First Brother, Manning Park

FRIDAY: I've already done a few dayhikes so far this summer, but no overnight trips due to the wetter-than-normal May and June weather. Finally, at the start of July, sunshine became more regular and the temperature rose! Jodi and I were keen to some kind of trip, so we decided to spend two nights in Manning Park, and to fit a day hike to First Brother in. Manning is about an hour southeast of Hope, and very close to the US Border - most of the peaks we could see on our hike were in fact in the US! I picked Jodi up from work at 4:30pm and we headed straight for Highway 1; traffic was not bad at all.

We had a great view of Mt Baker on Highway 1, stopped for dinner in Chilliwack, and turned off at Hope onto Highway 3. The Lightning Lake campground was full (we didn't have a reservation), so we headed to Hampton Campground, which was only a 2-minute drive from Manning Lodge, and got there around 8:30pm. It was actually quite empty, so we had our pick of campsites. The Coldspring and Mule Deer campgrounds were probably more popular because they are on rivers, but I liked our campsite - it had a great view of the valley, and was very quiet.

SATURDAY: We got up and had a deluxe breakfast of scrambled eggs and yogurt. My hike guidebook suggested 7 hours for the Three Brothers Hike, so we set off quite early in the van for the trailhead. There is actually a paved road, followed by a gravel road, that climbs from the Manning Park lodge in the valley up to high in the mountains - the parking lot is at almost 2000m! It took us a while to actually drive up the road, which has spectacular views, so we left the trailhead at around 10am.

We started off on a wide gravel path that actually headed downhill, an interesting change from most hikes I've been on. After we passed Buckhorn Camp, the trail turned upwards and climbed fairly steeply, first through trees, and then out into beautiful, wide-open Alpine Meadows! We had incredible views of the mountains around us, and of course there were many different types of wildflowers blooming. I (sadly) don't know any of their names, but we saw red, yellow, purple, blue and white ones!

We continued walking through the meadows, and followed an alpine ridge, although we weren't on the top of it yet. The terrain was rolling, with a fair bit of up and down (I think the guidebook described it as a "meandering" trail). We also ran into lots of snow patches, although they were easy to walk across and were nearly melted. At around noon we came to a viewpoint on the ridge and had a view of the Three Brothers - our lunch objective!

From there the trail headed upwards again, without many switchbacks. We quickly got to the ridge of the Brothers, which was very cool - it dropped of sharply on either side, and there were panoramic views all around. We followed the ridge and were soon on the peak of the First Brother! It was occupied by some other hikers, so we walked down to (what we suspected was) the Second Brother, and ate a well-deserved lunch there at around 1pm.

After a nice long lunch, we headed back down the ridge the way we came. There was a junction where one could hike onwards to Nicomen Lake - it looked like it would have made a nice overnight trip, maybe next time though since we only had day bags with us! The hike down was uneventful, apart from discovering an outhouse without a door, and learning that we could have parked at a higher parking lot and cut maybe 20 or 30 minutes off of our hike - oh well! We got back to the car around 4:30pm. On the drive down we stopped at the car viewpoint for great views throughout the valley, and of peaks in the US.

We drove over to Lightning Lake for a dip in the water to clean off the sunscreen and sweat (well, it was more like splashing water on ourselves, the water was way to cold for a swim!). Dinner that evening back at Hampton campground was Chili (premade at home) - delicious! I spent the evening re-learning how to play Skippo (a card game) from Jodi, and we were off to bed fairly early since there were lots of bugs. The next morning we slept in, and then took a nice easy stroll through the Canyon Nature trail before packing up and heading back to Vancouver. A great weekend!