Connecting the North Shore to Lac Du Bois 'Batch Nature Park'

 The South Shore has a special privilege when it comes to park spaces. Nearly every neighbourhood has some level of Nature and Recreational Park area - Barnhartvale, to Valleyview, to Peterson Creek, Kenna Cartwright and Pineview/Iron Mask Trails. The South Shore supports vast mountain bike networks, dog walking trails, unique landscapes and trails for all weather. Importantly, those parks are connected to their communities in a way that folks can walk, bike, ride, walk the stroller, right from home, without having to get in a car.

However on the North Shore, the area of the City with the most number of folks cycling, the flattest land, and the fewest drivers - North Shore residents have no convenient access to a nature park without significant amounts of driving - yet Lac du Bois Provincial Park (Colloquially "Batch") is extremely proximate to almost every part of the North Shore - yet one cannot access it on foot or bike from these very areas.

I obviously am here to advocate for better connections into the existing Provincial Park trails in Lac du Bois from various areas of the North Shore, and perhaps even expansion of some of the recreational trails in the Park (like a connection to Mara Summit). I think that the lowest hanging fruit to connect the existing biking/walking trails to North Shore communities is to connect the Singh Street Multi-Use Path up to the Lazy Boy trail on the bench. The Blue Line below shows a rough idea of how that trail could connect.

The Singh Street MUP connects traffic free through MacArthur Island all the way to Mac Donald Park; and through quiet bike routes to most of Brock and other parts of North Kamloops.

Thousands of homes and more than 10,000 people would now be a short walk to the walking trails - trails that are currently a 10+ minute drive.

The challenge comes from the complicated relationships between different jurisdictions, regulators and operators participating in this area (as it often is the case in all recreational land use in the South Interior). Trails connecting from Ord Road, up to Batch, cross multiple land parcels, some crown, some private, some park, some City, sometimes with different management within a single parcel - as you can see in the following image:

Trying to get all these kinds of partners in the room together is the hard part, building the trail is the easy part. I think this is important, because the goals and management of the players here is not being met. Whether trying to protect the grasslands for rattlesnakes and other species, a different reality is playing out as more housing is added to the North Shore: lots of illegal trail building is going on, all over the place. I cannot say that many of the folks are even aware that it is illegal to be digging new trail here - but it is happening regardless. I think most are teenagers or walkers just trying to add a connection to nature and recreational opportunity to their neighbourhood

The current attitude of all regulators involved is that said illegal trail digging shouldn't be happening, but it is also hard to fault a significant portion of our cities citizens just trying to spend their time and effort to try to have what most of the rest of the City has in spades (shovel pun intended). The powers that be: BC Parks or the City, having a default answer of 'no' to all proposals before even getting involved in the multi-year, engineered, expensive process of applying for a trail - is instead just leaving the situation completely unmanaged. 

And of course, if environmental impact is being measured, we can't imagine that folks that are driving 20+ minutes round trip that may have instead just walked or biked from home doesn't have an impact - whether that be generating dust, pollution, running over animals, erosion, etc. 

Where a coordinated effort by volunteers, stakeholders like the Kamloops Naturalist Club, the Kamloops Bike Riders Association (who maintain the trails) and the regulators could build out good connections that avoid most of the most critical habitats and erosion problems - instead trails are built anywhere and everywhere - and other old 4x4 trails on fall lines continue to exacerbate erosion problems and remain un-remediated. If the stated intent of forbidding trail development is to protect erosion and habitat, the pragmatic reality is the opposite.

Finally - The Bike Ranch in Valleyview/Juniper is one of the best projects ever built in any City anywhere. The success of the Bike Ranch, the history of Kamloops as one of the birthplaces of free riding (right on these hills in Batch), continues to inspire folks young and old to try out mountain biking. While the teenagers of Juniper and Valleyview can bike themselves to the Ranch - and the teenagers of Aberdeen and Pineview can pick from Peterson Creek, Pineview/Iron Mask or Kenna - the teenagers of North Kamloops cannot access these areas. So it is no wonder that keen teens build jumps and berms in these sensitive areas. You can see in the Google Earth Image below the mixture of abandoned/eroding 4x4 tracks, illegal trails and informal animal tracks that are growing into walking trails.

So I say its time to start actually managing this problem - and propelling the opportunity - to start with one, and then more, connections for North Kamloops residents to access the incredible nature park that is Lac du Bois PP right in their backyard. 

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Post Script:

I also think that the North Shore has the opportunity for other significant park investments including turning most of Schubert Drive over to Park Use (Schubert - A really long Park?) - a Multi Use bridge connection from Henry Grube to Riverside Park (Red Bridge Repurposed as MUP from North Shore to Riverside). And of course the crazy idea of a Gondola which would also connect North Kamloops all the way up to Kenna Cartwright (The GONDOLA)