A couple of years ago the village of Pemberton, hoping to attract tourists, built a trail up Mt Currie. The TH is semi-reachable by car if you can do water bars and cross small streams. None of us had ever hiked it, but some VOC’ers have, led by “Pemberton” Sam McKoy. We figured it was time to give it a try.
But first we had to drive into Pemberton to get a picture of Mt Currie for Birgit and the Vocene.
Then we tried to get a better picture from the Pemberton Golf Course,
and then from the Pemberton Airport.
By now it was getting scorching hot out, so figured we’d better get on with the hike. We drove down past the Soo River to the dirt race track where the trail starts. Here we were met by a serious lady who told us that we couldn’t possibly go up the trail because we would have to drive through today’s monster truck race. We explained that we had driven all the way from Vancouver and we didn’t think she was being fair and the Village of Pemberton would probably not be impressed. She modified her requirement; we would have to each pay her $40 and wear wrist bands (for liability reasons). We still weren’t happy so she phoned The Boss, and Boss said “let them through”, so we were off.
We drove across the Green River, past the dead TV set, over increasingly sketchy water bars until we were stopped by a biggish stream. We parked. I semi-leaped the stream, Carla got a wet foot, and Lia snuck across on a fallen log. A bit further along (750 metres by GPS), we found the actual trail start. Prior to this time we had been running on faith, as we had no instructions for finding the trail. Once found, the trail is fairly well marked, has some windfall, and goes for a looong way. Did I mention that it was scorching hot?
The trail was somewhat unrelenting. It skirts across cliffs and goes through a patch of helicopter logging. It has many zig-zags. It seemed that we stopped every 10-15 minutes to drink water and cool down. We set a turnaround time as 3:30 but that passed and we talked ourselves into another turnaround at 4pm. That too passed, so around 4:15 I stopped on some rather welcome snow, while Lia and Carla continued for a bit. They got back to me at 5pm and said “it’s a ways further”. So we turned around. The trip down was faster because we didn’t have to breathe as hard, and maybe it had cooled down. A bit. The biggish stream had become much bigger, so we all crossed it on a sketchy log. According to my GPS, we had covered a total of 9.5 km and had done 1040m of elevation gain.
We put up our tents beside the dead TV set, ate dinner, chased off a pair of monster trucks that looked like they were planning to drive over our tents, and started doing the sleep thing. Around 2:30am I realized I was drenched in sweat so I took off all my clothes and lay on top of my sleeping bag for a few hours.
Sunday morning, driving out through the slumbering monster trucks, it was clear that some serious crashing and smashing had happened. But that’s what they like, I guess.
We decided to check out Brandywine Meadows access and snow conditions, for an Alcoholic Traverse later in the season. We were able to get to both trail heads with the Jeep, but there appears to be still too much snow on the traverse for a Beginner Friendly trip. Up at the snowmobiler cabin the Jeep didn’t want to start, but it was hot enough to cook eggs on it, so we guessed that might have been the problem. We opened the hood and added some nice cool oil to the engine, and then it started.
Carla drove us home uneventfully.