Garibaldi BC, Black Tusk & Panorama Ridge

The September long weekend is here! This weekend we are heading out camping into the best of Garibaldi Provincial Park – Panorama Ridge and Black Tusk here we come. Finally I will get to see the views of the ridge after I resisted temptation a few weeks ago! We set off Saturday morning and picked up two of our friends, Alex and Harriet on the way. They are looking at moving to Whistler as they can both work from home, so we drove up to Whistler to check out a rental before going on the hike. Surprising enough – it was bigger than they expected and reasonably priced. Fingers crossed!

We made it to the trail head at Cheakamus at around 10am, grabbed our huge packs and set off. The hike to the campsite was a 8km, 700m vertical gain hike. Woah it was tough! We made it 2.5 hours and setup camp. We had some lunch and chilled out for a little bit before heading off to Panorama Ridge for sunset. This was another 6.5km and 600m of vertical! Offft the legs were feeling it as we were leaving the campground, the views on the way were so nice – the big black tusk was just towering over us all the way to Panorama.

Once we started climbing the views were amazing, every 30 steps or so we would all just stop and turn around and look at the views. We stopped and had a swim in the blue lake in the valley.

After 40 minutes or so of climbing straight up the ridge we made it. And OH MY GOD – it is absolutely ridiculous. No wonder this place is so popular, and on a heap of postcards – there was also not many people at the top as it was late in the day. I can’t put it in words how nice it is, so here are some photos when we arrived at the top – zero edits to these photos. The lake is actually that blue!

We hung out at the top for a couple of hours, taking it all in. We were the only people up there for sunset, amazing we had this whole place to ourselves. The best thing about this place is I had cell signal, and the Raptors were playing Game 4 against the Celtics, so I streamed it from the top. We won! Yahoooo

Ellen being Ellen, thinks shes a mountain goat and needs to get in the best position for a photo for “The Gram”. Below is a picture of Ellen scaling a dodgy cliff, and the next photo is the result. Thoughts? Was it worth it? I think so.

Then the sun started setting, and boy o boy – pinks, and reds, and yellows, and purples starting popping in the sky. Just stunning!

After the best of the sunset was done we started heading back down. We tried to get through most of the scrambling before it was dark. Almost at the bottom of the ridge I rolled my ankle pretty badly – I was only just telling Alex how good my ankles are 100m before this happened! Thankfully I could still walk on it, slowly and steadily we trekked all the way back to camp in the dark. We arrived at around 10:30pm and went straight to bed. What a night that was!

Day 2 – time to climb that mammoth of a mountain Black Tusk! We had a lovely coffee and breakfast before heading off up to the Tusk. Around 7km with 700m of vertical gain! Woooo our legs were tired thinking about it. Thankfully my ankle is ok, it is super swollen but good to walk on. I wasn’t missing the attempt to summit the tusk!

We climbed up a little way and were again spoiled by the views of the lake. We were also so far above the clouds today. Just amazing.

After a couple of hours we made it to the ridge line. The last km heading up the ridge was a battle, lots of loose rock. It was a 2 steps forward, 1 step back situation.

Ellen convinced us all to keep going and try to summit the rock. It became super dodgy once we were up close to it, so I waited under the rock while Ellen made the summit. It was pretty much a rock climb to the top! No thanks

We then hiked all the way back down. As you can see Ellen is super stoked with herself and risking her life!

We then went back to camp and hung out for the afternoon drinking beer and wine. Fly nets were a must have!

Day 3 – we packed up camp early and hiked all the way down. The wind has really picked up so we got out of there quick smart. Thankfully we had two unbelievable weather days in the alpine!

More photos are located here.