Camping was Brrrrrrilliant

Hopefully the stressful suspense last week has not killed off too many of our readers…

We did go camping!

Rosie severely overestimated the hardiness of the non-indigenous Canadians, only two other tents joined us in the snowy campsite at Manning Park last weekend. It was only -5°C! What wimps.

We arrived late morning, picked a camping spot (always a difficult task with Ollie who struggles with commitment) and then headed out on a gentle walk around Lightening Lake.

The big flat area is Lightning Lake itself. Although it seemed to be currently frozen, it won’t be frozen forever – as Rosie kept reminding Ollie. In fact, you can see where it had started to thaw in some shallow and sunny areas. After Rosie got over her fears, we did have a lot of fun playing with our new snowshoes.

Before cooking our dinner back at the campsite, we opened our camping wine and enjoyed a cup or three by the lake (they are small cups). Camping dinner was very very spicy Korean instant noodles we found for cheap, then we retired to our camp fire with our single camp chair. We got it for free a while ago and somehow neglected to buy another one… regretted that.

It was pretty cold overnight but, as the campsite wasn’t far from the carpark, we had brought our duvet as well as our sleeping bags. We were very cosy, if a bit restricted by the weight of all the layers.

After we gathered the strength to emerge from the tent and put on our boots (which were frozen solid – a painful surprise which we should have really expected) we set off to walk up Windy Joe.

Windy Joe is a small mountain (1825 m) named after Joe Hilton who worked in Manning Park from 1946 to 1975. We spent most of the way up discussing whether Joe thought it was windy or windy. There were a few switchbacks, but we wouldn’t say the path was notably windy. But equally, it was fairly still at the top, not notably windy. Perhaps Joe ate a lot of beans?

Anyway… the path was mostly compacted, it was easy enough to walk up with the microspikes on. However, on the way down, heavy footed Rosie kept falling into the snow up to her knee with one leg (known as post-holing), so she was grateful to have the snowshoes! At the top there is an old tower which used to be used to spot forest fires. These days they have aeroplanes for that, so the tower is mostly used for eating houmous sandwiches in.

Also we saw this fearsome squirrel… You should have seen the other guy.

We decided not to stay a second night and headed home for a relaxed Sunday in the warm before going back to work – Canada don’t get Easter Monday as a holiday.

We are going camping again shortly, but are staying put this weekend. No cliff-hangers this week folks!