If you are a true outdoors person and you want to live in the Lower Mainland, the North Shore is your ideal location. Within minutes you can be in areas so secluded you can't see any sign of civilization. Living in Surrey we aren't quite as close but we're close enough to make it a nice day trip. At the end of August we took a trip across the river to Mike Lake in Golden Ear's Park. This is a provincial park north of Maple Ridge and since all of our drinking water comes from the North Shore mountains they keep the parks as natural as possible.
I'd never actually heard of Mike Lake and I'm not entirely sure you could call it a true lake. It might have been grander a few thousand years ago but since then it had filled in form the edges and was more marsh then lake. It has a bit of history as one of the main logging camps from when much of the old grown timber had been cut down in the 1800's. A typical site in the lower mainland are the 10 ft wide stumps of old grown trees with notches cut in where loggers placed planks to get up high enough to cut down the tree.
It must have been incredibly intimidating to walk up to a tree that big and have to cut it down by hand. Still amazed they took so many of those big trees. We only had time to do the short loop around the lake but one of the local maps showed an enormous network of trails. We'll definitely have to go again next summer with proper hiking gear so we can explore some of the more secluded trails. Having said that I think we only saw a handful of people along the way. There were a few more people in the parking lot but they seemed to be trying their hand at a bit of fishing and kayaking.
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