A person cycling on the Selkirk Trestle with the GNRC dock in the background.

Bike and Roll Routes To The Club

Updated on
A map showing the Gorge Road lanes and the Galloping Goose Regional Trail.

The City of Victoria has an excellent network of safe bike & roll routes that makes using a bike, trike, or mobility scooter a safe and effective way to get to Gorge Narrows Rowing Club.

The club is fortunate to be on two major All Ages and Abilities (AAA) routes, the Galloping Goose Regional Trail, and Gorge Road.

These two routes connect to others, and make it easy and safe to get to the club from Saanich, Esquimalt, Vic West, Downtown, and pretty much anywhere in the City of Victoria.

Parking Your Bike

There's a lot of bike parking withing a few meters of the club! Here are a few things you should know:

  • Please do not ask to bring your bike into the boathouse. We need all of the space to carry boats in and out!
  • The area is pretty busy, and security has not been a problem.
  • That said, make sure you lock your bike appropriately using a U-lock, a heavy folding lock, or a heavy chain. Don't use a cable lock—cable locks can be cut in seconds with simple hand tools.

Planning Your Trip

The route you'll find best depends a lot on your individual preferences. Some people are comfortable riding in traffic. Other people will ride in traffic for short stretches. And many prefer to stick to quiet streets and protected bike lanes. There's no right or wrong way to choose.

Here are some tools that many people find useful. Unfortunately, none of them are perfect.

  • The City of Victoria's map of all cycling facilities is a static map that shows the different types of bike lanes in the city. These include AAA protected lanes (like Gorge Road) and multi-use pathways (like the Galloping Goose), along with AAA shared-use streets, and painted bike lanes. The AAA network is the gold standard for comfortable cycling. The map is most often useful as a sanity check on the routes generated by tools like OpenStreetMaps and Google Maps.

    Unfortunately, as of August, 2025, the Gorge Road protected bike lanes are still missing from this map!
  • Google Maps can provide cycling directions and has an excellent, intuitive, interface and is amazing at finding locations. Unfortunately, Google Maps sometimes generates cycling routes that are really bad. Still, it runs on everything and has an excellent user interface, and it's easy to modify the routes it generates. For example, with the web interface it's easy to drag the route onto a AAA lane if one wants a more comfortable route.
  • OpenStreetMap is an open source mapping project that has multiple web, Android and iPhone apps. On the web, OpenRouteService has solid features and is being used on this page. On Android, at least, the most widely used app is OsmAnd. Because OpenStreetMap is open source the routes tend to be updated a lot more frequently than Google Maps, and there are different layers that are dedicated to cycling. For example, the previous link uses the CycleOSM layer, which highlights and colour codes different types of bike & roll routes.
  • Another useful tool is BRouter, which has a web interface and a plug-in for OSMAnd on Android phones. BRouter supports multiple routing profiles, and it's Safety profile, while not perfect, makes good use of safe cycling infrastructure.

Some Key Choices

If you're coming from Esquimalt or Vic West on the E&N, your main choice is whether to continue all the way to the Johnson Street Bridge, then take Harbour Road to the Goose and go across at the Selkirk Trestle, or to make your way to Pine Street and cut through Banfield Park. Cutting through the park is obviously shorter, but, time wise, the difference is less that you might think, and the longer route is entirely on separated infrastructure.

If you're east or south of Downtown, then the easiest route is generally to take the Johnson Street Bridge to Harbour Road, the Goose, and the trestle. Wharf, Blanshard, and Vancouver are all good ways to get to Pandora, which will then take you to the bridge.

If you're north of Pandora, you can either go to Pandora and across the bridge (as above), or take the separated bike lanes on Government to Gorge Road East, then turn into Selkirk Village at Jutland. Pandora and Caledonia are both good ways to get to Government (although if you're on Pandora you might as well continue across the bridge). If you're even farther north, you can take Kings to Hillside to Gorge Road East.

If you're farther east, then taking Haultain to Kings is an option.

From Saanich, it's often easy to get to the Galloping Goose or the Lochside Regional Trail (which connect with the Goose near Uptown Mall).

From further west in Saanich, Tillicum Road has protected lanes, but there's a gap in Gorge Road West's bike lanes between Tillicum and Harriet. Maddock Ave and Balfour Ave are reasonable streets to ride on, so Maddock to Balfour to Gorge Road E makes a decent route.

From Reynolds Secondary School

About 15 minutes. Take the Lockside Regional Trail and continue onto the Galloping Goose.

From Esquimalt High School

About 12 minutes. Take Carrie to Craigflower. There's a crosswalk there. If one turns left on Craigflower, then there's a cut-through to Selkirk Avenue after about a half a block (or one could just walk a bike on the sidewalk). From Selkirk Avenue, go to Banfield Park, then take the Trestle.

From Victoria High School

There are several good routes:

From Oak Bay High School

There are several good routes: