Archive for September 2016
It's been a while since a post. This year was not a great year in terms of hiking. With weddings and other things, I got caught up and before I even realized, the season just flew by. Originally set for late August, but changed at the last minute, We conquered the Lions on September 10 2016.
It was a huge battle, physically and mentally. Just imagine 1200 meters of elevation change over 8 km route. Add another 2 km for the distance it took to walk from where our car was parked to the trail head. At the top, there is more hiking to be done as the trail extends further and we just went with it. That day I hiked a total of 43 thousand steps or roughly 29 kms.
The planned hike had ended up on a day that a roller coaster of ups and downs. I had gotten cramps that morning and didn't want to have to postpone the hike once again. I pushed through and met up with my hiking friend. On the way to Lions Bay, we got caught in traffic due to a bike race from Vancouver to Whistler and got detoured. We didn't end up arriving until 10:30 am. We were already behind by 1.5 hours. As previously mentioned we parked over 1 km away because there was no parking available at the trail head. Good warm up I guess. Once we hit the trail head the trail was a gravel uphill climb for the first hour or so. This for me was the most difficult portion of the entire hike. I had to fight myself not to turn back and just keep telling myself to take a couple more steps. The trail eventually leveled out and was easy going. This didn't last long because as soon as that was over, the hard steep decent followed shortly thereafter. We made our way up slowly. When we finally made it through a section of landslide area into a clearing and finally saw the majestic lions towering over us for the first time, we were in awe. Excitement and Relief were a couple of the emotions. We continued thinking we must be almost there. We weren't. Far from it. Along the way we ran into a lot of hikers heading back down. Asking each of them, everyone would say how hard the actual summit was and how far we were from it. We had to traverse over a rock slide until we reached a plateau before the lions. By this time it was already close to 3 in the afternoon. We were cutting it pretty close in terms of time. We decided that since we had come all this way, we wanted to take a stab at summiting the actual lions. Sadly it wasn't meant to be as we ended up getting lost and going the wrong way, continuing along the Howe Crest Trail getting to the portion between the East and West Lions. We decided to turn back as we were now battling against time to head down the mountain before nightfall. I didn't want to be the one that Search and Rescue send out a team for.
The descent was a lot worse than I expected. The jagged rocks and fallen trees added to the difficulty and as we were in a rush, we put our knees and body through a beating. We made it back to the gravelly sloped section of the hike near the beginning when we were enveloped in complete darkness. This made me glad I was totally prepared for this hike. So many firsts on this trip included making sure I had my headlamp, more than enough water and food, extra layers for warmth, spare battery, whistle and actual hiking shoes! We made it through the last hour in complete darkness with the help of my headlamp.
I was never as sore as I was after this hike. It took an entire week for my body to fully recover. But the views and the feeling of accomplishment for getting as far as I have far exceeded the pain and suffering.
