Walk up Churchill Drive on a weekday morning in late August and nothing looks different. The gate swings open at noon like it always has. The paved road still climbs 160 meters from the lower lot to the summit parking area, then another 23 meters if you push to the geographic marker itself. The view from the top still runs from Haro Strait to the Olympic Peaks on a clear day. If you only measure Mount Doug by what you can see from the summit, 2026 looks like every other year.
But the way a Saanich East resident actually moves through this park, especially anyone walking a dog off leash, has been rewritten twice this year by two projects that had nothing to do with each other. One closed the summit road for five and a half months. The other shrank the off-leash roaming area from more than 20 kilometres down to a single fixed loop, then survived an act of vandalism serious enough that the mayor recorded a video about it. Neither project was designed as a package. Together they changed what a regular visit to PKOLS looks like more than anything since the park's name was formally restored in 2022.
The road that closed in January and didn't fully reopen until June
Saanich locked the gate on Churchill Drive on January 19, citing construction on a replacement telecommunications tower at the summit. The existing tower is more than 20 years old and no longer meets current federal regulatory standards, and the district framed the new structure as a necessary piece of regional public safety and cell infrastructure. Contractor TEP Canada began work that same month, and the closure was pitched as roughly three months, then quietly extended through the end of June as geotechnical work, foundation pouring, and equipment staging pushed the timeline back.
The disruption came in waves rather than one clean shutdown. The lower parking lot closed for an evening and a following full day in late January. A crane relocation shut the base lot again on May 7. The final major closure ran June 8 through 12, when crews transported the new monopole, raceway cable path, and carrier equipment up the mountain and the gate stayed locked to give them room to work. Saanich noted the lot could reopen early if the work wrapped ahead of schedule, but the practical reality for most of the winter and spring was that anyone who wanted to drive to the summit lookout, rather than hike or bike the road during morning hours, had to plan around a project with a moving deadline.
That chapter is closed now. Churchill Drive is back to its normal rhythm: gated to motor vehicles until noon every day, open to pedestrians and cyclists in the quiet hours, and driveable from noon until dusk except on holiday long weekends. If you stopped visiting the summit lot in the spring because you'd heard it was closed, that's no longer true. What has not gone back to normal is how dogs get to move through the rest of the park.
The off-leash loop got smaller, and the debate over the fence isn't over
For years, off-leash access at PKOLS extended across more than 20 kilometres of trail on the park's south end. That changed with Saanich's People, Pets and Parks Strategy. Finalized maps published on January 20 confined leash-optional use to a fixed 2.3-kilometre loop covering the Glendenning, Whittaker, and Maddock trails, and the district began installing page-wire fencing along that boundary in late February to keep dogs from straying into adjacent sensitive habitat. The initial 2026 financial plan set aside $150,000 for the fencing, signage, and benches.
The reasoning, according to the district, was ecological rather than punitive. A PKOLS-Mount Douglas Conservancy survey found that 60 to 70 percent of the park's south end had already been damaged by unauthorized trails carved out during years of unrestricted off-leash use, much of it dating back to the pandemic period when people started avoiding designated paths. Conservancy vice president Michelle Watt presented those findings to council directly, arguing that education and signage alone hadn't stopped the trampling and that fencing was the only tool left that actually worked.
Not everyone agreed with the design. In early March, someone vandalized the new fencing over the course of three days, bending posts, pulling out stakes, and stealing 21 of them, causing an estimated $3,000 to $5,000 in damage. Saanich Mayor Dean Murdock released a public statement calling the destruction disappointing and noting the cost fell on taxpayers at a moment when the district was already managing tight budgets.
"Damage to the fence costs taxpayers money, and it takes our park staff away from the important work that they can be doing around Saanich."
The trail closed for repairs and additional security measures went in around the construction site. Then, at an April 14 council meeting, Saanich approved another $515,000 for the broader Pets in Parks strategy, with $270,000 of that earmarked specifically to finish fencing the remaining leash-optional sections at PKOLS. The CRD DOGG Society, a local nonprofit that advocates for off-leash space across the region, called the decision "simply unacceptable" and pointed out that roughly 30 to 40 percent of Saanich's population owns a dog. Councillor Karen Harper defended the spending as a fiduciary responsibility to protect land she described as significantly degraded, and the district maintains that page-wire fencing, while less attractive than the split-rail alternative some residents wanted, is both cheaper to maintain and more effective at actually stopping dogs from leaving the trail.
Neither side has backed down. The CRD DOGG Society says it's now looking toward the fall 2026 municipal election hoping to elect councillors more sympathetic to expanding off-leash access. Whatever happens at the ballot box, the 2.3-kilometre loop is the operating reality on the ground right now, not a temporary measure awaiting revision.
What this looks like on an actual visit this week
If you're walking into PKOLS for the first time since last year, here's the current shape of the park rather than the one you might remember:
- Churchill Drive is fully reopened to its standard schedule, gated to vehicles until noon daily and driveable into the evening except on long weekends.
- Off-leash access is limited to the Glendenning, Whittaker, and Maddock loop on the park's south end, fenced with page-wire construction along the boundary.
- Seasonal beach restrictions are still in effect through August 31, meaning no dogs on the beach, around the playground, or in the lower parking area near Cordova Bay Road until September.
- If your dog needs more room to run than the fenced loop allows, Saanich's pop-up dog park at Lambrick Park in Gordon Head remains open for the season while the district plans a permanent replacement location.
- The park is still an active, sometimes unpredictable stretch of road. A single-vehicle collision closed the corridor from the lower lot through to Ocean Park Lane for most of a day in late July while police investigated, a reminder that Cordova Bay Road and the park's access points see real traffic on a summer weekend.
None of this changes the reasons people have always come to Mount Doug. The forest still runs from beach and creek habitat up through Garry oak outcrops near the 225-metre summit, and the annual Salmon Carcass Transplant each January still draws well over a hundred people to Douglas Creek to help feed nutrients back into the watershed. What's different in August 2026 is that the park now enforces its boundaries in ways it didn't three years ago, and a resident who plans a visit around the version of PKOLS they remember from 2023 will find both more certainty on the summit road and less room to let a dog wander than they're used to.
For anyone weighing whether Saanich East still fits the daily rhythm they want, that kind of on-the-ground detail tends to matter more than a market report ever could. If you're thinking through what a move in this part of Greater Victoria actually looks like day to day, FarupScott Group can walk you through the neighbourhood the way people who live in it actually experience it.
