It’s a place on the Sunshine Coast where many go just to find some quiet, alone time. It’s a Sunshine Coast Regional District Park and for all of us who live here we’re so appreciative of the vision and foresight someone had to make it such. Cliff Gilker Park is a sanctuary of peaceful solitude. Located just beside the Sunshine Coast Golf and Country Club in Roberts Creek, this west coast forest gem, for some, is a daily destination.
To walk in the cool embrace of Cliff Gilker Park is to experience the west coast rain forest at a most personal level. Surrounded by giant cedars, the meandering path seldom truly dries out at any time of the year. Lush green, cool mosses cover the forest floor. The groomed trails are easily, softly and quietly walked. In the fall you’ll lose count of the many and varied types of colourful mushrooms you’ll see. Even the highway, close by at one end of the forest walk, is completely masked from your eyes and ears. The only sounds, if you choose to walk in your own personal silence, will be that of birds, the breezes in the tall trees and the soothing sound of a mountain stream as it etches its twisting path through this very special place that is more a cathedral than a forest.
Though there are many different courses and trails to explore within the park, there’s always one destination that everyone stops at. “The Waterfall”. Few refer to it in any other terms other than “The Waterfall in Cliff Gilker Park”. In the winter of 2008 I took a photograph of that waterfall just after a substantial snowfall. The wondrous, mysterious colours of the stream and the brilliant highlights of the snow on the rocks caught my eye. I found the scene both dramatic and soothing.
I finally was moved to paint the image in February of 2011 but when I went to title the piece I had a problem. Did the waterfall have a name? Anyone I asked only knew it as “The Waterfall In Cliff Gilker Park”. That just didn’t seem appropriate, so I called the local Regional District. Surely it had a name. It’s simple really, while the Park is named after a local man long since gone, the waterfall was named for his wife “Aletta Gilker”. There is no plaque at the waterfall stating that name, and few if any know the name to this point in time. I hope my painting and its title will serve that purpose at least. From now on we’ll all know the name of that beautiful waterfall “Aletta Gilker Waterfall”.
