Lightning Lakes Backpacking Trip

July 11, 2026July 8, 2026 / Maria / 2 Comments

Last week I wrote about Keats Island, which was the first in a slew of backpacking trips I did in late Spring. Many people are familiar with Lightning Lakes, which is a popular location for day trippers in Manning Park. I’ve done a lot of backpacking and car camping in Manning Park and I love spending a day relaxing at the lake in the summer. At this point, I think I’ve hiked the majority of the popular trails in Manning Park, including many times hiking around Lightning Lakes, but I’ve never done the Lightning Lakes Chain Trail. I’ve been wanting to do it for years and I finally made it happen in early June.

Lightning Lakes Chain Trail starts at the main parking lot and includes hiking around the first two lakes before continuing 11km into the backcountry, passing 3 more lakes along the way. It’s a good hike for early in the season because the trail follows the river through the valley and has minimal elevation gain. So even though the hike starts at a pretty high elevation (1200m), all the snow melts at once, meaning the trail is usually completely clear by June. I first became aware of this hike in 2018 when I did the Skyline II Trail from Strawberry Flats to Mowich Camp. That trail hikes up to the top of the mountain and then follows the ridge through Despair Pass and up to Snow Camp Mountain. From there, you can see Thunder Lake, which is the final lake on the Lightning Lakes Chain Trail, located in the valley below.

On this occasion, I left my house on Saturday morning with my dog, Sadie, to meet my friend in the park. I haven’t seen very much online or on social media about this trail, so I wasn’t expecting it to be busy. We met at noon and started hiking around 1pm. It was a pretty hot day for early-June, especially in Manning Park, which can be cold. I find that you never know what you’re going to get in Manning – you’ll either get beautiful sunny weather, or it will be cloudy and absolutely freezing (more common) – but it feels like there’s no in between.

So I was thrilled to get warm weather. Even though it had been nice in the city for weeks, Lightning Lakes was my first real mountain hike of the summer and I felt a giddy anticipation for the season to come. This was enhanced by the fact that the trail was filled with wildflowers! I can’t ever recall seeing wildflowers in June before, but we saw common paintbrush, lupin, arnica, columbine, valerian sitka, spreading phlox, pentstemon, and violet (among others I couldn’t identify).

It was busy along the first Lightning Lake, but the crowds tapered off when we hit the second Lightning Lake. We stopped for a snack at the end of the second lake, before continuing along the rest of the chain trail. From that point onwards, we saw very few people, I can only recall passing one or two groups of day hikers. The trail continues to Flash Lake and Strike Lake, with the campsite located just past Strike Lake. The challenge is that this trail doesn’t see a lot of trail maintenance and there is a fair amount of blowdown, so we did a lot of crawling over and under trees and my legs got pretty scratched up.

I wanted to swim in all the new lakes I’d never been to before, but Flash Lake wasn’t particularly nice. It’s a bit scummy and I couldn’t see anywhere nice to enter the water, so I ended up skipping it. Strike Lake was a little bit better, but there’s still not a lot of good places for swimming. Close to the end of the lake, we found a decent spot and took another break. Colin had a snack while I went for a swim. The water was cold, which it always is in Manning, but surprisingly, I didn’t find it too bad. We were pretty sweaty from the humidity, so it was a nice break to cool off.

The campsite is just a few hundred metres past the lake, but what I wasn’t prepared for was how busy it was at the campsite considering the trail had been empty. It is a fairly large campsite, with several tent pads spread out along the river and through the forest, but they were all full. There was a school group that had hiked in on Friday that was taking up a large portion of the sites near the river, but even excluding them, there were still a lot of hiking groups. I do wonder if this campground is busy all summer long, or just in Spring/early Summer, since it’s a lower elevation hike. Either way, we couldn’t get a tent pad and wandered around for a while looking for empty space before squeezing in among the trees near the river. We had Sadie with us and there was another dog on the other side of the campground, so we mostly tried to avoid them. I think it ended up working out.

We arrived around 3:30pm, meaning it took us approximately 2.5 hours to hike in, including the swimming and snack breaks. I was keen to continue hiking to Thunder Lake, so once we set up camp, we packed supper with us and hiked another 3km to the final lake. Trail maintenance definitely didn’t improve after the campground. There was still a good number of trees blown across the trail, but what was more annoying was that some sections of the trail were very overgrown with shrubs, and in one area, a very prickly plant. I’m not sure what it was, but we quickly noticed it stinging us as we were walking through it, so shorts weren’t a great idea. It was probably only along 5 minutes of the trail, so we just suffered through it, but we both changed into pants on the way back.

