The first cool mornings of fall bring the regulars back out to Rock City Road. You know the crowd: the woman with the two spaniels who always takes the wide, groomed side of the loop, the retired guy who does the narrow, root-and-rock side because his knees apparently don't care, the after-school group of young families who never make it past the picnic table near the water. Fifteen to twenty minutes gets you around Cottle Lake if you keep a brisk pace. Longer if you stop to let the dog investigate every log.
Most people doing that loop have no idea that this specific piece of ground, the one their feet are on right now, came within a rezoning hearing of becoming a subdivision.
The Parcel That Almost Wasn't Park
Back in 2014, Nanaimo council directed staff to lock down option agreements on roughly 221 acres scattered across five parcels in Linley Valley, one of them a 50-acre lot at 5260 Tanya Drive. Those agreements were only good for a year. Several lapsed without a purchase ever closing.
By 2017, that same Tanya Drive parcel was back in private hands and in play again, this time attached to a rezoning application from Broadview Developments for a 29.3-hectare residential subdivision, the kind of proposal that typically ends in five-acre lots and a new road grid, not a trailhead.
A group of residents who called themselves Save Linley Valley's Hidden Ridge organized against it. One of them, Susan Juby, noticed the development signs go up and started leaving sticky notes around the neighbourhood to let people know what was coming. The petition that followed asked council to reject the rezoning, work with residents on a plan for the valley, and fold the Hidden Ridge property into the existing park instead of building on it.
Council did the second and third things. In a May 28, 2018 closed-door meeting, they approved buying the parcel outright for $3 million, a million dollars more than the city's lapsed 2014 option had priced it at. The land transferred to the city on June 15, 2018.
"It just goes to show that a small group of people can make a big difference."
That's Vicki Adamson, one of the four residents behind the campaign, talking to the Nanaimo Bulletin after the vote. It's a fair summary of how this particular corner of Uplands got its trail system, and it's a detail that doesn't show up on any trail map.
How the Park Actually Grew
None of this happened in one clean transaction. The city's own account of Linley Valley Park's growth shows a series of separate acquisitions stacked over roughly a decade. The 2014 option round was aiming for a linear park of just over 367 acres. By 2017, the combined Linley Valley and Cottle Lake holdings sat around 378 acres. The Hidden Ridge purchase in 2018 pushed the total to 428 acres, the figure the city's park planning page still uses today.
Paul Chapman of the Nanaimo Area Land Trust, the organization that has quietly shepherded most of these deals, made the case for why the Tanya Drive piece mattered beyond its own footprint: it connects Lost Lake to the rest of the park system, which is a different kind of value than raw acreage. A patchwork of protected land only functions as a network if the pieces actually touch.
What that patchwork adds up to on the ground, for anyone deciding how to spend a Saturday morning:
- Cottle Lake loop from the Rock City Road entrance: a 15 to 20 minute walk on one side of well-groomed, wide trail, and a slower, root-heavy path on the other, good for anyone who wants variety without committing to a full hike
- The full Linley Valley Loop, a 5.7-mile route with about 833 feet of elevation gain, running closer to two and a half to three hours for most walkers
- High bluff sections toward the park's ridgelines, where the payoff is a clear view over Departure Bay to Newcastle Island, or across to Mount Benson
- Singletrack maintained by the Nanaimo Mountain Bike Club, whose volunteer trail work keeps the mountain-bike network in the valley rideable through the wet season
- Leashed dogs allowed throughout, though the city has been explicit in the past that building unauthorized trails, even well-meaning ones, isn't permitted on any of this land
The range matters more than any single number. This isn't a park with one use. It's short enough for a school-night walk and long enough for a Sunday commitment, and it exists in its current shape because people who lived here treated a rezoning notice as something worth fighting.
The Built Half of the Neighbourhood's Commons
If Linley Valley is the informal, fought-for half of Uplands' shared space, Oliver Woods Community Centre is the planned half. It's a LEED-certified building with a twinned gymnasium, badminton, pickleball, basketball and volleyball drop-in for adults, a youth stream for ages 10 to 16, a fitness studio, and a preschool room.
The fall 2026 gymnasium schedule runs from Tuesday, September 8 through Sunday, March 28, 2027, closed on statutory holidays, which means the drop-in sports calendar most Uplands families build their week around is now in full swing. Front desk hours are 8:30 a.m. to 4:15 p.m., Monday through Friday, if you need to sort out a rental or ask about the schedule in person.
Outside the building, Oliver Woods Park does its own quieter version of what Linley Valley does at a larger scale: trails, a children's playground, an outdoor wellness park, and interpretive paths circling a duck pond. It's a smaller loop than Cottle Lake, but it serves the same after-work, after-school function.
One logistical detail worth knowing if you're eyeing the pottery studio program: the clay isn't sold at every location. It has to be purchased at one of five specific city recreation facilities, Bowen Park Complex, Beban Social Centre, Oliver Woods, the Nanaimo Aquatic Centre, or the Nanaimo Ice Centre. Small thing, but it's the kind of small thing that saves a wasted trip.
Where the Loop Ends, on Rutherford Road
Uplands' retail corner, Nanaimo North Town Centre on Rutherford Road, runs on its own seasonal rhythm, and by late September that rhythm has already turned over. The 2026 food truck season, Strait Curbside, closed out its run on August 28, with vendors like Van Isle Poutinerie and Carthage Mediterranean Tunisian Cuisine taking their last turns in the west parking lot for the year.
What's taking its place right now is the Rotary Club of Nanaimo's Fall Used Book Sale, running September 25 through October 4, an event the club bills as the largest used book sale in the city, with more than 100,000 titles spread through the centre. It's not run by the mall. It's run by volunteers, the same basic civic mechanism that got Linley Valley's Hidden Ridge parcel into public hands in the first place, just applied to a folding table of paperbacks instead of a 50-acre rezoning fight.
That's the thread running under all of this. The trail loop, the gymnasium schedule, and the book sale table all depend on the same thing: people who show up, whether that means signing a petition in 2017 or hauling boxes of donated novels into a mall corridor in 2026. None of it was inevitable. All of it took someone deciding it was worth the effort.
Next time you're circling Cottle Lake as the light goes low, it's worth remembering that the ground under your feet was almost somebody's driveway, and that it isn't anymore because a handful of neighbours decided to make it their business.
If you're curious about anything else happening in this pocket of Nanaimo, or you'd just like to talk to people who know the neighbourhood at this level of detail, the Charlie Parker Team is always happy to talk. Contact Us.