Cinder Cone Hike in Whistler area, Nov 8, 2020

[Ye Chu]

Are you ready for winter? How cold is cold? How windy is windy?

We had a blustery blue sky day starting at 8:15 am. On the Cheakamus forest service road, two trees had fallen and luckily our vehicles could drive under or around them (mental note: we should carry a saw in the car). On the 7.5 km hike up to Helm Lake, we had several fallen trees across the trail and Dave and Mark, kindly did some trail clearing.

I decided we would try a new route up Cinder Cone along the rim of the old volcano and it turned out to be quite easy compared to last year’s approach. Today, the exposed rim had a vicious westerly wind that blew my black mitten down the slope (Dave retrieved it for me) and left me with a frozen face mask.  But the endless sunshine and laughter made it all wonderfully tolerable. I found a nice alcove out of the wind to have our lunch. Two hikers wished they had their skis as they would have loved to ski the bowl of the crater. After our balmy lunch, we hiked around the entire crater, giving us excellent views to Helm Glacier. As I was taking a video and zooming in to the glacier, I saw the four French men we met earlier stuck between two huge crevasses. They had no rope, ice axes or crampons. Unfortunately, we couldn’t stay to watch where they went (it was 1 pm and we wanted to get back to the cars before sunset). But they looked intent on hiking up the face of the glacier.

It was slippery hike back down as the ground had frozen solid – micro spikes worked perfectly though.

We got back to the cars at 4:30 pm with plenty of daylight to get back to the highway for our long drive home. All in all, everyone said they had a great day, and a big welcome to our newest club members: Maggie, Michelle and Dave.

• This topic was modified 4 years, 5 months ago by Ye Chu.
• This topic was modified 4 years, 5 months ago by Ye Chu.

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