Hiking Flatiron

November 10, 2020November 10, 2020 / Maria / 2 Comments

For mine and Brandon’s third annual Thanksgiving weekend hike, we did Flatiron for the first time in 2018. Now while I think Elfin Lakes and Watersprite were a bit of a stretch to be considered “Fall hikes”, I thought that Flatiron was a great Fall hike, but not in the traditional sense.

We’d intended to do the Needle Peak trail, which shares the same trailhead as Flatiron, but once we got up to the branch and saw the layer of snow sitting atop this steep climb, we decided to leave it for another day and do the Flatiron trail instead. Flatiron continues on past the Needle Peak branch and hikes down through a pass and back up again to a small glacial lake. I’ve since learned this a popular location for camping in the summer, but in October it was pretty empty.

The lake is what I think makes this a great non-traditional Fall hike. The trail continues over a steep slope to the top, which is a giant flat plateau (hence the name Flatiron). At just the right time of year, all the shrubbery against the slope turns this beautiful shade of deep red. Pair it with a fresh coat of snow, which is how it looked when we visited, and it really gives you lots of changing season vibes. I think your timing probably does have to be just right, but even if you missed it, it’s still a great hike.

There were very people on the trail when we visited and most of them seemed to be attempting Needle Peak. There were just two other guys going the same way as us. We passed them on the way up because they had big backpacks on. We asked if they were planning to camp and they informed us they were actually hoping to fly down!

This was my first experience with paragliding and I have to say it’s a hard pass from me. Even Brandon, who is much more adventurous than me said you’d never get him paragliding. We were pretty much the only two groups on top of the Flatiron, so we watched them setting up their flight suits as we ate our lunch. I admit we definitely lingered over our lunch because we really wanted to watch them fly off.

From the start, it was clear one guy was more experienced than the other and they chatted a lot as they got set up. Eventually, after much checking, they finally got ready to take a run. The more experienced guy had no problem and the wind caught him and took him right off the side and up. We watched as he sailed off and circled up and up in the wind currents for about 20 minutes before finally landing back at the car park.

Unfortunately the second guy didn’t have quite as much luck. He took off just after the first guy, but he terrified me and Brandon with a fall right at the start. It almost looked like he was going to get up, but the wind took his chute funny and he ended up crashing to the ground. It wasn’t a far fall, but it didn’t look comfy and it made us really nervous to watch him. I can see why Flatiron is a great place to practice though, there’s lot of wide open space in which to run from and relative safety from which to fall until you head out over the edge.

We watched him make 2 more unsuccessful attempts and then Brandon decided it was time to get out of there or we were going to be watching this guy fall to his death. After that he decided to give up and ended up packing up and hiking back down to meet his friend at the car. So fortunately no one was injured, though I’m sure he was disappointed.

As usual, it was freezing at the top of the trail for October, but this time we’d come prepared with warm jackets so that we could stay out and watch the view. Unlike our other two trips though, this year we got clear blue skies and lots of sun, so it made for an incredibly scenic trip! It’s a steep trail, with 800m of elevation gain spread over 11km round trip, but so worth it for the 360 degree views at the top!

If you’d like to hear more about Flatiron or see more photos, I have published another blog post on an overnight trip I took in July 2020.

Flatiron and Needle Peak Backpacking Trip

October 21, 2020October 19, 2020 / Maria / 8 Comments

My scheduled post for this week was supposed to be about Frosty Mountain, a popular Fall hike I did at the end of September. However, the top of the mountain is now under several feet of snow and hiker Jordan Naterer went missing on this trail on October 10, 2020. If you were hiking on the trail on Thanksgiving weekend and saw Jordan, please contact police. If you’re thinking about doing Frosty Mountain yourself, I’d recommend waiting until next year as the season for doing this hike has now passed. In light of this tragedy I’ve decided to postpone that post for another time and write instead about a backpacking trip I went on back in July.

There’s so much exploring to do in the summer, I’m always behind on writing about my adventures, but this summer I had an amazing experience stargazing at Flatiron. I’ve been getting into star photography over the past few years, but Brandon is the real night sky enthusiast of the group. He tries to catch the Perseid meteor shower every year and this year he was really stoked about the Neowise Comet. We decided to make an attempt at stargazing and spent forever trying to come up with a good place to go looking for it. You can’t be too close to the city because there’s so much ambient light, and we wanted to be sure we’d have a good view from our campsite, meaning we needed an unobstructed view looking Northwest. We floated around a few campsites we’d been to before, but nothing was really quite right. Then I remembered Flatiron, which me and Brandon had day hiked in the fall of 2018, and we thought we had a good chance of clear views from the top.

