Garibaldi Lake

Today was spent hiking on Garibaldi Park in Squamish, British Columbia. This is about 30 minutes further north of Stawamus Chief, which we hiked a couple of weeks back. This hike took us approximately 7-8 hours, covering a distance of 25km. Elevation's hard to determine. Our ultimate goal to doing the hike is to get to the beautiful Garibaldi Lake, situated right smack in the middle of mountains, which is why, the only way to get there is to hike, or if you’re rich, perhaps, use a helicopter.

Here’s the picture of the trail map around the Garibaldi Provincial Park. This picture is from VanLiving.Net.

Our trek started from the Rubble Creek parking lot, going up to the junction (roughly around 6-7 km hike). From the junction, we decided to take the longer route so that we can pass by Taylor Meadows. Taylor Meadows is supposed to be a very pretty place at this point in time, but look what we encountered halfway up there:

(Left) from dry path to (Right) wet snow!

Hiking in snow is no fun at all. It’s slippery, it’s soft, and worst of all, it’s wet. Most of the effort was trying to be balanced. As my friend told me, the experience of hiking and walking through snow is like one who’s walking on a tight rope, trying to keep the balance, and the rope just keeps on wobbling. A couple of times I almost twisted my bad ankle.

And another thing I realized with hiking in the snow is the illusion that it is packed snow, but when you step on it, your whole leg submerges down! I think It happened to me a couple of times, which I hate more because if you don’t have any balance, you might just break your leg.

And what’s worst, I had my runners on! Which is not a good idea at all. If you hike, better use proper hiking shoes.

Continuing on with the hike, from Taylor Meadows, we somehow lost track of the markers and got lost for around 40 minutes, just wandering around the snow until we found the markers again. The good thing about my friend, he had his Garmin GPS so that we somehow had an idea where we were wandering to.

At this point, we’ve been hiking for roughly 3 hours already. And according to my pedometer, I’ve been walking 12000 steps already! Talk about being tired and then, worst – being lost! But somehow we managed to find the markers again (thank goodness!) and continue our way to Garibaldi Lake. By the way. I somehow managed to snap picture of the Black Tusk! Awesome isn’t it?

Even though we’ve been trekking for a while now, I still have energy left to continue the hike. But with a view of the lake (see below), I don’t think you’ll be tired at all! It’s well worth it after all.

 

Garibaldi Lake is amazing! It’s also extra special because there were still snow around, and we have to admit, even if snow is very hard to work with, it still looks beautiful with nature. And can you believe it, snow in the middle of Summer! Weather here is really absurd these days.

We stopped here for a quick snack and to enjoy the view for a moment. My other friend let me taste this Korean rice cake or something. It wasn’t bad, but… after eating the whole slice, my stomach suddenly felt really really absurd. Ang sakit! It was tolerable, but it didn’t help at all with the trek back. Of course, I didn’t tell her that. That’ll be too rude as she offered that to me anyway.

Our trek going back is to go via Barrier Lake path instead of the Taylor Meadow trail. That’s roughly another 10km back to the parking lot. Hiking down is as hard as hiking up. Going down, your ankle, knee, calves take all the weight. While going down, my legs and ankles are about to just give up. So in order to lessen the stress, I tried running down (after we got past all the snowy area, which was almost an hour later). Running down definitely lessened the pain. In fact, it was really fun running down the hills. You just have to be careful though. There were rocks all over the trails and some of them are protruding and they were as sharp as a knife.

Finally, around 3 PM, we finally made it back to the parking lot. We started around 7:30, if I’m not mistaken. What a day! Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to track my overall steps via my pedometer because my iPod Nano died an hour before we got to the end zone. But according to my friend’s GPS, he said we trekked a total of roughly 25 km. Not bad at all.

This is definitely something I wouldn’t mind doing again, but not just in the next few weeks. Perhaps next year again!