A contentious plan to improve a lookout view in one of Vancouver's most popular parks by cutting 70 trees will come before the park board for a vote Monday night.

Board commissioners are looking for a way to restore the once popular view from the top of the 127-metre-tall Little Mountain at the centre of the park, which once looked across downtown Vancouver toward the North Shore Mountains.

But for Celia Brauer, a master gardener with VanDusen Gardens, the trees are the view.

"The parks board people are going to be standing there with chainsaws making huge noise, huge destruction, just because we want to stand there and go 'Ooh' and 'Ahh.' It's tragic," said Brauer.

"Who are these people and why do they desperately need to stand atop Queen Elizabeth Park and see the downtown skyscrapers?" said Brauer on Sunday.

"First of all, you can have a view of the downtown peninsula, which I don't think is all that pretty to be honest. It's just a bunch of big buildings. You can see that from a lot of different places," said Brauer.

But park board staff said felling the trees serves a number of purposes: the ever-popular view will be restored, and the trees will be thinned out, making them less likely to come crashing down in a windstorm.

Park board vice-chair Ian Robertson said that if the view attracts more people to the park, it could also draw more visitors to the paid attractions.

"There's no question that if we get more people up to the top of Queen Elizabeth Park, hopefully we would see a bump in attendance at the MacMillan Bloedel Conservatory," said Robertson.

For every tree cut, two would be planted, said Robertson.

Over the years, there have been a number of proposals to restore the views from Queen Elizabeth Park, including a tower or viewing platform, but neither suggestion found support.