Living the best adventure life, since 1958
August 16-18, 2019
~ submitted by Rick King
Friday, Aug 16: At 8 am, nine of us met at the resort at Great Central Lake to catch the Della Falls water taxi. Due to our numbers Doug, owner of the water taxi, had arranged for two boats so we could all arrive at the same time.
June 29-30, 2019
~ submitted by Jamai Schile
The party of six Ramblers set off from the well marked parking area on Western Mine Road. From there the group started the trail that climbs and weaves its way into the alpine. The relatively gentle gradient that gains 1,100 meters to the ridge crests at kilometre 8. The trail is dispersed with a few rolling treed areas that offer some relief from the grade as well as an impressive view point over looking the Myra Falls mine site.
My summers are hectic. I pack my days full of hiking in the mountains and coasts of the island. Often, I’m thinking about what to pack on my next trip while I’m unpacking my gear from a trip I’ve just finished. So come September, I’m ready to head back to work and the normalcy of weekly routines that it brings. But not before I squeeze in one last hurrah, on Labour Day. This year, we picked Marble Meadows as the destination for the weekend, and it didn’t disappoint. It was just what I needed after a summer of rained-out trips and the loss of a friend on a mountaineering trip.
Marble Meadows is a unique treasure within the boundary of Strathcona Provincial Park. But before you start shouting, “Uh, Matthew, there are many treasures in the park!”, let me qualify my point. It’s one of the few places you can stand on the top of a mountain and see exclusively unlogged landscapes, turquoise lakes, and the many types of rock found on the island. It’s a backcountry destination well-known by hikers and fossil-hunters for its rolling terrain, well-booted track, and the millions of fossils visible on the surface of the exposed limestone. You get the point: Marble Meadows is worth a special note.
Total Distance: 30.4 km
Minimum Elevation: 227 m
Maximum Elevation: 2079 m
Total Elevation Gain: 3012 m
Continue reading “Marble Meadows Ramble: Marble Peak, Morrison Spire, and Mount McBride”
Once you’ve done enough hiking on Vancouver Island, you will realize that most of the great hiking requires that you drive down a section of industrial gravel road. And that’s if you’re lucky; a good number of these places require walking stretches of road as well. Mount Mitchell is one of those.
Located along the Strathcona Provincial Park boundary, between the Norm Creek Valley and the south arm of the Oyster River Valley, this rocky feature creates a jagged protrusion of that boundary to include the area above 1200 metres into the Park. Below that, the terrain is stripped bare, and roads are visible throughout the surrounding valleys.
Aside from the tragedy of the lost forest, the roads give fast access to the start of our route. In previous years when the gates were open, Mount Mitchell was considered a daytrip. In those days you could access the route either via the Oyster River gates off Highway 19, or from the Boliden-Westmin Road along the Buttle and Park mainlines. However, times change, and so do permissions and road conditions.
Total Distance: 44.9 km
Starting Elevation: 232 m
Maximum Elevation: 1842 m
Total Elevation gain: 2548 m
June 15 – 16, 2019
~ submitted by Julianna Wells
The group of 8 met at the Elk River Trail parking area on a beautiful June morning and headed out at 8:45am. The trail was dry and the forest was showing it’s many shades of green all along the way.
June 17th, 2019
~ submitted by Ken Warren
It was a clear and warm morning when 10 Ramblers and a guest tackled Crest Mountain, most for the first time. We ground our way up the switchbacks in good time with no snow until we hit the plateau.
–submitted by Ramsay Dyer
The Ramblers trip to Malaspina Peak was disrupted on Saturday morning by a large Grand Fir that had laid to rest across the Canton West Main, a few kilometres before where we wanted to go. I hadn’t thought to throw my saw into the truck, but cutting it up will be a fairly big project anyway. We did briefly try to pull it out of the way, but no.
So we decided to go for Tahsis Mountain. When we did Santiago the previous week, we got a look at the approach that Lindsay had taken from the same area to ascend Tahsis Mountain. This seems to involve a fair bit of road walking and bush now, so taking the alternative route, ascending in the Malaspina drainage, that I’d explored previously had some appeal. I guess I’d kinda forgotten that that also involved a fair bit of road walking and bush (probably considerably more).
Santiago Mountain rises from the shores of Tahsis Inlet on the west coast of Vancouver Island. From its summit, you can see some of the best views of Nootka Island, Tahsis Inlet, and some of the island’s most prominent peaks. Yet, for all its selling points, Santiago Mountain sees very few summits. At 1485 metres, this bushy peak’s summit barely reaches the alpine, but still includes enough tree-climbing, exposed scrambling, exposed tree climbing, and long, steep snow slopes to deter most island mountaineers from catching the views. How many have done so is a matter of debate: there’s no summit register to document the ascents –probably not worth it—and in our research we could only find one trip report, the evidence of at least one other via a rusted aerosol can on the summit, and shared word-of-mouth about one other person to successfully summit.
Distance: 12.5 km
Starting Elevation: 458 m
Maximum Elevation: 1292 m
Total Elevation Gain: 882 m
Total Time: 10 hours
~submitted by Phil Dol
March 2, 2019
Five members met up at the Wood Mountain parking lot for a snowshoe to Mt Becher in the sunshine.
We departed at 9:45 am mostly following the summer route. There was only one other person on the trail whom we played leapfrog with up to the summit. We arrived at the summit around 12:30 pm where we experienced the rarity of no wind and clear views of the surrounding mountains all to ourselves.
After a short lunch break, we headed back along the same route, where we encountered several groups of people on snowshoes and backcountry skiers as well as their dogs. We arrived back to the vehicles at 3:00 pm.
Dear Octavia,
We don’t often get a whole day together for just the two of us. Typically, the entire family goes on our adventures, or at the very least it’s you, Hemingway, and me. In fact, that was the original arrangement, for you both to come with me –and 12 of my closest Ramblers buddies– on our February 3rd summit of Mount Elma. But Hemingway decided to stay home for a swim lesson and his first overnight camping trip away from home, leaving the whole day for just us–our first time!
