Gold Creek, Golden Ears Park

For Canada day, Mark and I decided to do a hike in Golden Ears park. Unfortunately, we didn't get going until a little bit late (9am), and it's a long drive to Maple Ridge, so we didn't actually get on the trail until 11:15am. To make matters worse, we chose one of the longest hikes in my guidebook (Hector Ferguson Lake), with a suggested time of 11 hours!

We had brought our bikes, so we rode in on the logging road for the first few kilometers, which went very fast. At around 5.5km, the trail got too rough to bike easily, so we locked the bikes to a tree and set off on foot. Our trail basically just followed Gold Creek, which was beautiful when we got glimpses of it.

We quickly ran into overgrown parts of the trail, with lots of Devil's Club and salmonberry bushes completely blocking our path. We bushwacked through it, and then lost the trail, as there was flagged route leading to a swamp dead-end. We backtracked and found a different flagged route. Some parts of the trail were completely clear, and very pleasant to walk along, with great views of Gold Creek. However, we kept running into very overgrown sections of trail, and the going was slow bushwacking though all of them. It was hard to follow the trail in many sections, and we had to backtrack a fair bit.

We got to the 10km marker at around 2:15pm. There was only 4km more to go to the lake, but at that point we ran into a massively overgrown section which was basically just pushing through bushes and Devil's Club. If the tail had been clear, I think we could have made it to the lake and back in a reasonable time, but we decided to turn around at that point, especially because we wanted to be back in Vancouver for Canada Day celebrations. We backtracked for a few minutes and had a great lunch sitting on the creek.

We hiked/bushwacked back through the trail, and only got lost once on the way back! We got back to our bikes, and after a short climb, it was all downhill on the fireroad! What a great way to end a hike, as opposed to walking out a boring road. I wasn't used to riding a rigid bike with cantilever brakes though, and my wrists and fingers were sore by the end of the downhill! We hopped into the van and were back in Vancouver in time for dinner and the Canada Day fireworks!