Happy Canada Day! And it’s a toasty one! My whiny button is activated at around 24C and today was well above that. We thought we’d go for a little hike up Grouse Mountain to find some cool air in the forest. It sort of worked, but we also worked up a sweat on the trails and then had to come back down in the afternoon blazing sun. We brought snacks, but didn’t really find a good place to sit down and snack on said snacks on the rocky trail.
We rode the chair up to the top, and marvelled that the chairlift could go as slowly as it did. I do not think I have even been on a chairlift moving that slowly. I suppose it makes sense, it’s pretty scenic up there and tourists certainly love the view. To be fair, so do we.
We walked a little ways from the top of the lift and I went looking for a trail that was on my app. Not exactly marked, but eventually we found it when we realized that it ran under a remaining pile of snow that we have to navigate across and down before we could make out the actual trail. When we got to the bottom, there was a closed sign….but to be fair…on looking at it now I can see it was for snowshoeing…
Before we headed up the next rocky slope, we chatted up a fellow coming down from the bush and discovered he was an Aussie at the beginning of a two and a half month wander across Canada, with no firm plans in place other than Vancouver, Victoria, up to Nanaimo to circle back to Vancouver, Squamish, and then out to Banff, Lake Louise and Calgary, before hopping on a plane to jump over the middle and into Ontario, then to Halifax. We made a few suggestions like Whistler, Cape Breton, and PEI. His name was Finn, he lives in Melbourne, and he was pretty cool and had some interesting intel on parts of Australia.
We scrabbled up the trail that was more of a creek running towards us in many spots and eventually ended up at the end of a zipline run. The trail forked and, not wanting to hike all the way to Lynn Valley with a knee that was threatening to give out on me, we looped back around and back down to the gravel service road and eventually back down to the celebrations below at the lodge.
We found a spot in the shade to eat our snacks and looked out over the city and Straight far below us and appreciated that we live in a pretty special place.
Happy Canada Day!