2022-3-24 The North Salish Cycle Route
Cortes Currents
English - March 24, 2022 11:58 - 4 minutes - 9.96 MBNews cortes island discovery islands quadra food security energy indigenous nations Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - The ‘aha moment’ for Sue Bossley arrived last Fall. Her employers, the Access Point Marine Transportation Group, started a water taxi service between Lund and Cortes Island. They had just bridged the final gap in a what was now a continuous loop running through Powell River, Cortes Island and Campbell River. The North Salish Cycle Route was born.
“You can start anywhere actually. People from Powell River can ride up to Lund and catch our Cortes water taxi across the desolation sound into Cortes Bay. Then from Cortes Bay, they can ride all around Cortes and then take the ferry over to Quadra and go to Campbell River, ride along the Oceanside route back to Comox and then back on the ferry again,” she said. “The whole area has really just been a huge community. We all have so much in common and I just thought that with everything that's happening right now and fuel prices high as well - how awesome to be able to just go for like a wonderful little biking holiday in our own neighbourhood!”
While some people may make the trek relatively quickly as possible, others may choose to spend a week or so checking out communities along the route.
Bossley won’t make the trip herself until April, but has seen posts on bikepacking.com and Facebook that refer to this as ‘the dream trip.’
She has been working with Sunshine Coast Tourism, Tourism Powell River and Tourism Vancouver Island to promote the route.
“On the sunshine coast, we have the Sunshine Coast Bike Route and in Campbell River they have the Greenways Route. All it does is just let cyclists know that they're welcome here,” explained Bosley.
She set up the North Salish Cycle Community Facebook Page before heading off for the Vancouver Outdoor Adventure Show earlier this month.
“I just encourage cyclists to use it as their own. They can ask each other questions, post their favourite photos, post their favourite stops along the way, and that kind of thing,” said Bosley. “It's really just a community page just the same way that you see a community page for the Sunshine Coast Trail or the Sarah Point Dropoff. People have lots of questions that are doing these types of things.”