Crystal's Epic Adventures

This weekend in metro Vancouver is going to be a scorcher, with Saturday reaching 31 degrees in the Valley.  We knew the only way to survive it  (besides going to an airconditioned store and spending more money) was to get up into the mountains where it was cooler and the views spectacular.  Definitely my kind of day! Our objective today - peak of Hope Mountain After the huge backpack we did the weekend before, I was surprised my legs were still somewhat sore.  So we decided to embark on what we thought would be an easier day hike.  We were wrong.  The 105 Hikes book labeled this hike has having only 690m (2260 ft.) elevation gain over 8.5kms.  However, what the book does not say is that this was the 'net' elevation gain after several losses and quite steep gains going up and over 3 bumps before making it to the peak of Hope Mountain.  If you look up the hike on Alltrails.com it is 15.1kms with 934m (3064 ft.) elevation gain; this is defini...

Last weekend, being the July long weekend, we had planned to do this hike in Manning Park to the Punch Bowl and possibly Snass Mountain over three days.  However, the weather turned out to be really wet and we decided to stay home and get some things done instead.  We also had some planning to do for our big 7-day through hike in the Southern Chilcotin mountains coming up in August. Staying home on a weekend, and not getting out to hike, quite often means we head to MEC or other outdoor shops and end up spending a lot of money!  After quite a bit of research, and even trying out several sleeping bags in MEC and Valhalla, I made this huge sleeping bag  purchase . A few weekends before that I had to replace the Black Diamond pack I purchased, and used on our Vancouver Islands trip, with this amazing pack .  The BD pack just did not fit me very well, causing a lot of shoulder and nerve pain in my elbows.  So weird! Anyways, with the recent new pack purchas...