Quick Facts:

• 2.8km walk
• Difficulty: easy, but not stroller friendly
• Traffic: light to moderate
• Facilities: free parking
• View: forest, creek side views
• Overall score: 6/10

Mahon Park is a sizeable municipal park in North Vancouver, featuring a very pleasant forested walk beside a loud Wagg Creek and a more mellow Mission Creek.

There are 10 entrances to choose from. The entrance at 18th St at Jones Avenue is the best among them given the easy access to a parking lot just across Jones Ave. The parking lot is open from 8am to 10pm.

No washrooms were marked on the map, but there were public washrooms available in the building west of the Fen Burdett Stadium, and also at the north side of Kinsman Field South.

The trails were unnamed, and there was no signage inside the park. We had our AllTrails App open to navigate and we had good cellular reception throughout the park. It would quite easy to get lost if you weren’t familiar with this park and you didn’t have a GPS app with you. Being in the center of town, though, you could just take any of the exits and find yourself back on city streets in minutes.

Almost immediately into the downhill hike from the entrance, we were greeted with the loudly flowing Wagg Creek.

Wagg Creek is the main surface runoff and storm water drainage for the City of North Vancouver. This means that whatever urban surface pollution, be it pet poop, garbage, or gasoline spills, gets diluted with rain water and carried into Wagg Creek untreated. Although the creek looked and smelled like any other fresh, clean creek, I would not recommend playing in this water.

The sounds of the creek was very soothing and it nicely blocks out the urban noise you would expect in the middle of the city. The trails follow the valleys formed by the creeks so it was easy to get lost in the woods and forget that we are no more than a few hundred meters from the closest roads and houses at any time.

There are 3 main parallel trails in the park. Each trail was only about 700-800m, and they all follow a fairly gentle grade. They are not accessible to strollers due to several flights of stairs.

Sections of the trail were mildly muddy.

There were also many little decorated bridges that zigzag across the creeks. Junior was into setting some loose leaves in the water these days, so it was very easy to keep his interest up for the hike.

We hiked down from Jones Ave Entrance, followed the southeast trail beside Wagg Creek, then turned north and followed the northwest trail beside Mission Creek, which emerges suddenly onto Kinsman Field South.

From here, we could look across the field and see our parking lot, but it looked like the sport fields were fenced off from this end. We could have crossed the fields from the northern border of the baseball diamond and get back to the parking lot, but it wouldn’t be much fun. So we turned south again back into the woods, and took the middle trail until we can hop over Wagg Creek to retrace our steps to the Jones Ave Entrance.

Overall, our route was about 2.8km. Junior probably finished about 1.5km of it. Interestingly this park isn’t available on AllTrails yet so I’m not sure how much elevation we did, but it felt pretty minimal. We would rate this as a very high quality, toddler friendly, albeit short walk in North Vancouver.