St. Albert’s oldest forest has reopened to the public after more than a year’s worth of renovations.
About 50 guests were at the Grey Nuns White Spruce Park on Monday Nov. 14 for the park’s reopening. The park had been closed to the public since October 2021 for some $3.1 million in renovations. Guests took part in a ribbon-cutting ceremony and guided tours of the park.
St. Albert Mayor Cathy Heron said council was very excited to approve the park’s renovation, which was backed by about $794,000 in federal and provincial support.
“This park is about recreation, but it’s also about preservation,” said Heron, who noted how that the forest was older than St. Albert itself.
“We’re protecting these trees. We’re protecting them from fire, we’re protecting them from flooding.”
New features
The park contains the White Spruce Forest — the oldest tree stand in St. Albert and one of the last white spruce forests in an urban setting in western Canada. Hundreds of bird and mammal species call it home.
This renovation was meant to limit human impact on the forest by managing public access to it, said Manda Wilde, interim manager of recreation facility development for the City of St. Albert.
Wilde said the renovations added about four kilometres of wood-chip, gravel, and asphalt trails to the park, most of which followed existing footpaths. Also added were two boardwalks, an outdoor classroom, a wetland viewing platform, and a viewing deck shaped like a beaver’s tail. Crews closed some footpaths in the forest to reduce habitat fragmentation.
The renovations made several additions to the open area on the forest’s west side, including a climbing log, a picnic shelter, and an outdoor classroom shaped like a bird’s nest. Look up, and you might spot 19 symbols burned into the underside of the shelter’s roof representing birds, trees, the Grey Nuns, and other elements of the park. Wilde said the big dirt patch by the shelter was temporary, and would fill in with grass next spring by the shelter next spring.
The renovated park also features new rules. Cyclists are now banned from the park’s interior trails, and will have to stick to the asphalt path along its edge, Wilde said. Visitors are also banned from feeding wildlife, as feeding birds had caused unnatural changes in their behaviour (as anyone who has had one of the park’s chickadees land on them would know).
Not bad, say locals
St. Albert artist and photographer Memory Roth said she was initially concerned the renovations would drive off the park’s wildlife, but later learned moose and birds had continued to frequent the park during construction.
“It might turn out to be a pretty good thing,” she said of the renovation, adding that she was happy to see at least one merlin in the forest when she visited Monday.
“If I see a moose, then for sure!”
Resident Sharon Murphy said her father, Peter Murphy, often spoke about the park’s planned renovation prior to his death in 2020. (Murphy helped craft the city’s management plan for the park and spearheaded an ongoing campaign to add thousands of new trees to it.) She said her father would be really pleased to see how it turned out.
“Forestry was his whole life, so to have (this park) as an education centre for children and the people of St. Albert, he would just love that.”
Visit stalbert.ca/rec/parks/places/parks/grey-nuns for information on the park.
