Backpacking the Heather Trail

June 24, 2020April 14, 2021 / Maria / 5 Comments

Continuing on with my mini-series on Manning Park, in 2018, 2 years after first being inspired by 3 Brothers Mountain, I returned to hike the full Heather Trail. Manning Park is filled with dozens of awesome mountain trails, but (dare I say) the Heather Trail is one of the most popular. It’s a 21km trail the starts at the top of Blackwell Road, runs past 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Brother Mountains, and continues through many kilometers of scenic alpine meadows to Kicking Horse Camp and Nicomen Lake. In the height of the summer, you can find every colour imaginable of alpine wildflower scattered along this trail.

In 2018, I finally took 3 days to hike the Heather Trail with my good hiking buddy, Carolyn. One of the reasons the hike is so popular (I imagine) is because it starts at the top of Blackwell Road, which is one of the few public roads going right up into the alpine, so it saves you from having to hike much elevation gain. I believe most people hike the 21km in to Nicomen Lake and then hike all the way back, but me and Carolyn decided to drive 2 cars out and added an extra 17.5km onto our hike to make it a through hike down to the highway and Cayuse Flats parking lot.

We took Friday off and dropped my car at Cayuse Flats and then started our hike from the Blackwall parking lot shortly after noon. I was dogsitting my friends black retriever, Alfie, at the time, so we had the added excitement of taking a dog with us along the trail. The view from the parking lot is already beautiful and showcases the surrounding mountains, so from the parking lot, we started hiking down into the woods for about 4 kilometres before arriving at the first backcountry campsite, Buckhorn Camp. We skipped this one and continued on towards our destination, which was Kicking Horse Campsite, located at kilometre 12.

From Buckhorn Camp, the trail gets super scenic. You hike back up into the alpine meadows and from there, you continue along the ridge to First Brother Mountain. There are incredible views of all the surrounding mountains, and though the wildflowers were a little late this year, we did spot a few starting to bloom. The nice thing about the trail is that once you hike back up from the first campsite, there’s very little elevation gain or loss for the rest of the trail (with the exception of First Brother Mountain).

Me and Carolyn aren’t ones for too many breaks, so we pretty much powered through the first 9km to the base of the First Brother Peak. From there we abandoned our packs for a little side hike up the First Brother. Like I said, I’ve done this one before, but it was no less breathtaking the second time. It starts with a steep ascent up the side of the mountain before flattening off again along the ridge to the peak. The mountain drops out from under you on both sides, so it makes for a narrow, but scenic walk up to the peak.

It’s a little steep, so we tried to tie Alfie to a tree for the last couple hundred metres, but he’s part retriever, part border collie, so his herding instinct started to go bananas as soon as we started to walk away from him. We were honestly worried he was going to pull off his leash in his anxiety to stay close to us. I told Carolyn to go ahead without me, but even that was too stressful for Alfie, so he did accompany us (slowly) to the top of the mountain. Honestly, he was totally fine with the rocks, it was me that was the nervous one.

We all survived the hike to the top, so after that we continued our hike to Kicking Horse Campsite. This was all new terrain for me and it was rolling meadows as far as we could see. We weren’t particularly worried about the campsite being busy because we had taken Friday off work, but a group of about 8 boys caught up to us mid-hike, so we kept just ahead of them for the last few kilometres to beat them to the campsite.

Our haste was wasted though, because even though we had barely seen anyone on the trail, everyone had apparently beaten us to the campsite and all the tent pads were taken when we arrived. So I can only imagine what this campsite must be like on a weekend, especially when the wildflowers are in bloom. But no fear, we don’t like tent pads anyways (they’re hard and uncomfortable), so we found a nice empty patch away from the crowds to set up our tent.

It was probably around 6 or 6:30pm by the time we rolled into camp, so we mostly just set up camp and had our supper before hitting the sack. We weren’t sure how many people were heading to Nicomen Lake in the morning, so we wanted to get a head start nice and early. It was also pretty cold, so we layered up and cocooned into our sleeping bags for the night. It actually dropped below zero in the night because when I got up to pee Alfie’s water bowl had completely frozen solid and everything had frost on it when we got up in the morning.

