The Age of Adaline | Barnet Marine Park, Burnaby — the shoreline where a life starts over

The beach scene is short and the geography does most of the work: cold water, a grey inlet, mountains on the far shore, two people meeting where the land runs out. The production shot it at Barnet Marine Park on Burrard Inlet, about twenty minutes east of downtown Vancouver.

This was industrial ground for sixty years. The Barnet sawmill opened here in 1899, ran until 1959, and shipped lumber out by water; the town that served it is gone and Burnaby turned the site into parkland in the 1980s. You can still read the history along the beach — old pilings standing in rows offshore at low tide, a rock groyne, flat ground where the mill floor was. The shore is coarse sand and pebble, the water is genuinely cold, and the view across the inlet takes in the North Shore mountains and the mouth of Indian Arm.

Freight trains run the CP line along the back of the park, so a horn goes through the trees every so often and then the quiet closes again.

Come at low tide on a weekday, walk east past the swimming area to where the pilings start, and look back at the beach. Log booms drift out on the water. A woman with a hundred years to fill could stand there a long time without anyone asking her a single question.

Location photo via Wikimedia Commons.