May 2, 2026
~ submitted by Melanie Yu
Three of us were keen on checking out the trail on a clear sunny warm weekend. The warm and disappointing winter ski season we had got me questioning how soon Comox Glaciers would be feasible…I still have to check it off my bucket list. It felt like the perfect time to check out how much has melted up there, and a good opportunity to check out the road conditions. This was my third time doing this hike, and I was able to drive to the trail head in November and thought it was still attainable. It was shocking to find how much worse all the cross ditches/water bars were since I had last been up.
No vehicles today made it to the trail head. A stark difference from last season. A significant amount of rainfall and washouts seemed to have happened since, as even at the trailhead, a lot of foliage had disappeared and it was almost completely exposed. I deeply remember hiking up this road years ago when I did it the first time and remember finding relief at the shaded trail head. This is no longer the case!
Even with maximum clearance of 15 inches with one truck, the only thing that would have made making the trailhead with more confidence was a stronger approach angle and a short wheel base (though it wasn’t necessary to have short wheel base for this one). The cross ditches to the trail head felt worse than the ditches to Mount Joan.
We debated whether to ditch the snowshoes, but given the heat dome over this weekend I didn’t want to risk the chance of deep post-hole-ing and feeling under prepared as a leader.
The snow started right at the start of the trail and then quickly disappeared, only to come back for the last 2 km of the hike to the lake. We had already put on our gaiters early on in the hike only to take them off because it got too hot, but we got lazy to put them on again and took the hot of getting soaked since we were so close to the lake even with the post-holing we were doing.
The lake was still mostly frozen but numerous spots on the lake starting to defrost.
When we got to our rest stop we had the lake to ourselves for majority of our break-a rare privilege to experience as this hike is incredibly popular in the summer. We even got to experience hearing the rare sounds of mother nature – glacial blocks giving off thunderous cracking …more than once! A hard no to checking out the glacier today. After a solid break and enough time to dry out our socks in the sun, we started our descent.
We thought perhaps not many people would want to come up when the lake was still frozen – giving no opportunity to swim, But on our descent we probably passed by 5 more groups of hikers – none had snowshoes with them. At that point in the day, it felt like 25 degrees in the sun, and the snow was getting quite soft and slushy in places – it made crossing some snow sections sketchy as there were some spots where there was evidence of deep hidden tree wells.
We were grateful we started first thing in the morning when the gates opened because we certainly would have pulled out our snowshoes if we started later. Even though we didn’t end up using our snowshoes, I don’t regret bringing them (and a good way to train for Comox Glaciers! ) because if we had stayed longer at the lake we would have needed them for the first km of our descent out of the lake.
Hike was a success!
Overall, at this time in the season, the snow pack in the area seems quite minimal given it is only the start of May.
Comox Glaciers feels feasible earlier this year than what is typically anticipated in previous years. I guess this is what is expected given we are going in to an El Nino summer. I am noticing more people, hiker or not, are paying more attention to the fires this year given what we lived through last summer. I am hoping the awareness shines a bit of light in to a mindful summer this fire season.