We’d picked a stellar spot though because as soon as the sun made it up over the mountains, it was shining directly on our tent. There’s nothing I love more than being able to pack up a dry tent! We had a quick breakfast, took down camp, and then started on our way to tackle the 9km to Nicomen Lake.

The hike to Nicomen Lake is just as scenic as the rest of the trail. We hiked through meadow after meadow until we finally hit the ridge before Nicomen Lake. From the top of the ridge, we could see Nicomen Lake and started our descent towards it. We were momentarily distracted by a helicopter transporting a supply load via cable down to the campsite and a couple we passed in the opposite direction informed us they were doing some campsite maintenance at the trail.

We had no worries about campsites this time. We were the first people to make it to the lake and arrived around 12:30pm. This time, the tent pads were all taken up by the maintenance crew, but we found an awesome sandy spot right next to the lake to pitch our tent. Nicomen Lake is incredible beautiful, the only problem is the bugs…

We’ve never arrived at a campsite as early as noon before, so we were honestly at a bit of a loss for what to do. It would have been lovely to lie next to the lake all day, but the amount of mosquitoes made it a bit torturous. We had lunch, took a little nap, went for a swim, and played fetch with Alfie. Eventually we decided to go for a little mini hike to explore the area to keep moving to avoid the flies. It was a really lazy afternoon and I got in a fair bit of reading, but by nighttime the campsite had completely changed and gotten very busy. Some of the people from Kicking Horse showed up, along with a huge crowd of others who had hiked the entire 21km that day.

We had supper and then made it a pretty early night. We got hit with a small bit of rain in the evening, but it only lasted about 15-20 minutes and the clouds cleared out again pretty quickly. We had a beautiful view of the lake and I wanted to try my hand at some night photography, so I turned my midnight pee break into a bit of a photo shoot and got some really awesome shots of the stars and the milky way!

We kind of forgot that our last day was going to involve a whopping 17.5km, so we decided to get up really early again because we really had no idea how long it would take and neither of us wanted to be too late getting home on Sunday. We also knew the last day wasn’t going to be scenic (all forest trails), but it was actually a bit of a relief because it was scorching hot on Sunday and the trees provided a nice buffer from the sun.

We totally killed the last 17.5km and exited the trail ~5 hours after we left the campsite. The trail out comprises of 2 hiking trails, the Grainger Creek Tail and the Hope Pass Trail. The Grainger Creek Trail was mostly switchbacks (although very gentle ones) that undid most of the elevation we had driven up. It ended at Grainger Creek horse camp, where we stopped for our only break, before rejoining the Hope Pass Trail to Cayuse Flats. The Hope Pass Trail has a lot of history because it was originally used as a wagon trail during the gold rush in the mid 1800’s. So it was a very nice wide trail the rest of the way down.

There was one challenging spot about 100m before the parking lot. There was a pretty high flowing river with two trees down over it that were the only way to cross. I’m not really afraid of heights, but I hate crossing on narrow trees with my backpack, so we had to butt-scootch our way along the tree. The real problem was getting Alfie across. I was worried about letting him go over the tree, so we spent forever trying to find somewhere for him to ford the river, but another guy and his dog eventually caught up with us and his dog had no problem crossing the fallen tree, so I let Alfie go across it too and he totally had no problem. So again, it was just me being a worry wart.

And that pretty much concluded our adventures on the Heather Trail. From the river it was a short walk back to the parking lot. It’s a pain having to drive all the way back into the park to pick up the second car at Blackwell peak (easy way to kill 2 hours). But the trail was just a scenic as expected and I had a great time exploring it!

Hiking Lightning Lakes

June 3, 2020May 8, 2020 / Maria / 2 Comments

This is the third post in my Manning Park mini-series, so it’s time to talk about one of Manning’s most popular day hikes – Lightning Lakes. Manning Park has 3 campgrounds inside the park: Hampton, Cold Spring, and Lightning Lakes. I’ve camped at Hampton several times and once at Lightning Lakes. Of the 3, Lightning Lakes is definitely the most popular, so you have to be on the ball when booking, which is why I usually end up at Hampton. The nice thing about Manning Park though is that with 3 campgrounds, you don’t have to book a site right when they release, there’s usually something available.

