Well it is November now and things are getting cold and wet... I saw that the weather forecast for this weekend was supposed to be pretty decent so I looked around for a good day hike that Darryl and I could do. While looking around I noticed people were posting a lot of beautiful pictures of Mount Whymper on a facebook group page. I did some research regarding its location and discovered that Mount Whymper is the highest mountain in Canada below the 49th parallel at 1539m. Because it was not too far of a drive up island, I figured it was worth a shot. When I awoke in the dark early morning I could hear the sound of rain outside pattering on the roof. I quickly whipped out my phone and re-checked the weather for Youbou (the closest community to Mt Whymper). I had it in my mind that if it was going to rain all day we wouldn't go because I wanted at least a bit of visibility on the mountain. Sure enough the weather report was adamant that things were going to turn around and the rain would be short lived. |
We slid out of bed, packed up the truck, and were on the road by around 0820 in the morning. We headed north on highway 1 until we passed Fuller Lake just north of Duncan and took a left on Macmillan Bloedel Rd. Here we set the tripmeter to "0". We kept left on this road until we came to a gate manned by a gatekeeper. We explained that we were going to hike Mt Whymper and he gave us a permit for the day and instructed us that the gate closed at 1600hrs. |
Close to the end of the road there was a well flagged and cairned trail we picked up off to the right that weaved up through some old logging slash. After about 5-10minutes we were walking through a beautiful forest with the occasional ray of sun peaking through the trees. Here there was quite frequent flagging and some markers nailed into the trees.
After a short while the trail broke out of the forest and we were climbing over some slick wet bluffs that required us to lift the dog. Again we could see views of the valley below peaking through the trees, but as we looked up I could see a wall of fog about to engulf us.
The descent was quite slippery and wet so we had to take our time and go slow. Eventually we popped back below the fog again where we could see our surroundings. We made it back to the truck in just over an hour and headed back for home with some time to spare before the gate closed. This was a great hike that I would love to do again in the summer. |
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