Since we were camping overnight, we didn’t have the earliest start. Flatiron is located in the Coquihalla Summit Rec Area, so it’s a little over 2 hours from my house with no traffic. It was around 1pm when we pulled into the parking lot – we figured we were going to have a hard time parking, but because we arrived later in the day, lots of people were finishing their day hikes, so we managed to snag a spot no problem. We ate lunch in the parking lot and then started hiking sometime around 1:30pm. Our group consisted of our North Coast Trail crew since we’re all in the same bubble and have gotten pretty good at camping together.

Flatiron isn’t the longest trail, only 11km round trip, but it is definitely a steep one. We’d day hiked Mount Cheam the previous week and I’d had a really hard go of it for some reason (just a bad day I guess), but I was feeling pretty good on Flatiron. Lien was having a hard time with all the elevation gain, but we plugged along, taking short, frequent breaks. The more challenging part was the heat. The summer started off slow, but overall, it ended up being a really hot one. I find it’s usually hot in Vancouver throughout the summer, but then I always end up going to the mountains where it’s a lot cooler. This year I found the mountains felt just as hot, so we were really sweating buckets as we climbed up.

After about an hour you come out of the woods and start hiking up over the rocks towards Needle Peak. Flatiron and Needle Peak are two separate hikes, but they share much of the same trail. Eventually you reach the junction and you can either start the steep ascent up to Needle Peak, or you can continue on to Flatiron. I would say Flatiron is slightly less impressive than Needle Peak, but a much nicer hike, so I’d recommend Flatiron, but many people do both in the same trip. We wanted to do Needle Peak as well since Brandon and I had already done Flatiron once, so we decided we’d make an attempt at it the next day on our way down. There were a lot of people on the trail and we heard that someone had actually gotten married at Needle Peak that day, so it was super crowded at the summit. There were also a lot of backpackers, most of whom were ahead of us on the trail. I usually like to make an earlier start for this reason, but there’s tons of camping space up at Flatiron, so we weren’t worried about it.

From the junction, the trail continues down and back up to a glacial lake at the foot of Flatiron. Flatiron is so named because it’s basically a mountain with a huge flat top. The lake is located just under the Flatiron and it’s where all of the backpackers were camping. It makes sense seeing as that’s where the water source is, but because we wanted an unimpeded view, we’d decided to camp on top of the Flatiron. From the lake it’s another 20-30 min climb up to the top. It’s not too challenging, but it is steep. When we got to the top, there were lots of day hikers around, but no other campers.

Despite all the space, we did have to walk around for a while to find a good spot for the tent. A lot of the top is just rock, which we could set up on, but obviously isn’t super comfortable, and we were going out of our way to avoid trampling any sensitive areas. There’s a lot of wildflowers up there and we didn’t want to destroy anything. Eventually Brandon found a nice little flat spot that was mostly free of vegetation, so we set the tents up there. We had a perfect view looking west and knew we’d be able to catch both the comet and the sunset from that location.

After setting up the tents and having a snack, we decided to head down to the lake again to get drinking water and have dinner. It was somewhere around 4:30-5ish and me and Emily wanted to go for a swim while the sun was still up above the mountains. We hiked back down and set up on a little peninsula in the middle of the lake. It feels somewhat like two lakes with rivers flowing between them. It’s not the biggest lake, so we were cognizant to make sure we same in the downstream section. Our effort was wasted really as we later saw people swimming upstream as well, so something to keep in mind when you’re in the wilderness. Sometimes, depending on the source, it’s best not to swim at all (if it’s a really small source or there’s no river), in this case we got our water upstream where it was flowing heavier. Overall it’s probably not the end of the world where people were swimming because there were several flowing sections to get your water, but be as considerate as possible.

As expected, the water was absolutely freezing. There was still snow all up along the slope melting into the lake, so we knew it was pretty much all snow melt. We ran into the water as fast as we could and then ran out again, but it felt really good on the muscles! After our quick dip we set into our normal routines, with Brandon and Emily getting drinking water and me and Lien making dinner. Our North Coast Trail trip had been cut short by one evening, so me and Lien both had meals already prepared, so I made a rice dish for me and Emily and Lien made ramen for him and Brandon. The rice dish was a new one for me and it wasn’t my favourite, but it was definitely filling! Then we all had tarts for dessert, which Lien has surprised us with, lugging them all the way up to the top!