So in 2017, me and my friends starting making a car camping trip to Manning Park an annual thing. We drive up after work on Friday, do a short hike on Saturday, and then spend the rest of the weekend taking it easy. Usually our trips are all about physical activities, but our manning trip has always been about lazing at the beach, drinking beer, and playing games. After a big breakfast on Saturday morning, we usually relocate to the Lightning Lakes day use area for the rest of the day to hike, go swimming, and have a BBQ. It’s usually too chilly for swimming in the morning, so we’ve gotten in the habit of exploring around the lake.

Lightning Lakes is as the name suggests, more than 1 lake. The first lake is located at the Day Use area and you can hang out at the picnic tables or rent a boat to explore for the day. There’s a bit of an offshoot from the lake on the other side of the boat launch and then if you follow the river up from the main lake, there’s a second long lake heading into the backcountry. There is a bridge across the river, so you can opt to do just the bottom lake, just the top lake, or both. The first year we’d intended to do both, but the length of the hike is actually a little bit misleading and it is longer than you think, so we ended up just exploring around the first lake. Then our second year we did the opposite and hiked around the back lake. Whatever you choose, make sure you cross the bridge! In my opinion it’s the most scenic part of the lake. There’s very little elevation gain on the hike, so it makes for a nice leisurely walk.

As I mentioned, you can also rent boats at the lake. I’ve never done this myself because we have a little rubber dinghy that we usually bring, but some time I would like to rent a canoe and go up the river to the end of the lake. Some people find the lake pretty cold for swimming, but we’ve always enjoyed it. There’s also a large dog beach on the east side of the day use area and it’s fun to watch the ground squirrels popping out of their burrows and running around on the grass.

I definitely prefer Lightning Lakes in the summer, but it does also make for a great snowshoeing location in the winter. Manning is one of my favourite places to snowshoe because unlike the North Shore and the Sea to Sky, it consistently gets snow all winter, so there’s always been fresh powder around when I’ve gone out there. This past winter I went out when my parents were visiting and we snowshoed up to the end of the second lake. We followed the trail on the way up and walked back across the lake. Careful doing this obviously – make sure it’s mid-winter and that’s it’s been cold for a while surrounding your visit.

So if you’re looking for a short, fun, and scenic hike; Lightning Lakes makes for a great pick any time of year!

Skyline II Backpacking Trip

May 27, 2020May 7, 2020 / Maria / 7 Comments

Continuing on with my mini-series about Manning Park, I’m super thrilled to finally write about the Skyline II Trail! After my amazing hike to 3 Brothers, I was inspired to go back to Manning. My goal was to hike the full Heather Trail, but I needed someone to do it with me. This was back in 2017, so I didn’t have as many hiking and backpacking friends as I have now, so that pretty much left Carolyn and Brandon because Seth isn’t really a fan of backpacking. I think Carolyn must have been on vacation at the time, but Brandon happily agreed to go with me. I wanted to hike from Blackwell Road all the way down to Cayuse Flats, staying overnight at Kicking Horse Campsite and Nicomen Lake. But since this requires two vehicles, we decided to try out the Skyline Trail instead.

The Skyline Trail is located on the other side of the park (basically, the other side of the highway) and continues for 25km to Skagit Valley Provincial Park. Since hiking to Skagit Valley would also require two vehicles, we decided to do a there-and-back-again hike from Strawberry Flats in Manning Park. The Skyline Trail is also well known for its wildflowers, but it doesn’t receive quite as many visitors as the Heather Trail, presumably because of the elevation gain. We wanted to beat the crowds to the campsite, so we decided to take Friday off and head out early.

It was late July and a beautiful blue sky day. We started hiking around noon and our goal was to stay at Mowich Camp, which is located right at the halfway point along the trail: 12.5km. The start of the Skyline II Trail is a bit of a slog. You leave from Strawberry Flats, which is a little way past Lightning Lakes. You can also hike the Skyline I Trail, which leaves directly from Lightning Lakes, but is longer and takes a different route up. On the Skyline II Trail, it’s about 5km to the junction with the Skyline I Trail. There’s not a whole lot to see on the way up – it’s pretty much all uphill in the trees, but they start to thin out near the top and you can catch a glimpse of Snow Camp and Goat Mountain. While it’s not the most interesting section of the trail, I’ve always liked it because it’s not too steep, so it takes about 90 minutes to hike up.

