That’s No Fen

The village of Burwell, UK, is located roughly 10 miles North East of Cambridge on the south-east edge of the Fens. The mountain of Burwell, Canada, is a remote granite dome located at the limit of legal backcountry access. One was named by the Anglo-Saxons, due to there being a fort (burh) close to a spring (well), and the other was named in the 20th century after an engineer who worked on the water mains in the Vancouver area.

We’ve never been to Burwell in the UK, where Rosie’s sister now lives, and the trip to get there seemed a bit daunting. So we decided to visit Mount Burwell instead!

Mount Burwell is right on the edge of the map, at the limit of the “legal backcountry access”. (The area beyond is protected as it supplies the drinking water for Vancouver and the surrounding area.) This was probably the hardest day’s walking we have done so far at about 30km in total with lots of elevation gain. On Saturday, we got up at 5am and started walking in the dark – the first part is flat and we wanted to give ourselves as much daylight as possible. Just to make it even harder, we decided to park an extra 2km from the trail head, as the car park gate is only open from 7am to 7pm. It was quite fun walking in the dark with our head torches and the flat part went pretty quickly.

The sun was well up when we stopped for second breakfast before tackling the steep climb up to Mount Burwell (via Coliseum Mountain). It has been raining lots recently and the trail was very muddy and slippery. We were pretty slow going up and had plenty of opportunities to spot some interesting mushrooms.

The weather wasn’t forecast to be great that day either, but as the days are getting shorter and the chances of snow are increasing we decided it was now or never!

Eventually, after a very long slog, we emerged out onto the enormous granite slabs of Coliseum Mountain. There were lots of clouds in the sky, but we could make out some views in between them.

We found a comfortable rock to have our first lunch while we tried to make out the peak of Burwell just a bit further away.

Luckily we had taken a photo of the instructions in our hiking guidebook, as the route up to Burwell was not obvious. We went past a large tarn and over a few more treed bumps before climbing up to the summit.

As we were having fun jumping across the rocks and scrambling up steep granite slabs, the lower clouds were all blown away! From the top of Burwell we got a great view of lots of the North Shore mountains that we have visited over the summer. It felt like the perfect last mountain to climb (probably).

There was a “Peakbaggers” cache at the summit with a notebook to sign. We added a note to explain what we were doing up there. The other people who had signed seemed to have just come up here for fun… weirdos.

After we said one last goodbye to the snow-free peaks, we picked our way back down to Lynn Valley. It took us longer to go down than it had to go up, as the steep rocks and roots were so slippery. We did also have a second lunch break… Finally we arrived back at the car 13 hours after we had left and in the dark again – we were very tired and achy but pleased we had managed to visit Burwell.

This weekend is Canadian Thanksgiving (which is apparently about celebrating the harvest rather than the arrival of the pilgrims as in the US version). We have several dinners planned and get Monday off work – so we are thankful already!