As far as the trail goes, Thunder Lake is a bit of an anticlimactic way to end. It’s a beautiful lake, but it’s really hard to access. As you approach the lake, the trail goes through a very steep boulder field, with the river flowing along underneath. You end up getting pretty high above the lake and the area doesn’t look entirely stable, so it’s not a great place to stop. Eventually you reach the treeline at the edge of the lake and there’s a sign saying that it’s dangerous to go further. We did go a little bit past the sign and I can confirm that it’s not worth it. The trail got steeper and was very dicey with loose rock overhead, so I don’t recommend it. It’s too steep to get down to the water, so we backtracked to the sign.

It’s frustrating to be so close to the lake, but unable to access it. We did find a small side trail leading down to the edge of the water, but there’s limited space to hang out. Fortunately there weren’t many other people around because it was late in the day, so we managed to go for a quick swim and had an awkward time cooking supper along the slope. I couldn’t even set up my camp chair because there was nowhere flat enough. So if you hike all the way to the lake, don’t assume you’ll be able to get down to the water, and if you try, definitely be very careful. I think it could be easy to get into trouble here or cause a small rockslide. I did not feel comfortable when we were bumbling around in the forest trying to find a way down, which is why we came back.

Otherwise it was a pretty chill trip. We hiked back to the campsite, arriving around 8pm and hanging out for an hour before going to bed. There is an outhouse and a bear cache, though the outhouse is a bit hidden in the trees. When you arrive at the main sign, it’s up through the trees to the right. I spent some time reading before bed and slept well with the sound of the river next to my tent.

It took us another 2.5 hours to hike back to the parking lot the following day. I would have liked to go for a swim at Lightning Lake before driving home, but I had Sadie with me and she’s a lot to manage when there’s people around, so we opted to skip it. Overall, I did enjoy the trail, in spite of the blowdown. The hike is primarily in the trees and not one of the more breathtaking hikes in Manning Park, so I probably wouldn’t choose to do it in the middle of the summer, but it was a perfect early season hike! Manning is still my favourite provincial park in BC and I love any time I get to recreate there.

Keats Island Backpacking Trip

July 4, 2026June 25, 2026 / Maria / 1 Comment

Now that it’s July, we’re firmly into backpacking season, which is by far my favourite time of the year! Usually I spend most of the Spring kayaking, but I wasn’t able to do that much this year because Seth hasn’t been available on the weekends, so instead, I spent most of June exploring some new low elevation backpacking trails that I’d never done before. Keats Island was particularly special because I went there with my Girl Guide unit!

Keats Island is a small island in Howe Sound, located between Bowen Island and the Sunshine Coast. In order to get there, you have to take the ferry from Horseshoe Bay to Langdale, followed by a water taxi to Keats Island. Plumper Cove Marine Park is located on the north side of Keats Island, with a large campground, that we thought sounded like a promising trip for beginner, teenage backpackers. I think the campground is most popularly used by boaters in the summer, but we opted to follow the 2.5km trail from Keats Landing instead.

After a thrilling ride on the ferry and the water taxi, we arrived at the north end of the island. The water taxi leaves from a dock right next to the Langdale ferry, but they only take cash payment or coupons, which can be purchased in Horseshoe Bay. The coupons are discounted, but they can only be purchased in a pack of 10 (convenient for a group like us, but maybe not if you’re traveling solo). It was a beautiful day at the very end of May when we went on our trip.

It’s a short hike, but it’s not flat. Once you get dropped at the dock, you start by hiking uphill along the road, followed by more uphill through the forest. There are a lot of small offshoot trails that I’ve heard can be confusing if you try and follow google maps, but it is very well signed, so follow the signs or a proper trail app like Gaia. The girls were in good spirits, but they did have fairly heavy packs and were happy when we reached the halfway point, because after that the trail was all downhill. There’s not really any views along the trail, but it is at least in the shade.

