I want to say thank you to Frank Bucholtz for his column bringing attention to the proposals being made for Redwood Park.

I live about an hour’s bike ride from the park and grew up with the place. I frequent the park often, sometimes multiple times a week.

While there are suburban-type neighbourhoods to the north, the general area is definitely rural. The ambience of the park is rural and the reason people go to the park is for rural-type leisure or gatherings. Even those few on bikes tend to amble. There is maybe the odd Frisbee throwing or badminton, but it’s all in an overriding sense of the simplicity and specific history of the place – in its basically uninterrupted layout and in its beautiful old trees.

The biggest “intrusions” have been well-blending long tables and an unimposing children’s playground and washrooms. At one point there was a nice wood stove for people to cook on until it was removed due to destruction by vandals.

And while there are many reasons (like the above) to reject the proposals for ziplines and other adventure-type games, the fact is, they are all beside the point, for the sole point of the place is that it has been preserved down the years as heritage land. If it hadn’t been, then we wouldn’t even be talking right now about a Redwood Park.

Whoever it is that said there’s a “heritage precinct” in the park, with which the proposed amusements won’t interfere, clearly doesn’t know anything about the place, and is, to all appearances, using weasely tactics to misinform.

Separate from the “heritage precinct”? You mean the “precinct” that has the replica of the Brown brothers’ tree house and a monument giving some history of the place?

Mr. Bucholtz is correct; the entire 80 acres of the park is heritage in all its sprawling natural variety, since the Brown brothers started on the place when it had just been logged: 40 acres to each of them, back in 1893. The brothers didn’t just live on and work the “precinct” that the parks-and-rec crew put the monument on. Their land (which is now Surrey’s) includes both the more cultured top of the hill, and the relatively wilder forest down the hill.

If any of you members of council really give a damn about the identity and cultural foundations of Surrey, then reject these proposals as they stand. There are 1,000 other places to have activities for outdoor enthusiasts such as those proposed.

What is it with Surrey anyway, and its apparent loathing for its own treasures – or its inability to appreciate them for what they are?

Paul Stilwell, Surrey