Once you reach the junction though, you are greeted by one of the most beautiful views in the park! From the junction the view completely opens up and you can climb down to this rock viewpoint that looks out over the park, all the way to the distinctive peak of Hozameen Mountain in Washington. The viewpoint isn’t for the faint of heart as there’s a pretty big drop-off, but we loved hanging out there while we ate our lunches.

After that, it’s back into the trees for one last challenging section. You have to climb back down and up Deception Pass. You head right back into the trees and follow the switchbacks down along the pass before starting to climb back out – I think it’s about another 1-2km, but then you’re home free for the rest of the hike! That’s not to say it’s easy, but it is damn beautiful! Skyline II Trail is what firmly cemented Manning Park as my favourite provincial park and to date, I still consider Skyline II Trail to be my favourite hike in all of BC. Now I still have yet to hike in the Rockies, but until I make it out there, Skyline Trail is definitely holding on to the top spot.

Once you climb out of the pass you quickly realize where the trail takes its name from. The rest of the hike is along the ridgeline looking down over meadows full of wildflowers to the Lightning Lakes Chain Trail, and out towards Hozameen Ridge and Hozameen Mountain. We had picked a dream day to hike the trail. There was absolutely no one on it since it was Friday, it was sunny, and the wildflowers were in peak bloom! I can’t recall exactly how long it took us to get to Mowich Camp, but it wasn’t the fastest. I have a feeling it was somewhere around 6 hours, which is a bit on the slow side for us, but we were constantly stopping to take pictures of the wildflowers and had a long lunch break at the viewpoint. Brandon is pretty silly and I was have a fun time hiking with him – he indulged me by taking lots of Sound of Music inspired photos of me dancing in the wildflowers.

The big thing to be aware of if you’re camping on the Skyline Trail is the water supply. In hindsight, we were pretty lucky because we weren’t super prepared for it. There’s only one campsite on the entire trail and the water source is pretty small. It’s just one tiny stream that runs through the campsite. We weren’t sure if it was even going to be running, so we kept out eyes open for other water sources along the way. There are a few other streams running by, but it would have been a long walk from the campsite. Fortunately the stream in the campsite hadn’t yet dried up. Our plan had been to bring Brandon’s water filter since it was only a small source, but he forgot it, so we had to make do with the emergency water tabs in my first aid kit. Obviously we could have just boiled the water, which we also did to leave overnight, but the last thing you want after hiking all day is to drink hot water (or worse, no water if the stream was dried up). So plan accordingly if you’re going out there. In future, I would bring extra water with me just in case.

Despite the rest of the trail being breathtakingly gorgeous, Mowich Camp isn’t much to write home about. It’s hidden in the trees, so there’s no viewpoint from the camp. But it still goes down in my memory as one of the more memorable campsites. For the first, and only time, on all of my hikes, we were the only people at the campsite. Manning Park is too far to drive after work and then hike into the camp, so we ended up being the only ones there! It was a weird experience. I’ve camped several times with only a limited number of other people (Juan de Fuca Trail and Ring Lake come to mind), but never as the only people. We took over the whole campsite and picked the best spot to pitch our tent. Brandon set up his hammock across two trees and we set up his bluetooth speaker while we cooked to scare away any animals that might be attracted by the smell. Brandon made chili for supper and had even brought dessert up with him! Overall it was a relaxing evening, except when Brandon left to go get ready for bed and I was left alone in the tent with only the sounds of the forest to keep me company. It’s kind of creepy being the only people around and I was definitely more aware of the potential for animals to wonder into the campsite. We were very careful about keeping all of our smellies away from the tent.

But we weren’t disturbed at all and woke up in the morning to continue our journey. Our plan for day two was to hike along Hozameen Ridge to Monument 74 at the Canada-USA border for a view of Hozameen Mountain. We continued along the Skyline Trail for a little while until we reached the junction for Hozameen. The Skyline II Trail continues down from there all the way to Skagit Valley. I’ve never done that section of the trail, but I have heard there’s more elevation gain to reach the bottom, so it’s not as scenic as the Manning side of the hike. But our destination lay along the ridge. We took the junction onto the Hozameen Ridge Trail, which continues all the way to border, and I suspect onwards past Hozameen Mountain and Ross Lake. I was never able to find a proper map for it, so I’m not really sure. My GPS says the trail ends shortly before the border, but it definitely continues to the monument and beyond.

