I commute most days by bicycle. It’s only across town but Squamish is a long thin town. There is a trail of sorts that takes longer but avoids cranking the entire way on the edge of the busy highway.

Like a lot of things about Squamish, the trail has an impressive name but the reality doesn’t quite live up to it, yet (think “Outdoor Recreation Capital of Canada”, “The Heart of 2010”). This is the “Discovery” trail, which is nicely developed in some places with footbridges and signage, and in other places is just a track on the other side of the ditch from the highway or a rutted dirt road at the back of a subdivision.

About halfway, for a few hundred metres, it’s the old highway. I guess they moved it when they made the new bridge or something. Now there’s a tree-lined stretch of two lane ashpalt sleeping quietly over to the west.

It starts in gravel and ends in gravel, but most of the way it’s in good condition, I guess since nobody drives cars on it anymore. The ghosts of 1000 tiretracks linger, but it’s just my 1 incher riding down the yellow line now. On busy days, you can just hear the car noises from the new route through the screen of old trees. It feels like the set for a play about a highway, before the actors get there.

If you’re heading south, you can see through a break in the scrub down the active road. The cars all curve off where it diverts. At night the lights come at you and then seem to dissapear like ghosts.