Pacific Spirit: A Photo Essay

By Susan Olding

PACIFIC SPIRIT

A Photo Essay

By SUSAN OLDING

Most days, I walk in Pacific Spirit Regional Park.

The park surrounds the University Endowment Lands near Point Grey, Vancouver, and borders the Georgia Strait.

Thirty years ago, when it opened, Pacific Spirit was praised as one of the largest urban parks in Canada.

The xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people saw it differently.

They had lived on this land for thousands of years. They had never ceded the territory.

The bones of their ancestors lay beneath its criss-crossed trails.

Today, many people, including me, go to Pacific Spirit to immerse ourselves in nature. We watch the play of light through the towering trees; feel the stones and knotted roots beneath our feet; listen to salamanders rustling through ferns and ravens croaking in the branches; fill our lungs with the intermingled notes of spruce and cedar, hemlock and fir.

Even though the park bustles with dogs and joggers and cyclists, and some weekends, you can hardly go ten steps before you pass a noisy crowd, it’s the closest Vancouver gets to the wild. 

The closest Vancouver gets to magic, some say. To the sacred.

Maybe they’re right. Once, I thought I glimpsed a unicorn on Sasamat Trail.

Yet, to celebrate the park as wilderness, as “nature” is to delimit it from “culture.”

 

From people.

 

And people are as integral to Pacific Spirit as its firs and alders and fungi and flowers.

For nine thousand years, the Musqueam came to this forest to gather materials and medicines. For them, it was a place of learning and ceremonial retreat.

Over the centuries, it also became a place of danger.

Danger for the Musqueam, who can no longer engage in some of their traditional practices here on pain of arrest.

Danger for the trees. In 1912, the entire area was clear cut to make way for the University of British Columbia.

Danger, sometimes, for runners and hikers.

 

Ten years ago, a middle-aged woman was murdered while jogging on St. George’s Trail. 

 

Her killer has never been found.

And yet, in these woods, I have also witnessed less destructive forms of human intervention.

Once, at Christmas, someone decorated a small oak tree with ripe apples.  

Another time, I stumbled on a painting of clouds, propped against a mossy stump. 

Apparently, it had been there for days. A second artist had written a poem of thanks. 

The painting spoke more eloquently than the poem.

 

 

 

 

 

You know what they say about pictures and words.

Acts like these remind us that even the largest, wildest park is a cultural construction.  

Made by humans, for humans, with human purposes in view. 

What, then, is Pacific Spirit’s purpose? What is the meaning of this place?

Is it a triumph of conservation against encroaching development?

Or a site of sanitized settler expansion, its Indigenous history forgotten and erased?

Maybe it is both.

Maybe it is something else.

Something beyond “park.” Something even beyond “land.”

Only the forest knows for sure. 

I try to tread lightly on that ground.

Notes: I am indebted to M.J. LaSalle (2014). “Escape into nature: The ideology of Pacific Spirit Regional Park.” (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C. And Scott Steedman. “A Place of Learning: A Musqueam View of UBC and BC History.” The Tyee. 11 April 2018. 

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