After we’d had our fill, we made our way back up to the top for one of my favourite evenings in the backcountry. Brandon and I get a bit giddy sometimes when we hike together, and we were each making good progress on our flask of fireball, so we decided to have a little dance party up on the mountain. First Emily led us in yoga stretches, and then brandon played music from his speaker while we all danced around waiting for the sun to set. Since the trip was all about stargazing, Brandon and I both lugged up our tripods and set them up for later, with Brandon doing a timelapse on his.

Eventually all the campers from the lake made their way up to the top for sunset as well, but save for one other group of 2, we were the only ones camping at the top. I’m still a bit amazed at how lucky we got with the weather. I feel like it’s easy to plan these idyllic trips, picturing cloudless skies and millions of stars, but they so rarely work out like you intended. But this trip actually did. There were absolutely no clouds and we had a perfect 360 degree from which to watch the sun go down over the mountain and the stars come out.

The challenging part about stargazing of course is staying up late enough for it. We’d read the best time to see the comet was just after sunset, but we didn’t see any sign of it. However, as it got darker, the milky way became more and more impressive. Brandon and Emily were working on tracking down the comet, but in the meantime, I had a nice little photoshoot with the milky way and got some pictures that I’m pretty proud of. I don’t really know what I’m doing, but the conditions were good for messing around. No ambient light, so the stars were showing up really well. Eventually Emily spotted something moving that she thought might be the comet and her and Brandon spent ages debating whether it was or not. Eventually I came over and was like, ‘well why don’t you shoot it and see how it comes out in the photo…’ to which they were like, ‘oh right, that’s what we came to do lol’. We’re no astrophotographers, but it was obvious from the photo that it was indeed the comet. Photo credit to Brandon for this one:

The comet is one of those things where skilled photographers have made it look a lot different than it does to the naked eye. We thought we’d be able to see somewhat of a trail behind it with the naked eye, but this is not the case, the trail only shows up on photos, at least from where we were watching anyways. It was still cool to see and Lien and Brandon spent a lot of time photographing the comet. It was definitely harder because it was in the Northwest and so because the sun sets west, it look a lot longer to get dark in that direction. Plus the moon was up and pretty bright, so that made it more challenging to shoot as well. I look a few photos and I’m glad I got to see it, but if I’m being honest, I was a lot more enthralled with the milky way. Saturn and Jupiter were both visible on the evening we were out and I managed to capture both in my photo with the milky way!

Sometime before midnight we gave up and went to bed. Despite how hot it had been in the day, it was pretty cool overnight. Not surprising as we were very exposed and in the mountains. We’d hoped to sleep with the fly off, but it was too dewy, so we popped it back on for the night. Emily had a hard time sleeping and ended up being pretty cold overnight, but I think the rest of us slept okay. Fortunately the sun came up again pretty early and warmed us up. I got to take down a dry tent, which is pretty much one of the best things ever.

We took down camp and set off again, but the day was far from over. Usually we don’t linger too long on the last day, but I was determined to do Needle Peak. The first time I’d hiked Flatiron, we’d actually intended to do Needle Peak, but it was October and there was ice on Needle Peak, so we’d done Flatiron instead. I couldn’t come back twice and not do it, so we planned to drop our bags near the junction and hike up to the top. Lien was feeling pretty tired and decided not to join us, so we did our best to find a shady spot for him and left him with our fly dope. Fortunately it hadn’t been buggy at the top of Flatiron, but it was extremely buggy along the rest of the trail, so I didn’t really envy him hanging out with the mosquitoes.

