A hike that the locals know about in Whistler. We had someone take us, wouldn’t have found it otherwise.
At one point we walked under the freeway.
Up onto the train tracks. We were told not to walk on the tracks.
The locals don’t care. forest afterwards a very big freight train did come by.
Back down into the forest to see something we don’t see often, a rushing gushing river.
This is what people did a while ago when they wanted to leave their mark.
Today it’s all about spraying with as much color as possible.
In Canada, they authorize this kind of thing. Not sure that I like that they did so on a tree. It has become a problem that viewing nature or even old ruins isn’t enough, everyone wants to leave their mark.
What about arrested decay? There is so much beauty in the rust alone.
So what happened, how did these train cars end up in the forest? It was a freight train, something went wrong and about 7 cars careened off the track and down into the woods towards the river. Many trees were knocked down, but not all, and of course in 60 years others have grown around the train.
Nature is slowly taking back these wrecks.
One of the cars is hanging over the abyss. It didn’t make sense to try and retrieve the cars, so they unloaded whatever was in them and just left them there.
The impact of the cars left it’s damage.
Steel can crumble, but it’s holding up rather well, despite 60 years of snow, rain and wind.
Not only is this now a grafitti park, the cyclists come here and ride all over the trains, they have built bridges and ramps to jump off the tops.
I love old industrial elements like this handle.
Today a new bridge is being built across the river, for bikes and pedestrians. That will make the access much easier.
Back up on the tracks, the old wooden railroad ties and the new concrete ones that were put in when they repaired the tracks after the accident. No one was hurt or killed in the accident, becasue it was freight cars, but that must have been a terrible fright for the engineers.