Hiking along the ridge is pretty easy. It’s mostly flat and you meander back and forth through the trees, catching views on both sides. As you approach the end of the ridge, you start climbing. This is definitely a more challenging section, but as you crest the end of the ridge, you’re rewarded with an unimpeded view straight to Hozameen Mountain. If you’ve ever been to Manning on a clear day, it’s likely you noticed Hozameen Mountain. It’s the biggest mountain in the area, with very distinctive jagged peaks. We decided it was the perfect lunch spot and couldn’t pass up the opportunity to soak in the view while we ate our wraps. While we were eating, we came across our first visitors of the day, three trail runners that were training for Manning’s ultra marathon in August, the Fat Dog 120. They had started running that morning and caught up with us at the half-point of their run (and our 3 day trip). They downed a few gels, snapped some photos of Hozameen, and then took off again while we stared flabbergasted that they’d run the same distance it took us 2 days to traverse in just one morning. I bet we had more fun though.

Our lunch viewpoint is where it looks like the trail ends on my GPS, from there it’s a steep downhill towards Hozameen. We could see the border monument and trail continuing at the bottom, but I was reluctant to go down there because I didn’t want to have to climb back up again. There was no way Brandon was leaving the last stretch of trail unfinished though and he dragged me down over the side to finish what we started. It is difficult to follow the trail down over the edge and it is pretty steep, so be careful if you’re following this route, but I definitely felt a sense of accomplishment when we reached the monument. It was my first time hiking to a border monument (I’ve since done Monument 78 as well) and we had a lot of fun snapping pictures and dancing around the monument.

I was surprised to learn upon reaching the monument that the entire border is actually clear cut through the park. As we hiked along the ridge, we noticed there was a corridor of clear cut trees, but never considered it was the border. I just assumed there was a transmission line down there. But once you arrive at the monument, it becomes pretty clear that it’s the border. I researched it after the trip and confirmed that it is true. There’s no signage at the monument, but I later learned when I hiked to the PCT monument that the border is also monitored by cameras. There’s a sign at the PCT monument asking you not to moon the border as you are on video! Wish I known this when I was flipping Trump the bird at the monument by Hozameen!

We continued along the trail a little bit further to get another view of Hozameen Mountain before finally deciding to turn back. The trail definitely continues on, but it’s hard to judge the distance because mountains as large as Hozameen can be very misleading when guessing distance. All in all we hiked about 15km there and back to the campsite. We didn’t see anyone on the trail on our way back, but upon arriving it was obvious that other people had been busy hiking in all day. Our little solitary campsite was now filed with campers who had driven up in the morning to hike in for one night. It made me glad that we had taken Friday off and had the opportunity to hike the trail on our own, but we made some new friends with some of our fellow campers and swapped stories while teaching them to play exploding kittens.

We’d had two beautiful blue sky days, but the weather was forecasted to change on Sunday. When I hike with Carolyn, we’re always the first people up and on the trail, but when I hike with Brandon, we’re usually the last. Carolyn is a major morning person, while Brandon likes to take his time. I tend more towards being a morning person, but I can swing either way and enjoy sleeping in and taking it easy when I hike with Brandon. So despite being the first people to the campsite, we were among the last to leave. The clouds had finally moved in, but fortunately the rain was staying away. We made better time on the hike out, but we still stopped a lot to take more pictures. Even though I prefer round trip hikes, I find there-and-back-again hikes still look different from both directions and I have a tendency to take all my pictures twice – especially when it’s different weather conditions and all the photos look different anyways.

We stopped again at the big viewpoint for lunch and then pounded the last 5km back down to Strawberry Flats. I can’t remember if it ever did rain on us, which itself suggests that likely it didn’t, or at most was just a bit of drizzle. So even though it was 3 years ago that I hiked the trail, it still stands out in my memory as one of my most memorable backpacking trips and my all time favourite trail!