at the bottom.*

I was able to add a little bit of public art on this ride, rather unfortunately Lingua Aqua, which I had extensively trailed on the way to Bear Creek park turned out to be fencing and a mud patch, so maybe it was away for repair. For those interested you can see it here. We did though see the Winged Lion Woman and the Chapel in the Woods, but none of those were Lingua Aqua. For future rides it seems that Surrey is teeming with public art so there may be an adventure there in the making.

We made our way south largely on quiet roads and bike paths, passing Surrey Court House before a steep descent to the railway line where we waited for a relatively short train to pass and then it was on to the Rosemary Greenway. This pretty much took us to the approaches to Crescent Beach via the Pioneer Overpass with its Connections artwork, unfortunately best seen in the dark.

We then followed a twisting turning route passing some rather fine/ostentatious homes with the occasional scattered liveable home before ending up at Crescent Beach itself. This was a fine lunch spot, looking at herons, eagles and a hawk of some sort. We followed that with coffee at Dudes Coffee House which was a splendid find, thankyou Karla for spotting that on the way in.

Then it was time to make our way east and north, starting on the banks of the Nikomekl River before rejoining the Rosemary Greenway. Some interesting features further north on the greenway where it was sometimes a proper bike path and then just nothing, anyway we made it. We connected with the Green Timbers Greenway and then west, passing the construction for the Skytrain extension and finally returning to King George for obligatory selfie with blossom before making our way home, bearing in mind the two bikes per carriage mandate from Transit.

This was about a 60km ride, the weather was dry which given the preceding few weeks was most welcome although the general conclusion was that it was cooler than it looked. We’ll certainly return and this whole “using transit” really does change the places we can go. Apart from the steps at the skytrain this was pretty much a step free bike ride, regular participants will know that this has become a regrettable feature of some of the rides. Well it’s difficult to tell sometimes. Also only one dead end and a possible U-turn but let’s not get bogged down in semantics.