Lake lovely water weekend

Still feeling like we have a little bit of cabin fever we planned a weekend trip away up to Lake Lovely water, which is a little lake on the Western side of Squamish. This time however, we splurged a little and booked a helicopter to take us up the lake and skip the 5 hour hike up! Harriet and Alex also joined us for the weekend.

Alex and Harriet picked us up on Friday after work and we sped up to Squamish to catch our chopper at 5pm. We arrived and were sad to be told that due to the heavy clouds in the valley the chopper won’t be able to fly and take us up to the lake. They were confident that the clouds will lift overnight and could take us at 6:45am Saturday morning. We were ok with this as you can’t help the weather, and we found a crappy little campsite near Cat lake for the night.

Saturday morning arrived and we quickly packed up and zipped down the airport. No breaky, no coffee, we were excited!

The clouds had lifted overnight and we were off in a chopper!

We flew directly west and up through the valley we would have had to hike up. We were in some light clouds and then we spotted the Helipad – aka a giant flat rock! We touched down successfully and we all had to hop out while the helicopter was still going. Ellen, Harriet and Alex all had to wait on the side while I went around the other side of the helicopter to get out backpacks out of the cage. Once done I went to the front of the Heli about 2m from the nose, gave the thumbs up to the pilot and he lifted up and off. It was such an adrenaline rush for us all! Some good videos of the drop off are in the google photos album below.

We went and found a nice spot to put up our tent which had an awesome view of the lake and mountains behind. After this we set up and then went down to the lake to cook up some coffee and breakfast! This lake is fed directly from multiple glaciers, so our water was taken straight from the lake! Definitely a bit better quality that Murray river water!

After breaky we decided to go for a bit of a hike around the lake up to one of the mountains. We weren’t very prepared, due to the snowfall and glaciers in the area apparently proper ice axes and crampons are needed to get to the top of these peaks! But we were still keen to try see how we go! We hiked pretty much all day until it got a bit to dodgy and slippery and then headed back to camp. It was a great day out and we were out hiking for a little over 6 hours which made us fee a bit better about our Heli ride in!

For the night we chilled down at the lake drinking beers and eating food. We chatted to a few hikers who trekked the whole was up and we felt they didn’t like us as much because we got the lazy ride in! Or maybe they saw Ellen’s Tevas and thought we were an odd bunch.

The next day Ellen got up at 5am to watch the sunrise over the lake. That’s correct, Ellen awake at 5am! Wowee!

I slept in and went and joined her for breaky at a more reasonable hour. It was a ripper morning, bright blue skies without one cloud visible for the morning.

After breaky we decided to hike to the Alpha mountain ridge. It was a super tough trail, basically straight up through the trees to the snowline, and then once we got to the snowline it was a slog through the snow, slipping every second step. But alas, we made it to the ridge! 

Below is me trying to get the right angle for Ellen. It is an art!

Below is the result!

We hiked, or rather skied all the way back down the mountain to the lake. We laid up at the lakeside for the afternoon playing cards and eating snacks waiting for our heli ride back down at 5:30pm. We had the lake to ourselves as almost everyone had left at 11am to get back down to Squamish – the perks of the Rich and Famous!

5:30pm rolled around and we waited and the heliport for our chopper. It was a little intimidating waiting for the chopper coming in to land. We were instructed to wait 1m off the rock the helicopter was going to land on so we were super close to it as it landed! Our bags were blown away and Alex lost his hat! 

Apart from that is was successful and we caught our ride down through the valley and to the airport. This is much better than hiking! Alex and I were joking all weekend about how we need to work out how to be trained to a helicopter pilot for free – this is the life! 

One of the better campsites and weekends we have had here in BC. More photos and videos are here.