Myra-Bellevue: Hiking the Burn

Original plans for this weekend - our first weekend of freedom - consisted of Mountain Biking locally on Saturday morning, followed by Ski Touring in the Coquihalla on Sunday.

Well.

As of last weekend when we drove by, the Coquihalla was under about a foot of water, and yesterday we woke up to six inches of snowfall here at our house.  Not the way things normally go, but I'll take some local snow without complaint.  We headed to our MTB destination on foot, so we could at least scope it out for springtime.

Gorgeous.  There is nothing like hiking through a burn after a big early season snowfall.  My pictures don't even come close to doing it justice.

We saw a large wolf as well.  Not pictured.

We ended up hiking (slowly) for about two and a half hours, doing a big loop through the park.  This was our first time, and we had no map - when we found our way back to the car, it had felt like a pretty long hike.  Without knowing anything about the park, I was worried that we had just spent a morning circumnavigating the entire park - it was fun, but if we could do all that in a morning on foot, we were going to run out of mountain bike real estate pretty quickly.

Not the case.  This is most excellent.  We will probably be able to spend all winter here on skis, and as soon as we have skiied it out, we can start exploring all over again on bikes.

Trip Report: Juan de Fuca Trail

Another delayed post: we hiked the Juan de Fuca (JDF from now on) trail the beginning of this month.

A few years ago we hiked the West Coast Trail, which is the original coastal trail.  It basically ends 200 metres to the north of where this one begins.  We went in expecting the West Coast Trail (WCT from now on) all over again, which the JDF definitely is not.  The WCT is all about getting to the beaches at all costs (ie 100 meters down a slippery ladder, walk for half a kilometer, then the same thing back up again).  The JDF is a little more sensible, and because of this spends more time in the woods.  At first I was disappointed with this, but I think there are good aspects to both:

WCT:
- you get to use ladders to get to each and every beach
- there are tons of people who can't wait meet and hang out with you
- it is ~7 days long, giving you lots of time to immerse yourself in the trail

JDF:
- you don't have to take ladders to each and every frigging beach
- it isn't crawling with tons of dirty hippies who can't wait to meet you
- it is only 4 or 5 days long. "Immerse" is hippie for "smelly"

Overall, a really good trip.  Also, if you hike it South to North, each day seems to get better and better, at least in my opinion.

My favourite picture is below.  I don't know why I like it so much, but there it is.  Clicking here will take you to the full album.