As we advocate and encourage folk to get outdoors and explore nature, we often find ourselves feeling conflicted. Today was such a day! We arrived at the trail head, that was once quite difficult to find, to discover an expanded parking area - actually a fully developed parking lot and it was full. We knew we should have been excited that so many people were out hiking and enjoying the great outdoors, but I must confess that deep down we were a little upset that "others" would be on the trail. These feelings make no sense, yet every once and a while they rear their ugly head. We forced ourselves to make a conscious decision to celebrate the fact that so many people were outside! Unfortunately, we also found ourselves packing out a LOT of garbage....clearly much work needs to be done to spread the "leave no trace" message. We will leave that for another blog post! :)
It was a beautiful spring day and we were thrilled to be visiting
Chilliwack Lake Provincial Park, a 9258 hectare park just 150km east of Vancouver. We planned to hike the trail past Lindeman Lake to Greendrop Lake. Both lakes feature back country camping - complete with pit toilets and tent pads.
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| Back Country tent pads - at Lindeman Lake |
This hike is a both a great weekend getaway and a fantastic day trip....lots to keep you interested:
- Views of snow capped mountains
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| Navigating across a slide area |
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| Trillium in bloom |
The trail is really well marked, but today we were forced to be a little creative as sections of the trail had been washed out by recent spring run off. We managed to keep our feet relatively dry as we scampered and jumped from rocks to logs!
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| Trail marker on rock |
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| Flagging tape marks stream crossing |
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| Section of bridge washed out |
As we were crossing one of the slide areas a young couple caught up to us. We heard a deep voice shout out, "Mr. and Mrs. Weiss!" This hulking, young backpacker quickly approached and gave me a huge hug. Turns out he was a baseball player from a team Rob had coached years ago. Of course, he was all "grown up" and had changed considerably. On the other hand, we have hardly aged a day! What a great meeting - we were so excited to catch up with him and of course thrilled to meet him on the trail. You just never know what might happen or who you might meet when you get outside! :)
Giggle of the day:
It has been many years since we last hiked to Greendrop Lake. In fact, the previous time we visited the area, we took our three children, who at the time were all under the age of 10. It was a wonderful day trip to the lake, as the kids enthusiastically climbed, explored and got their feet wet and muddy! You can imagine our laughter today, as we arrived at the first lake in 30 minutes.....an outing that years ago had taken an entire day and countless SNACK breaks.
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Trail leading past Lindeman Lake to Greendrop Lake
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