This walk was a little different from those that came before as it was an evening stroll in the moonlight. On summer days the west beach at White Rock is a busy place. After ten o'clock on a week night it was far from deserted but still quiet enough for pleasant conversation as we walked along the promenade and the pier. We saw several other couples and some families enjoying the mild night air. When we parked the load dance music from one of the local clubs seemed out of place with the moonlight on the waves, but as we walked it faded away. During the day the street has many shops with souvenirs and ice cream but most were closed this late in the evening.

The promenade is a paved path, well lit with street lights and lights in the trees. It follows the route of the railway almost 2.2 km, with the street and parking on one side and the West Beach on the other. The City of White Rock Museum is on the promenade, and often there are artists displaying their works in this area during the day. The 470 m pier is also well lit and a good place for an evening stroll with great views of the city lights across the water. I found it a great place to experiment with my camera settings to try to get some photos.

It was high tide the evening we were there so we didn't spend much time down on the beach. We did walk down to look at the big white rock which gives the area its name. Before we reached it there were some teenagers climbing up on the rock and just enjoying the evening. We decided not to try climbing up on it ourselves. Unfortunately the rock is a magnet for graffiti and there were some new names and dates scrawled across it. The city repaints the rock white at least once a year which makes it unnaturally white. It makes me curious just how pale the original colour was in comparison. The early photos I could find show it to be much darker in the past. You can also see that years ago there was a ramp up to the top of the rock so it could be used as a view point.

The rock itself is a glacial erratic, likely left in the area by the retreat of the glaciers from the last Ice Age. There are conflicting reports if this rock is actually the one the area was named for, but the name does harken back to pre-contact times when the rock had a place in local legends. Here is the legend as told by Bernie Charles, a Chief of the Semiahmoo Tribe in 1964, "The Sea God had a son, tall, handsome and strong, who dwelt with his father in a subterranean cavern not far from the present town of Sidney on Vancouver Island. On the shores of the gulf, on the original site of Sidney, lived a tribe of Cowichans, whose Chief had a beautiful daughter whom many young braves had wooed, but she refused them all.

One day when the lovely Princess was bathing in the waters of the Gulf, the son of the Sea God rose to the surface beside her and, as mortal youths had done, fell in love with her at first sight. He seized her and carried her off to his father’s mansion, in front of which was a tremendous totem pole of rock carved with the history of the ocean. The Sea God was angry with his son for bringing a mortal, even one so fair, to his Kingdom, and, refused his blessing on their marriage, ordered them to return to the girl’s tribe.

The young God, determined to keep his Princess, went with her to her father’s home where she said he would be as welcome as a son, and in time would rule. But when they rose from the water and presented themselves before the old Chief of the Cowichans, he too refused to accept the, and declared, like the Sea God, that mortals and Gods should not wed.

The young man, by now more determined than ever raised in his powerful arms a huge white rock which stood on the shore and said to the Princess: I will hurl this tone over the water! Wherever it falls, there we will make our home and establish our tribe. So saying, he cast the stone far over the gulf. High over the island it went, and as it rose the son of the Sea God took his bride in his arms, dived into the sea and swam off in the direction of the great boulder. So swift were his movements that, as the huge rock fell on the mainland shore sixty miles away, the young God and his bride rose out of the water beside it.

There on the shores of a bay shaped like the crescent moon, they made their home, and the mighty Semiahmoo Tribe, the half moon tribe, grew and became famous. After many years the tribe dissolved, but a remnant of that once great and powerful people still lives near the Rock."