Bear Mountain, some pictures from today

"Downtown" Bear Mountain

Daniel is now 16 and learning to drive so I am beginning to take tours around the region so that he can get practice driving.   There are numerous new subdivisions out in Langford and I figure over the next months I will get Daniel to drive me to all of them.  

Today we ended up at the top of the Bear Mountain development.

Finlayson Reach Condos

I have been ambivalent about Bear Mountain from the start.   My biggest beef is that it right at the foot of Mount Finlayson and spoils the view I used to get from there.   This is not somewhere I would live - I do not get golf, I like wilderness and I like hiking, I am not a fan of long acres of green grass.   That said, others like living here.  I know a few people that have moved up there and like it.  

This region has a shortage of housing and each unit built anywhere frees up more space.  Bear Mountain may be top end, but each local buyer frees up a house elsewhere in a neighbourhood like Gordon Head. A house in Gordon Head is then bought by someone from my neighbourhood and then a house here is available for the first time buyers.

There is still almost no retail up at Bear Mountain.  You have a long drive for a litre of milk and some bread.  There are some restaurants and as we discovered at Cullinaire the other day, the Copper Rock Grill seems to be very good.

Kuma Sushi

Is there enough business at Bear Mountain to keep the hotels functioning?  It is a long way to go from the core of the city that I would think only golfers would be drawn here, but I could be wrong

The location also makes sense because it is an area of very low impact on the environment.   It is on rock, it is not situated in a crucial part of a watershed, it has density, and the whole property is to the east of Hwy #1 and therefore has very limited wilderness values for wildlife or functioning ecosystems.  There are few places that make better sense than where Bear Mountain is located.

I could only see on crane in evidence, so work seems to have slowed down a lot.   Lower down I could see some new developments on the lower slopes and then off of  Millstream road.

Cavalcade Terrace behind Costco

In our driving, Daniel took us the wrong way coming out of Costco and we ended up on Cavalcade Terrace.   Another small development of which there are so many of the Westshore that all look very much the same.   Not only is every house the same style, the style is the same over and over again.

There is this bland acceptableness about these sort of developments.  Ultimately it feels like the sort of suburban landscape that sucks out all the individuality and soul from the people.  I know this sounds harsh, but I grew up in the 'burbs of Vancouver (Tsawwassen to exact) and that is what it felt like to me.   But ultimately I have always been an iconoclast and just do not fit the societal expected norm.    This always drove my former mother-in-law nuts.