Westwood Park

Today I visited for the first time this trip my favorite Nanaimo park, 20-acre Westwood. Surrounding Westwood Lake, the park lies at the base of 1,023-meter Mount Benson, Nanaimo’s locally iconic backdrop. A beautiful 6-kilometer footpath circles the picturesque lake, making for a wilderness-like feeling inside city limits.

After a walk around the Lake, driving back east toward downtown from the higher ground at Westwood, the view reinforced anew Nanaimo’s incredible setting. The weather, particularly looking east, was crystal clear. The mid-afternoon sun brilliantly illuminated the snowy top halves of the rugged Coastal Mountains on the B.C. mainland while Vancouver Island’s topography shaded the lower parts of the Mountains and the Georgia Strait. Spotlighted by the sun and clearly visible to the southeast was active volcano Mount Baker, a solitary 10,781-foot peak about 100 miles distant in northwest Washington. No photos of this view--a still camera cannot capture scenes like this.