The picture above was taken April 2004, the picture below was taken August 2005… see the effects of climate change? … heh, not really… I first did this hike with Ross Easter w/e last year. We arrived and the trailhead and carpark was under at least a metre of snow. We had a somewhat epic 3-4 hour hour trip in deep, soft snow and icy switchbacks to the last of three lakes and snow-camped on, what we hoped, was the shore of the lake.
This weekend I hiked the same trail with Alex. It was more than 30C in Pemberton (the nearest town to the trailhead) and the car-park was packed full of day-trippers. It took less that 2.5 hours to make the 5.5km long 0.5km elevation to the end of the third lake. We set up camp and then made a further 0.4km elevation to the base of the glacier at 1950m.
Back at camp we battled swarms of mosquitoes, ate, slept and hiked out in the morning. On the way out we stopped at the location that I had camped in last year to take the above photo… I’m now not sure that we didn’t camp on the frozen lake last year!
We stopped at a cute little eatery called Pamela’s CookShack in Pemberton for a sweet $10 beer (well Kokanee anyways), burger & salad deal (with a large portion of 80′s metal at top volume on the side), then headed into the forest just south of the town for some very hot and sweaty bouldering. The rock there is really beautiful and the landings so flat but it really was hot… still, that didn’t prevent Alex from sending the slopy classic V3 ‘Pop-Tart’ or the V4 highball ‘Little Tree’. When we’d run out of water we got back in the car and headed back down the Sea-to-Sky to Alice Lake for a quick cool-off swim and then into Squamish for yet more food (yummy barbecued Coho salmon ) at The Brew where we saw, as always, a few familiar (climbers) faces (but I’m having a bad name day).