Golden Ears, September long weekend

Another loooong weekend here in BC. Sadly, due to the weather, there were showers and storms predicted for Saturday night and Sunday morning, so we couldn’t make the most of the long weekend on a big camping trip.

Instead, on Saturday, I went and played 36 holes of golf with a few mates! Not real golf, a form of golf called Pitch & Putt where the holes are only between 40 & 100 yards in length. Ellen came and joined us for the last 18 holes – hockey definitely translates! She is a pro, and even snagged a couple of pars 🙂

On Sunday, we decided to head out to the Golden Ears Provincial park for a night of camping and a mammoth hike to the Golden Ears peak. We left home at around midday in Ellen’s new little Echo, with another mate, Alex from work. Fun fact, he is from Yamba and knows Pete (Jordan’s mate). What are the chances!!

After an hour of driving we made it to the car park at Golden Ears and met up with the rest of the gang before heading off on the relatively cruisy 6km trail to Alder flats where we set up camp. For the afternoon we just hung around, and drank a lot of vino! When it was time for dinner, we discovered that Ellen & I accidentally left our dinner at home – there was a bit of a blame game going on there for a while, but the cause has now been settled between us 50:50! We coaxed a bit of food from some others for dinner so we didn’t just have to survive on wine & chocolate.

Sunday we awoke early, packed our day packs and headed off up to the top of Golden Ears. It is only a 6km trek, but the elevation gain is a whopping 1250m!! We grinded away up to the top, the closer we got to the top, the steeper the trail seemed to get.

After 3.5 hours, going a pretty quick pace, we made it! There was a little Canadian flag at the top, I wish we brought a little Australian one and planted it a little bit higher.

We hung out at the top for an hour and had some lunch taking in the views. We could see Vancouver in the distance as well as a thousand snow capped mountains looking North into BC.

My knees were already shaking in anticipation of the hike back down. We left the top at around 1pm, and made it back to camp at 4pm! All of us were very weary by this point.

We quickly packed up camp and headed back to the car, finally! At 6pm we were at the car and quickly zipped back home. We stopped at a Burrito place on the way back to Vancouver, I had a family sized Burrito, it was awesome!

Another great weekend in the lower mainland done and dusted! Only 1000 hikes to go.

More photos here.