Qualla: Minnekhada Regional Park

Minnekhada Regional Park: Introduction

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Canmenwalker, CC BY 4.0. The fire started on High Knoll, and then it fell downhill. Burning branches dropped off the rock onto the forest below and lit the lower slopes, which is how a two-hectare fire inside Minnekhada Regional Park became eleven hectares in a single day and fourteen before crews contained it. That was October 2022 - October, in a coastal rainforest, at the end of a stretch of record heat and drought. Smoke hung over the Tri-Cities for days, and the same steep ground that makes the park beautiful made it dangerous to fight on. For two hundred hectares of Coquitlam marsh better known for herons and quiet trails, it was a blunt introduction to a changing climate.

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Image: Canmenwalker | CC BY 4.0

Minnekhada Regional Park: Upper Marsh, Lower Marsh

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit flightlog, CC BY 2.0. The park sits in the far northeast corner of Coquitlam, up against Pitt-Addington Marsh and the Pitt River, and its heart is water. A single marsh is split into an upper and a lower half by a dike, with a small footbridge across it. Around the wetland, forested rock knolls push u...

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Image: flightlog | CC BY 2.0

Minnekhada Regional Park: One Hundred Fifty-One Birds

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carport, CC BY-SA 3.0. Minnekhada is a designated Wildlife Watch site, and the numbers behind that designation are worth stating. In 1993 the Burke Mountain Naturalists compiled a list of 151 bird species observed in the park - hawks, owls, grouse, waterfowl, herons, woodpeckers, songbirds - including ...

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Image: Carport | CC BY-SA 3.0

Minnekhada Regional Park: The Hunting Lodge on Oliver Road

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dllu, CC BY-SA 4.0. None of this was public land for most of its history. The valley was private property into the late 1970s, worked and built on by a series of owners who left farmhouses, stables, fenced fields and cabins scattered across it. Two of the earliest buildings are still standing: the f...

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Image: Dllu | CC BY-SA 4.0

Minnekhada Regional Park: Whose Land, and Who Decides

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alex of Canada, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Kwikwetlem and the Katzie occupied the Coquitlam Lake and Pitt River watersheds for thousands of years before any of the farmhouses went up, and the honest thing to record is that neither nation was involved when the property became a regional park, nor has had much formal ro...

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Image: Alex of Canada | CC BY-SA 4.0