The first half of our trip centered around Mount Steele (featured in Part I), so the second half of the trip was about McNair Lake. Like I said in my last post – there are 4 cabins in the park. Edwards Cabin is the most central and could be used as a home base for day hiking. Bachelor Cabin is located the closest to the parking lot and is really popular among both families and partiers because of the short hike for hauling in children or booze, depending on your desires, I guess. These two crowds probably don’t mesh very well, so my opinion is to leave this cabin for the families!

I think Mount Steele is the most popular hut because of it’s location for skiing, and I’d heard McNair Cabin is one of the least frequented in the park. It’s certainly the hardest to get to. You’d think that Mount Steele would be the most challenging because of the hike up the mountain, but it’s a longer hike to McNair Lake and while the terrain is flatter – it’s more technical. In the shoulder season, it can get very muddy on the trail to McNair and there are several detours around boggy areas.

It was another gorgeous day when we departed Mount Steele and we hiked our way back towards Edwards Cabin. Just before you get to the cabin, there’s a branch towards McNair Lake. We weren’t ready for lunch yet, so we skipped Edwards and immediately carried on towards McNair. It’s a nice forested trail at the beginning, but it does deteriorate as you continue on. It’s not really in bad condition, but there’s a collapsed bridge and a detour before Chapman Lake that were pretty muddy.

Eventually our hunger caught up with us, but it’s pretty swampy and we didn’t see many places to stop. We decided to aim for Chapman Lake for lunch and we did find a small dry spot right at the head of the lake to take a break, but overall there’s not many good places to stop at the lake either. We didn’t see anyone on the trail except for one father and son who were leaving the cabin. Apparently on this particular weekend McNair Cabin had been the party cabin and they told us they had a great time participating in “beer olympics” with a bunch of partiers the previous night. They were crowned champions at the end of the night as the only ones not blackout drunk.

The partiers must have gotten up early though, because we didn’t see them. There are some large meadows just before the cabin and a short climb to get up to the top of the hill. The Cabin is still a few hundred metres from the lake, so you can’t see it, but there is a really beautiful view looking down to the meadows. The father-son duo told us they had seen a bunch of elk down there the previous day, so we kept our eyes peeled for them. We saw lots of evidence of where they had been bedded down, but unfortunately we didn’t see them.

We were the only people at the Cabin when we arrived and it ended up staying that way all night. We loved meeting new people at Steele, but it was nice to have the cabin to ourselves at McNair. I don’t know how McNair got its reputation as the least popular cabin though, because we absolutely loved it! Don’t skip it if you’re visiting the park, it’s definitely worth the muddy trek out there! Someone has strung lights around the edge of the cabin that can be plugged into a power bank, so it has a really great atmosphere!

We made a trek down to check out the lake as the clouds moved in for the evening. It’s a pretty small lake and if you’re feeling adventurous, there is another day hike that can be done up to Panther Peak. Definitely do your research for this one though as there’s no marked trail and it wasn’t even shown on my GPS. Instead, we hung out at the cabin and ate supper and had a cribbage tournament. Girls vs. Boys and me and Adriana absolutely smoked the boys!

The hut is very similar to Mount Steele, but McNair has a little balcony on the front of the cabin, which is a nice spot to hang out. I didn’t sleep well though because I woke up in the middle of the night and was absolutely convinced I had forgotten my rain pants at Mount Steele when I’d been repacking my bag in the morning. I only recently bought rain pants after a very wet episode at Lake O’Hara and I was feeling dejected thinking that I wouldn’t have them for the following day.

Fortunately, I lost sleep over nothing and found them in the bottom of my bag the following morning. It wasn’t raining when we woke up, but it started while we were having breakfast. I wouldn’t say it was heavy rain, but it rained consistently throughout the entire day. We had a nice breakfast before packing up for the hike back to the car. We made for a colourful crew with our rain jackets and pack covers!

As muddy as the trail had been the previous day, it was much worse in the rain. In the very first meadow I went calf deep in the mud and got my shoe wet and Brandon took a tumble backwards into the mud. It continued to rain on us all morning and it was a slow hike back to Edwards. Adriana was very worried about crossing the broken bridge and she did take a little tumble off it right at the start, but was otherwise okay. Eventually we made it back to Edwards for lunch and were thrilled to find 3 other guys there who were getting ready to leave, but had a fire going.

I was pleased with my new rain pants, which were only $15 from value village, but kept me quite dry on the trail. We stripped off all our wet layers and enjoyed our lunch warming up by the remnants of the fire. Brandon literally had steam pouring off him as we dried out our gear as much as possible.

Given the rain, it would have been an easy choice for me to skip Bachelor Cabin on the way back. It’s a slight detour (~2km) to get there and we skipped in on the way in to secure spots at Mount Steele. But I’m glad Eddie was there because he was determined to check out Bachelor Cabin to come back in the future with his family. So he convinced us to detour and now I can say I’ve been to all 4 cabins! Bachelor Cabin is located in the woods, but not far from Bachelor Lake. We didn’t stop for too long and it was only a short hike back to the car after that.

It was pouring by the time we finally got to the car, which made for an interesting dynamic of 4 people trying to change into dry clothes! We had a ferry booking for 8pm, which was the only sailing with reservations left, but we were hoping to get on one of the earlier sailings. We checked the ferry status as soon as we got service, but even though it was only 3pm, the ferry was already ticketing for 8pm, so we just kept our reservation. Instead, we got to enjoy some time in Gibsons and had a delicious meal at Lunitas Mexican Eatery, followed by ice cream!

So overall, I think it was a very successful trip and had a great time backpacking with some different friends than I usually go with. My love for the Sunshine Coast stays alive and well and I hope to be back one day on skis!