A dynamite place to stop
Panoramic views of Bowen and Gambier islands unfolded as we drove toward Lions Bay for our first stop at Mile 9, a beach walk at Porteau Cove, a provincial park popular with scuba divers communing with the flora and fauna adorning a shipwreck and artificial reefs.
The park, just 35 minutes from downtown Vancouver, offers accommodations that include waterfront campsites and two log cottages built for the 2010 Olympics. The upscale Legacy Cabins, with beavers and bears carved into their big logs, have views over Howe Sound.
Eight miles farther, Britannia Beach was our favorite pit stop. At the Galileo Coffee Co., housed in a 1905 building, we picked up Canadianos ( Americanos with maple syrup) to sip while sitting on the deck overlooking the snow- capped peaks of the Tantalus Range.
This cafe was the former home of the manager of the Britannia Mine, perched on the slope above us and once the British Commonwealth’s biggest copper mine. It closed in the 1970s but was revamped in 2010 as the Britannia Mine Museum, a great place to experience a miner’s day in the130 miles of tunnels that snake 2,000 feet underground. We donned hard hats and hopped into a cramped miners’ shuttle for an intense guided tour of those tunnels.
Our 67- year- old interpreter/ guide Marshall Tichauer mined here from1965 to 1974. He started a drill used to insert dynamite into rock, introducing us to the job’s deafening noise. He demonstrated mining by candlelight as in the early days when the town of 2,000 could be reached only by steamship.
All along the route there is wilderness — roadside ponds with picnic tables and short trails, turnoffs to Alice Lake and Cat Lake, great places to lounge away an afternoon. Just north of Britannia, Shannon Falls plummets 1,100 feet down a cliff, and an easy trail leads to its misty base through towering trees.