Overall it took us 1 hour, as a group of 8 people, to reach the campsite. The park is gorgeous and much larger than I was expecting. There’s a large dock where boats can tie up and some people paddle ashore. There’s a large sloping green field heading down towards the beach and a central water pump. There was only one other group of campers when we arrived, so we had premium choice for our campsites and selected the two sites closest to the main beach. I was surprised at how large the campground was, there were 20 campsites and lots of room for overflow, though there is a ranger located on site, so I’m not sure if overflow camping is allowed. A few more people showed up by boat later in the day, but the campground was still less than half full.

I was keen to do a little day hike as there are lots of short trails from the campground, including a trail to a lookout, but the girl guides were not interested in hiking further and we ended up spending the rest of the afternoon enjoying the beach. It was relatively quiet in the afternoon and the girls had fun looking for beach glass at low tide.

If you’re hiking in, rather than boating, there are a few extra things you should consider. There was a bear on the island when we visited and there is no bear cache. I assume most of the marine users store their food on their boats, but we had to do a bear hang. We brought a full pulley system with us to practice, which we put to good use! In addition, there’s no running water source, only the pump. Groundwater is not as good quality as stream water and it had a boil water order in effect, so we ended up filtering and boiling it. It was a good decision because there was quite a lot of grit in the water and filtering alone won’t remove viruses, so we boiled it too, which did require a lot of fuel.

We didn’t do a lot at the campsite, but the weather was so nice and the views so beautiful that no one minded! The girls had a lot of fun hanging out at the beach and since it was early in the season, we were able to have a campfire in the evening. You also need cash to pay the ranger for the campsite, which doesn’t have any reservations, it’s all first-come-first-serve, pay on site. We also got the firewood from the ranger, which is sold for $10 a bundle.

The final highlight of the evening was that once it got dark, we went out on the dock to drag a stick through the water and we were able to see bioluminescence! It wasn’t the strongest bioluminescence I’ve ever seen, but still a very cool experience and it should be a lot stronger later in the summer. We did see a coyote hanging around at dusk, so be cautious if you have a dog with you.

The following day we packed up all our gear to head back to the water taxi. BC Ferries does post a schedule for the water taxi, however, it only runs by request. So make sure you call them in the morning and tell them you want a pick-up, because otherwise they may not come. We returned to Langdale and had some time to kill, so we enjoyed our lunch on the beach before taking the ferry back to Horseshoe Bay. It’s an easy trip and it made for a very enjoyable weekend. I’m keen to go back and camp with my kayak one day!

Hut Series: Elizabeth Parker

March 21, 2026March 18, 2026 / Maria / Leave a comment

If you’re at all familiar with backcountry huts in the Rockies, chances are you have heard of the Elizabeth Parker Hut. It’s an ACC hut located in Yoho National Park, approximately 0.5km from Lake O’Hara. Lake O’Hara is one of the most popular and exclusive places to visit in the summer because it is incredibly beautiful, offering access to the breathtaking Alpine Circuit. I’ve been to Lake O’Hara in the summer and I wrote an entire blog post about that trip and how to secure permits, so I won’t be getting into those details here.

Let’s talk about the Elizabeth Parker Hut. In the summer, access to the hut is managed through a paid lottery system. You pay a fee to enter the lottery and if you are successful, then you’re invited to book into the hut for a further fee. I entered the lottery once, with no luck, so I decided to abandon that strategy. I planned to visit in the winter instead. The hut is still busy on the weekends (and weekdays to an extent), but there’s no lottery, so as long as you are an ACC member and pay attention to the booking windows, you should be able to secure a booking. We decided to visit on a weekday in the winter, making the process even easier.

The challenge about visiting this hut in the winter is that there’s no shortcut to access it. In the summer, you can take the shuttle up the bus road, cutting out 11km of road-walking. In the winter, there’s no shortcut, you have to walk in the entire 11km road, plus the 0.5km trail to connect to the hut. This might not sound like a lot, but it is quite draining in the winter. It’s not a hard trail, but it is long and has a pretty steady uphill for most of it. The road does pass through a small section of avalanche run-out terrain in the first 5km, but for the most part, it’s a pretty safe trail. The one section goes through a run-out zone, rather than active avalanche terrain, so if the avalanche rating isn’t high, you don’t have too much to worry about.

