Rampant Drops

So far, we have had very good luck with the weather for our pre-booked camping trips. Not so much last weekend. On Friday we snuck off early from work and headed up to Elfin Lakes campsite in Garibaldi Park, one of our favourite walks from last year. Rosie bought Garibaldi biscuits from the English section of the supermarket specially, then forgot to pack them.

We were supposed to be going with Thom and Hannah, but Thom got delayed at work and we heartlessly left without them. (We were trying to avoid walking in the dark, but we were actually much quicker up than predicted, so could definitely have waited…)

Here are a few comparison pictures of last year vs this year:

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It was very foggy, damp and cold, but actually didn’t rain that much. There is a cooking shelter at the campsite, so once Thom and Hannah turned up we had a fun evening playing cards.

Rosie tried to take a picture of the process of rehydrating our tofu curry, but we ate it before we remembered to take the “rehydration complete” picture.

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The next morning, the weather had gotten slightly worse. Still not much rain, but it had rained overnight. We had booked the Saturday night at “Rampart Ponds”, a campsite about 9.5 km further into Garibaldi Park, and set off once we’d rung out the tents.

There is a small peak on the way called “Opal Cone” which sounded interesting, we decided it was still worth the short detour and climbed up to see the views… of the clouds. We did get a glimpse of a glacier at one point and got to do some fun faffing to extract all our bear attractants so we could stash our heavy backpacks at the bottom of the climb. After that, there was some snow to walk over and then another uphill before we reached the campsite.

Some interesting things:

• Some alarming red algae on the snow
• A marmot
• The meeting of two streams (one glacier fed and one from snow melt)

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Rampart Ponds campsite was still quite snowy, but we found two spots that had been previously cleared and managed to dry the tents out. The campsite was on a ridge and we could see Mamquam Lake 250 m below us. Here Rosie faced a dilemma: Rosie really wanted to jump in Mamquam Lake, but Rosie really didn’t want to walk back up 250m of elevation afterwards. The lake proved irresistible in the end and the swim was great, if a bit challenging as the water level was high and there was a lot of shallow water to wade through.

The clouds lifted that evening, but the bugs descended! Luckily we had fashionable mosquito nets to stop them landing on our faces. Thom and Hannah had them too, they just took them off for the photo so they could look less silly than us.

With good intentions, we woke up early to start the 20+ km walk back to the carpark. It was warm and our backpacks were only slightly lighter after consuming all of our supplies – there was some moaning and some very sore hips, but we all survived. Elfin Lakes was halfway and was surprisingly even colder to swim in than Mamquam Lake. They are smaller, but higher up and had actually only melted the week before.

We were back at the cars before 2pm and everything seemed peachy, until we started the drive back to Vancouver… There was a crash right near the end of our journey and the highway was at a standstill. We stopped on the way for fish and chips and to wait until things were moving again. By the time we got home it was 8pm and we were very sleepy!

The rest of the week has been pretty busy too – we have moved apartments! But we will save the update on that until next week. Now, goodnight zzz…