Needle Peak is a challenging hike. It starts off with a steep climb up to the ridgeline. Climb is definitely the best word to describe it and there’s one bottleneck rope section that is particularly challenging. While we were doing that part I was kind of wondering if it was really worth it, but it ended up being one of the most challenging parts and it did get easier after that. I believe it’s only about a kilometre, to the top, so we made pretty good time, but it is somewhat slow going. The ridge has beautiful views looking down both sides and the hike ends with one last scramble up the “needle” part of Needle Peak. We decided not to push all the way to the very top. There were a lot of people and you basically have to climb up this rock seam, so we knew it would take a while because of people bottlenecking at tricky locations. Instead we found a nice rock to sit on while we had lunch and we still had an amazing view looking out over the Coquihalla. One hiker, who we’d been passing back and forth was surprised that we weren’t going to finish the hike, “but you’re so close, you can do it!”, to which I wanted to respond that I knew I can do it, but that I am already satisfied with what I have accomplished this weekend. Sometimes I have a bit of an obsessive personality with wanting to see things through and push farther, but I think this year I’ve been getting better at setting limits. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, it kind of sounds like I’m saying it’s okay not to push myself, but that’s never really been my challenge, so I think learning to set boundaries sometimes is just as important.

Anyways, we had a good hike and I’m glad I can finally say I did it, but I don’t think I’ll be in a rush to go back to Needle Peak. It’s a tougher hike than I think a lot of people realize and I didn’t feel that safe with so many people on the trail. So we hiked back down, getting bottlenecked again at the rope section. As tough as that section had been on the way up, it was soooo much worse on the way down. We took our time and eventually we were reunited with Lien again.

As usual, the downhill back to the car was a real B for me and Emily. We don’t have the best knees and the last section through the trees is super steep. Plus it was even hotter than the previous day, so again we were all a sweaty mess. Finally we reached the car and I gave my feet and face a nice wash in the river before we headed back into town. So overall it was a really successful trip and probably one of my favourite overnights of the whole summer. The only disclaimer I’ll leave if you’re thinking of doing this trip is that there are no facilities at the top, so come prepared for no outhouse or bear cache facilities. Otherwise, this makes for a great trek!

Cape Scott and North Coast Trail: Part III

July 29, 2020August 12, 2020 / Maria / 3 Comments

The Saga continues – here’s Part 1 and Part 2 if you’re joining in the middle.

On Day 3 we finally started the North Coast Trail. As I mentioned before, most people start with the North Coast Trail and continue on to Cape Scott, but because of some conflicts with the water taxi dates due to Covid-19, we decided to do the trail backwards. So instead of starting with a water taxi from Port Hardy to Shushartie Bay, we had already hiked 37km and we still 43km to go. We hiked from Guise Bay to Nissen Bight before lunch and then continued from Nissen to Laura Creek, our first section on the North Coast Trail.

From the end of Nissen Bight, it’s about 5km in the woods, followed by another kilometre along the beach to reach the campsite. Our feet were already aching from pounding across so many beaches, so it actually felt like a bit of a relief to start climbing up into the woods. There was a noticeable change to the conditions of the trail as soon as we entered the forest. It started with a steep climb up towards Nahwitti Cone and then it was 5km of poorly maintained trail and mud.

The North Coast Trail is a pretty bare bones trail, besides keeping the brush at bay, it seems that the trail is left pretty wild and it makes for a very technical hike. There’s a lot of mud to navigate around as well as tons of obstacles from the trees. You’re constantly climbing up and over logs, under branches, and jumping your way around mud pits. The Juan de Fuca was a similar experience for me and Emily, so we didn’t come across anything unexpected, but we definitely forgot just how challenging and slow these kind of hikes can be.

At first the obstacles were a welcome distraction from our aching feet. When you put your brain to work navigating the obstacles, it does distract from your other pains, but the forest paths make for REALLY slow progress and eventually you just get frustrated at how long it takes to make any kind of progress. This was Lien’s first real challenge. He’d never been on a technical coastal trail before and so he really had no frame of reference for what it would be like. When we first switched our plans from Mount Assiniboine to the North Coast Trail, his first response was, “well at least it will be an easier trail!” We all laughed at him and informed him it would actually be a lot harder, but I can see where the misconception comes in and I have made the same assumption in the past. Mountain trails appear to be harder because of the large elevation gain, but coastal trails often still have a ton of elevation gain hidden among the relentless up and down along the coastline, as well as they’re usually a lot more technical.

There was a marked difference on Day 3 though in that we barely saw any people. We’d started hiking Cape Scott on the weekend, so it had been crawling with people, but it was now Tuesday and so even on our hike to Nissen Bight we didn’t see many people. After Nissen the trail really emptied out. We saw one hiker just as we were starting the climb to Laura Creek – he was returning from an overnight at Irony Creek (that’s a 19km hike!). After that the only other people we saw was one group of guys who were camping at Nissen and had day hiked out to Laura Creek and back. In mine and Emily’s opinion, it’s a waste of time trying to avoid the mud on a trail like the NCT, so we were both pretty muddy and had wet feet by the end of the day. We had wet feet the entire 4 days we hiked the Juan de Fuca, so in our opinion keeping our feet dry until Day 3 had been a pretty big success. But when we passed the guys coming back from Laura Creek and saw their completely mudless legs and boots, we had to conclude that they were clearly witches to stay so dry.