There’s a few ways that you can get there. The most common way seems to be cross-country skiing, which surprised me a little bit because there is a lot of uphill on the way there. I’d recommend having skins, but it’s a wide trail and very manageable. The attraction of cross-country skiing is that the skis are so much lighter, so it makes for a faster journey along the 11km road. Another option is ski touring, which is what we did. This is great if you want to do some touring and skiing from the hut, but touring skis are a lot wider and heavier, so we did find it very tiring. The last option is snowshoeing. There was no one on snowshoes when we stayed at the hut, but there was a big group heading in on snowshoes when we were leaving. I wouldn’t recommend spikes unless you’re sure it’s hard packed with no fresh snow incoming.

If you’re planning to visit, give yourself ample time as there is limited daylight in the winter. We didn’t do a great job at this because we had stayed at the A.O. Wheeler Hut the previous night, which meant we had to hike out 1.5km in the morning, drive to Field, and then do the 11.5km hike to the Elizabeth Parker Hut. This was made worse by the fact that we transitioned from Pacific Time to Mountain Time and lost an hour.

We didn’t start hiking until almost 1pm. It was mid February, so we had ~5.5hours of daylight. It took us 5 hours, compared to some cross country skiers, who were able to do it in 4 hours. I was feeling pretty good when we started, I figured I’d probably skied around 2km when I came across the trail marker for 1km, and that’s when I had to stop myself from despairing, as I knew we were in for a long day. If we’d started earlier, we could have taken our time and lots of breaks, but because we had limited daylight, we pretty much pushed forward all afternoon. We took one lunch break at the 5km mark, but otherwise only stopped to pee or re-adjust layers and equipment.

The biggest challenge for me was temperature control. It was around -20 degrees celsius when we did the trail, which is extremely hard to manage when you are working out. Normally, I would ditch my warm layers and just wear a base layer so that I wouldn’t be sweating into everything, but the challenge was that I was quite a bit faster than Brandon, who uses a splitboard. So I was continually having to start and stop, and I would get cold whenever I had to wait, so I didn’t want to layer down.

I managed well for the first half of the trail. There’s some picnic tables and a beautiful viewpoint at the 5km mark, so we stopped for a late lunch there. The weather was quite nice, mostly overcast, but there was some blue sky and we could see all the mountains, so it was very scenic. Around ~8km there’s a beautiful view of the glacier, so it was a nice hike, just very long. I definitely started crashing out around the 8km mark. I ate my snacks along the way, but our water bottles were becoming more and more frozen and I really needed an energy boost and a hot drink. Brandon put electrolyte powder in his water, which I wouldn’t recommend, because it turned the whole thing to slush. The trick is to store your water bottle upside down so that the lid doesn’t freeze on, and carry a thermos.

We finally made it to the hut around 6pm and I was so relieved to see the steam rising out of the chimney. There was a large group already inside the hut and I all but collapsed on the bench and started removing my boots, enjoying the toasty warm heat from the woodstove. The group consisted of 3 families and a lot of kids and they quickly encouraged us to move over to the Wiwaxy Cabin next door.

I didn’t realize there was a second sleeping cabin and their assumption that we would be more comfortable not sleeping with their big group was correct, but the group rubbed me the wrong way for most of the trip. It wasn’t appealing having to immediately go into another cold space and start a fire immediately after arriving. We managed fine, but the group was not respectful of the shared kitchen and dining facilities, spreading out and leaving a mess. Every time we tried to use the dining area I had to ask someone to move things so we could use a corner of the table. Although I will credit the dads for changing out one of the outhouse barrels while we were there.

But the Wiwaxy Cabin was very cozy. The main hut has a large bunk room that sleeps 16 people in the same room as the dining tables and woodstove. There are lots of racks to hang gear, but it definitely has more of a cluttered feeling than the Wheeler Hut, though that may have just been because the 3 families spread out everywhere. The Wiwaxy Cabin sleeps 8 on the bunks and has a small table and a woodstove, but no kitchen, so everyone has to use the main hut to cook. We quite liked the Wiwaxy Cabin, it was very cozy and we were the only ones in there on the first night, though we were joined by 3 more people on the second night. Once we got the fire going, it was quite warm. The woodstove was very efficient and it was pretty hot overnight, but we didn’t want the fire to die with -20 degrees outside, so we kept it going all night.

