The Dike Trails of Pitt Meadows, Ranked

Pitt Meadows is flat in a way that people from hillier places find slightly unsettling. It is a floodplain, kept dry by dikes, pump stations and a network of drainage ditches, and the dikes carry gravel paths along the top. The practical result is that a city of nineteen thousand people has more level, car free walking than places several times the size.

New residents always ask the same question: which dike is the good one. It is a fair question with a real answer, though the answer moves with the wind, the season and whether you want a coffee at the end of it. What follows is my ranking.

One thing before the list. None of these trails have shade. Not a scrap. In July that matters more than anything else written below.

1. The Fraser dike at Osprey Village

Best overall, and it is not close. The reason is simple. This is the only dike trail in the city with a village attached to it. Osprey Village sits at the south end of town on the Fraser, with shopfronts underneath the townhouses, so you park once, walk the river and finish somewhere that will sell you something. Every other trail on this list returns you to your car and no further.

The cost of all that is company. This is the busiest stretch of dike in the city, and on a sunny Sunday you will share it with strollers, dogs and cyclists who have not thought hard about their bell. Go early and it is close to perfect.

2. The Pitt River dike

Big water on one side, farm fields on the other, and sky in quantities that are genuinely hard to describe to visitors. This is the walk I take people on when they tell me Pitt Meadows looks like nothing from the highway.

It is second rather than first entirely because of wind. Walk out into it and come back with it behind you, never the other way round, or you will spend the return leg regretting your decisions. Honestly it is a better ride than a walk. This is the trail that will convince you to get the bike sorted out, if it has been hanging in the garage since the pandemic.

3. The Alouette dike

Inland, quieter, and for a lot of households the one you can reach from the front door, which counts for more than scenery on a Tuesday evening. Farm field on one side, ditch on the other, herons standing in the ditch pretending they have not seen you.

It ranks third because there is nothing at either end of it. No coffee, no reason to linger, nothing that turns the walk into an outing. A very good utility walk and a mediocre day out, and those are different things.

4. Rannie Road, Pitt Polder and Grant Narrows

Last, with an asterisk, because it is not really in the same category as the other three. The route runs north into Pitt Polder, the farmland that was diked and pumped dry after the war and leased out to Dutch dairy families, past the ecological reserve, and on towards Pitt Lake and Grant Narrows.

As a place it beats everything above it comfortably. As a trail it costs you most of a day, and there is no version where you nip out for forty minutes. Treat it as a day out rather than a walk, take with you everything you expect to need, and do not count on finding much of anything once you are up there.

Things worth knowing before you go

• Winter is mud season. The gravel on top holds up well. The approaches and the shoulders do not. Boots rather than runners through the wet half of the year.
• The field beside you is a workplace. Nearly all the land the dikes protect sits inside the Agricultural Land Reserve, which means it is somebody's blueberries or somebody's herd. Stay on the trail, close gates behind you, give farm equipment room.
• There is still no shade. Yes, twice. Hat, water, or go in the evening.
• Wind picks your direction. Check it before you set off, not once you have already turned around.

Where to stop afterwards

The walking is free; the rest of the morning does not have to be. Stomping Grounds Cafe & Bistro and The Coffee Pitt are the two names that come up most when people are deciding where to end up, and from about June onwards the answer is more often Sweet Tooth Creamery. Hopcott Farms Bistro is the one to aim at when the walk has quietly turned into lunch. Coastal Collective + Co is a sensible twenty minutes if you owe somebody a present and have been putting it off. And if the ride along the Pitt River proved that your bike needs more help than you thought, Pitt Meadows Cycle is the local answer to that.

The short version

Osprey Village when you want company and something at the end of it. The Pitt River when you want the view. The Alouette when you simply need to get out of the house. Rannie Road when you have a whole Saturday and the weather is behaving. None of them in the middle of a July afternoon, because I have already said it twice and I meant it both times.