It’s Not Weart It!

Last weekend was a long one, as Monday was “British Columbia Day”. To celebrate the British invasion, we decided to go camping again! This time we were at Wedgemount Lake, a glacial lake surrounded by glaciers and mountains about a 2 hour drive north of Vancouver.

Although not sick of camping, Rosie is getting sick of carrying heavy things up steep mountains – the 7km trail went up by 1200m and took us about 3 hours 15 minutes. The moaning peaked about 1/3 of the way through when Rosie nearly passed out before Ollie allowed her to sit down and eat some sweeties. The last part was supposed to be the hardest part, it involved using your hands to climb up some big rocks, but actually this was a fun change from the 3 hours of steep up through the forest.

There were two camping areas by the lake: one just where the trail arrives at the top of the hill and one a bit further down by the lake shore. We chose a spot by the lake shore, which was very picturesque. However, the outhouse down there was not – we will spare you the gory details. There was another back at the first camping area, so we ended up walking backwards and forwards to use that one whenever necessary.

This lake was the coldest one yet for swimming, which is to be expected considering its source. Just a bit further down the trail, you can get to the toe of the Wedgemount glacier. The smaller pool at the base of it drains into the lake and has actual ice cubes floating in it!

When we visited British Columbia on holiday in 2018, we paid for a guided walk out onto the Athabasca glacier. That one was much bigger, but you could get a bus right up to it. Seeing this one in the wild was even cooler!

Our evening wasn’t as relaxing as it could have been because there were so many mosquitos. Rosie ended up with 33 bites that she could count. Ollie had less because he had proper trousers on rather than leggings (and he doesn’t taste as good).

We had intended to stay up there for two nights so we could spend the day in between climbing up to Mount Weart, which is supposed to have spectacular views of the surroundings including another larger glacier to the east. There is no trail to the summit, you have to find your own route and do a bit of scrambling over several ridges.

British Columbia has been on fire for a while now. Air conditions have been terrible further from the coast, but Vancouver has been getting away with it, as you can see in the image below. This weekend the wind changed and blew some of it our way.

It wasn’t too bad, but the views were disappearing and Ollie was worried about conditions getting worse whilst we were up there. He didn’t want to be struggling to breathe on the way down. Rosie wasn’t too concerned about the smoke and persuaded Ollie to start the ascent. However, when it started raining about 1/3 of the way up, we both decided to give up. Wet rocks are slippy rocks. It wasn’t Weart it!

Not wanting to hang around to feed the mosquitos, we packed up and headed home early. We finished unpacking and organising our new apartment on Monday and fed Thom and Hannah instead.

Still no pictures/videos of the new apartment we hear you cry? Well, it is supposed to be raining this weekend (which is good for those wildfires), so perhaps we will get around to it for next time…