Pitt-Addington Marsh Wildlife Management Area Bike Ride June 13th 2026

Selfie at LaFarge Lake, Coquitlam - image by Tamsin

The target for the day was 85kms and 350m of ascent, connecting King George and LaFarge Lake - Douglas Skytrain stations. Eight of us took on the challenge, all meeting at King George Skytrain. It’s a bit complicated because Skytrain has a two bikes per carriage limit, while it is rarely enforced, eight bikes seems a stretch, so rather like the animals for the Ark we arrived two by two, more or less.

The first part of the journey took us along a beautiful bike route, through Green Timbers Urban Forest park and on to the Green Timbers Greenway. The Greenway largely follows the route of a natural gas pipeline to Tynehead Park, where we crossed Highway 1 before continuing our easterly progression to Golden Ears Bridge. The day was hot and we needed to keep topping up the water. Lunch was pretty early as we took advantage of shade and water in Merkley Park on 124th Avenue in Maple Ridge. Lots of baseball activity there on Saturday morning. It would have been quite easy to while away the afternoon, but onwards we went until we picked up the start of the dyke network, with cranberry and blueberry fields aplenty.

Eight Bikes A’Resting at Merkley Park by Iain

Soon after the start of the dykes we lost two of the team who needed to make their way back to Vancouver. The main object was not just to cycle the dyke network but to go down a less well used trail to the east of the Wildlife Area. It had been reported that this was likely to be overgrown and impassable and we went into the trail fully expecting to have to either walk or turn round. In the end it turned out to be perfectly passable, with care. I still managed to fall off twice including one fall that set off my Garmin Incident Alert. Not too much harm done, bruises, scrapes and hurt pride the only signs of a casualty.

We also took precautions against ticks, seemingly quite bad this year and the advice for that area was that long trousers would be a good idea.

We were expecting to see quite a lot of birds but in the end it was a bit quiet, maybe the heat played a part. After that and a minor mechanical hooha involving a split pin and disc brakes we picked up more roads and dykes to the Pitt River Bridge. We stopped at Tinhouse Brewery to top up water bottles and avoided the temptation to tarry awhile, after all we had Rocky Point ice cream waiting for us in the Town Centre Park in Coquitlam. We had a couple of choices for a route to Coquitlam, in the end we opted for the longer, more shaded, route. This was a good move as it was still hot.

This was a good day out but it really was hot. We saw some lovely scenery and definitely deserved an icecream. We inadvertently ended up with more ice cream than people, though this is rarely a bad thing. We’ll do this ride again sometime, on a cooler day. Here’s the route from my Garmin 1040 Solar