On a visit to Victoria, I naturally checked out the hotels.

A view from the rooftop of the Cht Vctr:

The comfy, completely accessible guests' terrace at the Dlt has one of the finest views of the inner harbor (why didn't I photograph that?):

And in the attic of the Mprss I found this employees' toilet!:

Couldn't get into a single hotel pool, though.

Out biking along the south edge of Vancouver on a Sunday afternoon in June, an open fence and no one around brought me to this rooftop, where I ate a sandwich.

And just recently, returning from the ferry in Tsawwassen, I stopped in Central Surrey, where I found the fence and a stairwell door to this brand-new condo sitting wide open. All the interior doors were considerately taped unclosable, too.

The photos begin to all look much the same; but that moment of first climbing out of a drab, dusty, airless, anonymous stairwell you've been trudging up for ten minutes, onto a breezy rooftop at sunset, with a view for miles around, is always magical.

There are days when I feel like a wimp: passing by an open door, unlocked gate, or unsecure fence, telling myself that, if the door is open, it must mean there's someone nearby.

Then there are days, like a Monday evening last May in 'Rotown, when, amazed and grateful, I stroll right in to that condominium construction site through a welcoming gap in its fencing -- expecting at any moment to be shouted at, but hearing nothing but the sounds of my own footsteps up the forty-plus flights of stairs to the rooftop. 

I've been inside the new Brtnwd Twn Cntr, and up the first of its towers, three times.



Twice I entered through unlocked doors in the service corridors of the old mall (including a door directly adjacent to the mall's security office), and once, legitimately, I visited with a friend working on-site (I didn't mention to him my other visits).

My last visit was in November.

The times I dropped by self-invited, it was late afternoon Sunday, and there was no one around.

 

Well, I did spot this security guard, sitting vigilant at his window:

See him?

The views from the top were pretty extraordinary.

And zoomed in:

In November, after a visit to my dentist in 'Rotown, I wandered over to Dunblane Avenue to check out one of the latest highrise condos. As luck would have it, the front doors were propped open for some new residents who were moving in. A little uneasily (I don't really like trespassing in apartment buildings; it's a bit too close to entering someone's home), I strode into the lobby, where I waited with others a few moments for an elevator, then dove instead into a stairwell.

I climbed to the top and found some views.

Sometimes I use an app to track the distance I walk or bike; sometimes I find the map of the finished route rather satisfying. Here's a bike ride I took, mindlessly alternating left and right turns (so to surprise myself):

Here's a big walk I took one day, travelling the breadth of Vancouver as far as I could in each direction:

And here's the crazy meandering track I laid while exploring, one sunny day in September:

That dense knot in the middle is me finding my way, via the hotel lobby, to the top of the Xchng Building.

At the beginning of September, when it hadn't rained in awhile, I returned to Renfrew Ravine Park, and, after pausing to take a blurry photo of it, entered this drain:

I'd been here before (in sandals!), and had got as far as the junction room. Today I was wearing rubber boots, and meant to go farther. I hoped, in fact, to get at least to the "1950mm-diameter brick-floor pipe," which, according to the beautiful hand-drawn map that I'd found and photographed (as mentioned in the aforelinked post), lay somewhere beyond a "slide" in the "Collingwood Trunk".

I am not going to post that map here (I somehow feel that it's not mine to share), but here are a couple of others of Still Creek and its underground sections. The first I found online (left is north):

The second I found in the neighborhood that same day, after emerging from the drain:

Beside this map is the following text:

Vancouver's Still Creek Watershed Streams of Dreams Murals
"Still a Creek Under the Street" 

Today, Still Creek is channeled through a pipe underground for two kilometers beginning at its headwaters near Central Park in Burnaby and finally making its first appearance near the 29th Avenue Skytrain station beside Renfrew ravine. It then passes through a culvert under 22nd Avenue and emerges again beside Renfrew Park Community Centre where it is contained by stonework retaining walls. Still Creek continues eastward, partially hidden in culverts, to Burnaby. There it flows above ground until it empties into Burnaby Lake. The lake drains into the Brunette River, which feeds into the Fraser River which flows out into the Georgia Straight. Still Creek drains about 2,400 acres of East Vancouver and much of the western portion of Burnaby between Kingsway and Hastings Street. 

Nearly 2000 Dreamfish on four Still Creek Stream of Dreams Murals remind us that rain falling into the Still Creek watershed flows to the greatest salmon river in the world—the Fraser River. Children from Norquay, Nootka, Renfrew, and Thunderbird Elementary Schools painted the Dreamfish for Still Creek and share a vision of hope for this partially lost waterway.

