Thursday, May 12, 2005

Adventures with Asphalt

Jon had a day off in the middle of the week and I was unemployed so we took advantage of the situation and headed east to hike Vedder Mountain. The weather was cloudy with sunny periods, yet all the peaks on either side of the Fraser Valley were masked in clouds. That made it a perfect day to do a lesser mountain such as Vedder. We followed the directions in the guidebook, and everything was going smoothly until we arrived at approximately where the trailhead sign and parking pull out should be. Instead we came across an asphalt processing plant. This clearly wasn’t right, and for something this big the book should mention it in the directions. So we went back down the road a bit to a fork. This side of the fork was definitely not for cars, even with Jon’s GTi’s “4x4” suspension. But we tried it out anyways, but after a few hundred meters and having a fender flare come unattached, we decided against proceeding any further. We headed back up to the asphalt plant to see if we missed anything. There did seem to be a small road leading away into the bush, but it was on the wrong side of the road to be the trail and we didn’t feel like wandering around somewhere we didn’t know where were going when there was heavy machinery operating. So we headed back down to Cultus Lake Rd, and discovered the Park Office. We found out that the trailhead is somewhere up where we were looking, but they weren’t sure exactly where. We also found out that the asphalt plant was only a year old, thus it wasn’t included in my book. With this new information and armed with a useless Chilliwack Forest District Map (useless for navigation due to lack of labels and missing roads), we decided on a new destination – Sumas Mountain. The only problem was that we had no idea how to get there. I had a general idea of where it was, which proved right, but then came the problem of finding where on the mountain the trailhead started. We stumbled upon Sumas Mountain Regional Park and parked at the very large yellow gate. At this point we just wanted to get out and hike so we started up the logging road on the other side of the gate hoping it would lead us to a trail. Well, it did, after 2 hours. The trail was 1.5km long and led to a decent view looking east over the Fraser Valley. With a decent view and some rocks in the sun, we ate lunch before descending back to the yellow gate. We figure that based on our hiking speed on that 1.5km of trail (17min), and the time it took to hike up the hiking distance should be somewhere between 20 and 24km. Despite a boring logging road, we still had a good day with some nice exercise.

When I got home I searched the internet for a Sumas Mountain Trail. I found a nice description of it, which makes me wish we would have actually found it, but nowhere could I find any info on where the trail actually starts.