Lien struggled along this section, mostly from the repetitive uphill sections. I started stronger along the wooded stretch, but eventually it really got to me too. I was tracking the hike along my GPS and every 30-60 minutes I’d check in to see how much progress we were making and it was always a mistake. Your location barely moves and it really only serves to de-motivate you. What was more depressing was that I’d read in the trail book that this was one of the easier wooded sections of the trail, so it made me really apprehensive about what was to come later. So much of making it through these long hikes is mental and often you just have to focus on making it through one part at a time.

Unlike the rest of us though, Day 3 was where Emily peaked. She had a rough Day 2, but she was in her element on this section. Despite her blistered feet, she was our cheerleader for the day and led us through the worst of it. One of the real saving graces of having 4 people in your group is that we didn’t all fall apart at the same time. There was always someone who was struggling, but when that happened, someone else would always step up to help motivate the group. The constant uphill was Lien’s mental block for the day, so we all cheered when we finally started heading downhill in earnest and could see the beach peaking out through the trees. We still had 1 more kilometre to go across the beach, which is it’s own kind of hell at the end of a long day, but at least you make a faster pace.

There was some confusion about where the water source was, so we spent a bit of time poking around for it at the end of the beach, before a closer read revealed that it was actually located right at the campsite. I’d read Laura Creek only had 4 tent pads, so despite seeing no one else on the trail, I was still a little concerned about availability. Me and Emily were anxious to get off our weary feet, so we took off towards the campsite. Fortunately there was only 1 other group of 5 guys at the campsite and they were only using 2 of the tent pads, so there were 2 more left for us.

I have to admit, as relieved as I was to sit down, the tent pads were a little gloomy after the beautiful campsite the previous night. The trees were extremely thick and didn’t let a lot of light in, plus everything felt damp. Fortunately Brandon is much more determined than me or Emily and when he showed up, he dropped off his backpack and declared there was no way we were camping in the woods and he would find us a spot on the beach.

There’s no where to camp on the beach near the tent pads because it’s a steep cobble beach, but if you continue another 200m to the water source, Laura Creek, there’s a small sandy beach with enough room for 3 tents. There was one couple set up there already and they kindly moved their tent to the side so that we could set up our two tents next to them. It was extremely windy, but a definite improvement over the wooded tent pads! So much thanks to Brandon for that!

We put up the tents as fast as we could and chucked all our gear inside to keep them from blowing away. We changed right away because it was cool with the wind in our sweaty clothes. Once I bundled up with a few layers though, I forgot about the wind and was thrilled when the sun finally came out for the first time since we’d started the trail!

The weather on these trails really is wild – it’d been overcast most of the day, but within a half hour the wind completely blew the clouds away and we found ourselves with a gorgeous sunny beach view – so that helped with the chill as well. It was somewhere around 7pm at this point. It ended up taking us about 4 hours to go the 6km from Nissen to Laura, so we knew we were in for some longer days.

By Day 3 we’d started to get into a bit of a routine. Lien got water from the creek to start filtering, Brandon started working on getting a fire going, and me and Emily started boiling water for hot drinks/soup and started making dinner. Emily was the chef for day 3 and served us a cheesy pasta that we’d made from a backpacking website. It was vegan so it used coconut milk powder and nutritional yeast to get the creamy cheesy flavour – it was my first time using either ingredient and it was actually pretty good.

The only downside to our beach campsite was that it was a 200m walk back to the outhouse and bear cache, but definitely still worth it and we ended up having a great night relaxing on the beach by our fire. Laura Creek definitely had the best sunset of the trip; when the clouds cleared out we had an excellent view of the sun as it dipped below the horizon and filled the sky with its orange-yellow glow. We were zonked from the long hike, but relieved that our biggest day was now behind us. Over the next 3 days we’d be averaging about 12km a day, so we were optimistic that though the hiking wouldn’t get easier, the days would at least get shorter. It was an incorrect assumption, but more on that in the next entry, Part IV!