Capturing the Art of Nature
Hope Mountain
Over-looking the town of Hope, BC. This peak looked interesting and promised great scenery from the top.
Category
Serendipitous Discoveries
2009
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The hike to the peak of Hope Mountain is a moderately travelled one. Though not nearly as well known as Cheam, this trail is fairly well maintained and marked. Earlier this year when I was trying to determine what my 5th peak of the season would be , I came upon this hike in a new hikers book I picked up. As I was spending a fair amount of time near Hope while exploring the logging roads, it seemed like a natural extension to the exploration of the region. In preparation, I took a drive up the logging road early in the season to scope out the trailhead so that the day of the actual hike would start smoothly and get us on the way sooner.
When we left home we were concerned about the weather again as it was overcast with some chance of rain in the area. What we hadn't expected however was the low cloud layer which fogged in the whole mountain! When we arrived at the parking area next to the trailhead we were completely enshrouded with fog. Though that was fun to be in, it caused us two serious problems. The first was the lack of a view of anything, the second was the complete drenching of all the foliage along the trail. Despite these issues we decided to do the hike as planned.
We first setup the cross-band repeater radio as is our custom on hikes. This took a bit longer than normal as we were having trouble finding an orientation for the antenna that could reliably reach the Sumas Mountain repeater. We eventually found a partial solution to the issue and then set off. The first leg of the hike is down through the head-waters of a small stream, here the foliage was thick and being wet with dew the plants were hugging the path soaking everything that came past. We were quite drenched before we had gone half a kilometer. Trying to shake the water off the plants slowed us down quite a bit and so we were making very poor time on the hike.
As we made our way to the first ridge, we lost the trail for a short distance. We kept heading in the original direction and found it as the trail took a steep climb to the ridge line. At the top of the ridge there was a pleasant log seat to rest on. Since we had lost so much time getting this far it was now lunch time,so we took a break to eat. As we rested we watched the cloud come and go on the next segment of the trail, at no time did it clear enough to see the peak that was right before us. We decided that the slow going would delay us enough that going on would not be worth it since we were unlikely to reach the peak and even if we did we would see nothing. So we decided to walk along the ridge a distance to see why the waypoint I down loaded as the location where one crosses the ridge was some distance from where we were. After bush-whacking a ways we realized that it would take too long to find the old trail, if it even existed, especially since we were wet and getting cold. So we returned to the trail we came up on and started our return trip to the truck.
The hike back went quite quickly as it was down-hill almost the entire way. The plants were already very wet again and so we had to shake the water off a second time. It was certainly nice getting back to the truck and turning on the heater for some drying action. Though we didn't achieve the peak we did have a good time. I have re-scheduled the hike for next year and hopefully we will have a clear day to try it on.