–text by Brian Fleming
–images by Brian, Jes Garceau and Matthew Lettington
What a day. This one kicked my butt a bit. I went on this trip with the Island Mountain Ramblers. A few of the people from my first club trip were here again, so it was nice to have some familiar faces.
The weather sucked… clouded in and no blue sky; until we were back at the vehicles. It rained lightly which wasn’t too bad except it made the snow conditions a lot worse, heavy and wet.
The trip up to Mount Hal is about 6.6 km from the car with a lot of logging road to start. There were some very steep sections to get to the top. The pictures don’t really do it justice.
Once we were at the summit of Hal, we continued on to Mount Irwin, which was about another 6km away with a 300m descent before another 500m gain. By the time we got off Mount Irwin my legs were done.
On the second trip up Hal, it was a slow grind up to the top. After the uphill battle on the way to the summit of Hal there were still a few more uphill battles, but soon enough, the downhill fun would start.
Mount Hal has some fairly epic hills and to make things a little more fun and easier on the feet, a few of us decided to slide down these hills on our butts. Sure they got a bit wet but who doesn’t want to slide down a 100′ steep hill?!
We found bear tracks through the snow before we got to Hal and we found another club member’s, Dean Beaulac’s, tracks between Mount Irwin and Hal. Dean went up Irwin from the other side, made it partway to Hal and turned around. It would have been a super tough grind to get both from that side.
On the drive out we came across a group of kids who got their 4×4 stuck. Luckily we had a shovel to help dig them out before towing them.