Dave HuggardA new installment in my efforts to pay attention to the Green Necklace, a local neighbourhood walk that can easily become all-too-familiar: tracking where you can see The Lions from the trail.
The Lions are the icon of North Vancouver and much of Vancouver itself. The twin peaks are often hidden by clouds or obstructed by buildings and trees, but when they pop out – usually dappled by snow – they can startle even long-time Vancouverites. They are Vancouver’s version of Hokusai’s Mount Fuji, or the Eiffel tower, or, more recently, the One World Trade Center in New York.
Iconic views are better for being rare. Pattern 134 “Zen View” in Christopher Alexander et al’s A Pattern Language points out that views that are always visible quickly become invisible from familiarity. We recently lost our long-time Zen view of The Lions when the little old house across the road became the huge beige wall of a developer’s investment opportunity. But that has just made me pay more attention to where I can see the mountains on my neighbourhood walks. And so, a project to map views of The Lions from the Green Necklace (and, because I’m still a bit aggrieved by the beige monster, to map what obscures the views here in suburban North Vancouver).
Lions View 1
View over and through(!) Queen Mary school.
Lions View 2
The full view over Carson Graham school.
Lions View 3
Nice view, with a bonus free-standing basketball hoop.
Lions View 4
Perfect little Zen view through the rec centres.
Lions View 5
A grand view on Grand Boulevard.
Lions View 6
The shrubbery has almost taken over.
I did the mapping, camera in hand, on a high-overcast day with the mountains glowing in a silvery light. I found 28 separate spots where The Lions were visible. At times they seemed to be rising like the full moon above buildings or tree tops. The best full-on view is above Carson Graham high school (but do the kids even notice the mountains from day to day?) There is also a view at Queen Mary school, over the roof and through fortuitously aligned windows in the gym (or did an architect plan that little miracle?) There is a Stonehenge-like alignment through the roofs of two community centres, several views through shrubbery best suited to song sparrows, and even one view featuring that other North Vancouver icon, the free-standing basketball hoop.
And here are the stats, for the Zen-viewers or the monster-house-aggrieved: The Lions are visible from 11.8% of the Green Necklace. Trees obscure the view for 29.5% of the distance. Houses, or sometimes their accompanying hedges, hide the mountains 28.3% of the way. Apartment buildings account for another 16.6%, townhouses and condos for 5.5%, and miscellaneous structures (schools, rec centres, courthouse, even an elevated lawn-bowling field) make up the remaining 8.3%. And maybe that’s not a bad mix for reminding us to pay attention to the view.