When I got back to my little apartment, on the couch, trying hard to remember which roads I had traveled, I decided to open a browser window to google maps. It was a futile move.
Much of the area I ended up walking through in Langley and rural northeast Surrey on Saturday has been altered so dramatically so as to render it unrecognizable with satellite imagery. Oh there are statistics I could roll out on population growth, housing starts etc. In this case, the terrain traversed and the photographs captured should do most of the explaining.

It started as a spontaneous project; walk to the nearby bus exchange and keep taking buses until you can't take them anymore. Either that or you find yourself somewhere that you had never taken a photowalk before.
After a predictable first ride from Newton to Surrey Central bus exchange, the next bus to leave from there was destined for Langley. Why not?
Well, one could probably think of many reasons actually but who was I to argue with "the plan".

Turns out it's not a quick ride. Over an hour later, the old 502 bus crawled onto Logan Avenue and dropped me in front of a ghostly strip mall. Across the street, a lady waited forlornly outside the surreal looking Greyhound Station.
And then immediately, the trek into the "post satellite" age began. Across a new, and not terribly pedestrian friendly overpass to the warehouse district north of the Langley Bypass I went. This was a place where remnant fields and tenuous riparian zones clash with RV lots, glassy new civic buildings and strip malls.
Here, in this place known as Willowbrook, the land rises and those commercial enterprises yield to apartment and housing projects, many unfinished.

Somewhere around here, public maps older than six months stop serving any tangible purpose. New schools, soccer fields and only partially finished "greenway" paths sprung up. And scattered almost evenly, the houses of yesteryear with their sizeable lots.
Whatever road I was on ended at a firehall on 72nd Avenue.
Soon I was amongst subdivisions so new, their houses seemed barely lived-in. I naively followed an official greenway which dead-ended right in the middle of one. A moment later I was at the edge of a little precipice, where a ditch separated myself from the roaring traffic of 200th Street.
Most of the next several kilometres were a mess of backtracking, walking down narrow shoulders of busy roads and stumbling upon holdout houses, abutted against walls of blackberry bush which in turn give way to apartment condominiums.

Somewhere just past where the latest greenway path ended abruptly, I could faintly see an old wooden structure beyond the thorny bushes and strewn garbage. And then, suddenly, I reached the edge of this unrelenting suburban creep. It was a vast openness of dirt, diggers and newly finished streets and laneways on a plateau. And all of these things clashed madly with the distant mountains, the neighbouring wall of houses and few stands of trees.

Beyond here, horses and cows grazed, pigeons strolled from their coop and big red barns dotted the landscape. Latimer Road and the walk north was a reprieve. Some miles later and, all told, 15 kilometres from where I'd got off the bus, I found myself back at the Fraser Highway waiting for a bus again. It felt as though I'd looked something in the eye. And that something had moved me.

Enter Photo Gallery