Inside, it was slow going. The drain is indeed a pipe, and the rounded bottom was slippery with scum (I occasionally saw a tatter of toilet paper float by). I could shuffle carefully forward with my feet in the stream, which sometimes splashed up onto my legs; or else, straddling the stream and its scum, I could waddle awkwardly forward in short, knock-kneed strides—either way, I had to run my hands along the walls, to catch myself if I slipped, as I often did. I was also hunched over, to keep from hitting my head on the top of the tube (though I was wearing my bicycle helmet), and very soon my neck and shoulders were sore, and I was sprinkled with slimy creekwater and dripping with sweat.

I paused at the junction room, then continued down the left fork.

Occasionally I would pass a little chimney-like alcove with stepirons leading up to a manhole cover. In one of these, my flashlight lit up a petrified spider, floating, it seemed, in mid-air, as white as chalk, and bulbous at its joints, as if the mineral dampness were somehow turning it to coral.

Once, I turned off my flashlight and in perfect darkness listened to the many-voiced water rumble.

As I proceeded, the rumble got louder, till I rounded a curve and came to the slide.

It was two or three meters long, and rose at a grade of about twenty percent. Set into the left wall was a handrail, though it was so rusty that sections of it had completely corroded away. As I stood there considering my approach, my boots sent water splashing in every direction. At last, I looped my flashlight onto my belt and stowed my phone in my backpack; then, with both hands on the rail, and planting my feet as high up either side of the pipe as I could reach, I started heaving myself up sideways. I slipped once, but didn't fall. I made it to the top, if barely.

The rest of the story is anticlimax. I found the brick-floor pipe, and shuffle-trudged along it for awhile, happy to be able to stand upright, but aware that each step forward was another I'd have to take back. I went round a curve, to see if anything lay beyond it, then one more, and when nothing did, I started back.

Crouched, arms out for balance, I slid on my heels down the slide.

I sang a few notes, revelling in the reverberations.

As I neared the outfall, I turned off my flashlight and proceeded for awhile by feel. Eventually, I saw glimmers of reflected light. 

When I reemerged into daylight and fresh air, I was exhausted, grimy, and wet with sweat, but exhilarated. I had been underground for an hour and five minutes.

At about 7:30 p.m. on a Monday in August, I found my way into a deserted multiplex under construction.

I could have just strolled in through those tarps, but I took the skulking route around back, where I was required to climb some scaffolding stairs to get inside.

Looking down at where the seats will go in future Theatre (let's say) 7:

Future theatres 3, 4, and 5:

The pictures don't do justice to how big and airy -- and dim, at dusk -- this shell of a building was.

There was a ladder leading up to the roof, but I only made it about four-fifths up before deciding that I was not going to have the nerve to transition off the ladder onto the roof, and turning back. It was a tall ladder.

On a Tuesday in August, I revisited Th Chrlsn, a condo under development that I'd been eyeing for a while. (On Halloween I'd climbed its sister building and watched amateur fireworks pop and fizzle all around me, small and mute with distance.) That day the fencing was down, and there was a sign on the lobby doors, apparently for tradespersons, saying that the lobby would be closed for tile laying from 6:00 p.m. on that day's date to sometime on tomorrow's. I looked at my watch. It was 5:45.

The lobby was locked but the gate to the underground parking was up. As I was descending the ramp, some guy crossed my path on his way to his vehicle. I was forced to follow him for a while to get to the elevators -- one of which, hung with movers' drapes, proved operable. I rode it to some floor, I cannot now recall which one, but most likely a couple from the top, from where I climbed a stairwell the rest of the way.

Down at street level it had been dusk; up here it was full day.

Why, there's my old friend, Vncvr Hs!

On what my camera, to my surprise, tells me was a Friday in July, I waltzed in to the construction site of the stylish, top-heavy Vncvr Hs. There were perimeter cameras aplenty, but no one apparently around and the gate wide open. Well, wide unlocked. So in I went.

 And up I climbed.

It was a calm, bright, colorful day.

On a Friday in July, I took a public tour of the Greenpeace boat docked at Lonsdale Quay.

On the tour, I learned that the boat had been a something or other before it had been a Greenpeace boat.

After the tour, I strolled along the boardwalk till passing a condominium under construction. I looked hard, but casually, at an obvious point of entry; and finally, after a couple of passes, when there were not many people around, and those who were around were probably not looking at me, I casually hopped over some formwork and into the site. It felt a little brave.

I climbed to the top, fourteen storeys or so, if I remember, and looked out at the water.

Why, there's the Arctic Sunrise!

Then down and back out the way I had come. I had learned nothing.