On our second day, there was less blue sky, but you could still see all of the mountains and it snowed pretty lightly throughout most of the day. We had breakfast and did our chores, namely restocking our woodpile (Brandon did a great job), before going out for a tour. It was the middle of the week, so we didn’t encounter any day users, it seemed to be just us and the family in the area. We didn’t have a lot of concrete plans of what to do for the day, and we debated between hiking up to Schaffer Lake or down to Lake O’Hara. Neither is very far, so we opted to hike up to Schaffer Lake to take a look at Mount Schaffer, which I’d read is popular for skiing.

There’s no trail markers to follow in the winter, but there is a pretty obvious route up through the trees. It’s only 1km from the hut, so it’s not a long way to go. We hiked up to the lake, which has a great view looking up on the base of Mount Schaffer. There was a lot of fresh snow and we could see a few lines coming down from previous visitors. We hadn’t actually planned to ski because I am pretty nervous in avalanche terrain, but the conditions were ideal when we were there. There was some fresh powder, but the avalanche rating was low to moderate and there were no slab problems. So we decided to hike up through the trees to ski down the main slope.

There were ski tracks coming down from quite high, but we only went about two thirds of the way up because we didn’t want to be in super steep terrain. So we hiked up and then picked a spot to transition. As with the previous day, the most challenging part of the trip was temperature management. It was still very cold, so it was challenging to transition and I added a lot of layers before skiing down. It was a short ski out, but probably one of the coolest lines I’ve ever done. It was my first time skiing in avalanche terrain, and I keep having second thoughts about it when I look back on the experience, but at the time I was feeling confident about the conditions and everything went according to plan, so I guess it was our first real touring line.

We just did one line since we’re pretty new to touring, but if I was to go back, I think I’d do a few more. My ski touring journey isn’t really driven by skiing epic lines, which sometimes makes me feel a bit at odds with other ski tourers I meet, as most seem very obsessed with skiing remote terrain. But maybe I’ll care more as I get more comfortable in avalanche terrain, but for right now, I like just being outside on skis, enjoying nature, and building up my experience.

We had a fun second night as we were joined by a couple that we had met at Wheeler Hut, as well as a single guy on holiday from Korea, who we were all impressed with as it was his first time skiing! They all came in on cross-country skis, which seems to be easier on a long access trail. We spent the evening playing cards and the couple shared a special moment the next morning and got engaged in front of the mountains!!

The sun came out to play on our last day and we woke up to a bluebird day in the mountains. It was still very cold, but at least we had the sun shining down to warm us up a little bit. We weren’t in a big rush to leave, but after packing everything up, we skied down to Lake O’Hara to enjoy the view before skiing out. Lake O’Hara is one of the most renowned views in the Canadian Rockies and it does not disappoint. It was very smoky when I visited in the summer of 2023, so dare I say, the winter view is even better? I felt like I was on another planet as we skied across the lake to get an incredible view of the surrounding mountains. Plus, we were the only people there, so it felt very special.

Usually the ski out is a lot more fun than the ski in, but the road is not a simple downhill the whole way, so it was still a lot of work to ski out. Ideally you would take off your skins and just ski down, but there are still lots of flat sections. I planned to just skin the whole way down, but there was still a lot of powder on the trail and it was really hard to pick up any speed on the downhill. So eventually we took our skins off and I was planning to just skate ski the flat sections, but it was too powdery for that too. However, because I was on skis, I was able to just put them back in touring mode without the skins in order to ski the flats and I did several kms that way. But Brandon was on a split board so he ended up carrying his snowboard through the flats.

It was still faster than the way in and we stopped again at the picnic tables for lunch, where there was a large group of women snowshoeing in. It’s 5km from the picnic tables and I put the skins back on for the first 3km, which are really flat. But the last 2km is the steepest part of the trail, so at that section, I was able to properly transition and ski out the final 2km pretty quickly. In total, it took us 5 hours on the way in and 3.5 hours on the way out.

Lake O’Hara is definitely a beautiful place to visit and we had a great time, but it is a slog on that road and I was really glad that we had planned to stay for two nights. It would have been a lot to ski in and out for only 1 night. If you’re dying to visit O’Hara and haven’t been able to secure summer permits, I definitely recommend checking out the hut in the winter. It’s much easier to reserve and in my opinion, the experience is even more special because there’s barely anyone around (at least on the weekdays). We had a great time!