Pitt Polder and the Road to Pitt Lake

Almost everybody in Pitt Meadows lives in the compact strip in the south. Drive north for a few minutes and the city stops being a city. Fields open on both sides, ditches start running parallel to the road, and by the time you cross the Alouette River you are in Pitt Polder, which is a different place with a different history.

The polder was diked and pumped dry after the Second World War by Pitt Polder Ltd. under Dr. Jan Blom, which leased roughly ten hundred-acre farms to Dutch immigrant dairy families. That is why the barns up there look the way they do, and why the road grid is so uncompromisingly straight. Everything you can see is dry because a pump says so.

Past the polder the road carries on to Pitt Lake at Grant Narrows, and that drive is one of the few things in this city that genuinely counts as an outing. Here is how to do it, and what is worth stopping for on the way.

Getting out of town

The route is simple enough. Head north out of the Town Centre, work your way east across the farm grid, then north on Rannie Road until the road runs out at the water. It takes longer than the distance suggests, mostly because the last stretch has nothing in it to measure yourself against.

Do your errands before you leave. There is nothing to buy north of the Alouette, and that is not a complaint.

The farm belt on the way

Before you cross the river you pass through the working agricultural core of the city, and this is where the stops are.

Amsterdam Garden Centre is out in the farmland, and it is the reason a good many local gardens look the way they do. Hopcott Farms Bistro does a farm lunch, which makes it one of the better reasons to leave the house on a weekday. Twinberry Farms is out that way too, working to the season, so what you can get there depends entirely on when you turn up.

Off the side roads in the farm grid there are more: Meadow Ridge Berry Farms, Meadows Landscape Supply if you have a project and a truck, and Specimen Trees Wholesale Nurseries, which grows on a scale that surprises anyone who assumes nursery means garden centre. None of these are detours in any meaningful sense. They are all within a couple of minutes of the road you are already on.

Across the Alouette

The polder itself is flat in a way that is hard to convey to people who have not driven it. Dikes, drainage ditches, pump stations, dairy barns, hedgerows, and mountains standing straight up out of the flat at the far end. There are no shops up here, no fuel and no coffee.

What there is instead is farmland with people working on it. Keep out of the field entrances, do not stop in the middle of the road for a photograph, and give the tractors room. Pitt Polder Ecological Reserve is up here as well, and Rannie Road runs north through the whole thing, straight for long enough that you stop noticing you are driving.

The end of the road

The road finishes at Grant Narrows on Pitt Lake, and the change is abrupt. You spend a long stretch looking at flat farmland and then the land simply stops, and there is water, mountain and a great deal of sky. It is rarely still out there. There always seems to be wind coming down the lake.

It is a place for walking, watching birds and getting out on the water rather than a place for swimming. Bring layers even in summer, bring your own water, and understand that once you are out there you are committed to the drive back.

Doing it on two wheels

Plenty of people ride the route rather than drive it. The terrain is flat and the roads are long and straight, which makes for fast, monotonous, oddly satisfying cycling, and the dike network gives you options on the way home. Pitt Meadows Cycle in the Town Centre is where to get the bike sorted first, and The Coffee Pitt is a sensible last stop before the fields start, because after that there is nothing until you come back.

When to go

Autumn, if you want my honest opinion. The cranberry and blueberry fields have colour in them, the light comes in low across the flat, and the roads are empty. Summer weekends out at Grant Narrows can get busy enough that the fun goes out of it. Winter is bleak out there in a way that a small number of people love and most people quietly do not.