Hollyburn is one of the places we go to when the weather’s looking nice and we don’t feel like driving very far. The other one is Seymour. For those of you who don’t know, Hollyburn is the cross country skiing end of Cypress Resort, but we don’t go there for skiing because we are too cheap. You don’t even need a car to get there; there’s a shuttle bus but I have never ridden it, so I can’t provide details; check the Internet. You want to get up there early because when everybody in Vancouver decides to drive up there, the road becomes full and you can end up inching forward for an hour, then fighting for a parking spot. We were up there by 8:30 and there was plenty of parking, and bluebird sky.
Carla and I realized that we were both pretty badly out of shape and we did not want to make any predictions about whether we would get to the top or not. There was lots of other hikers up there, and to amuse ourselves we tried to count the number on various apparatuses. We saw 60% on snowshoes, 20% with micro-spikes or similar crampon-like pointy things, 15% on back-country skis, 5% with just boots, and we saw a split-boarder down at the parking lot. About 5% were carrying babies, about 5% had dogs, some had both babies and dogs. Half the dogs were wearing clothes; dog clothes have become very popular lately. Everybody seemed pretty happy. On top, lots of people were taking pictures and one young lady was doing rather uncomfortable-looking gymnastics. There was a drone flying overhead taking pictures. The mountains were all looking white and beautiful, and the only clouds were below us, but rising fast.
On the way back we looked for any slopes steep enough that they might slide and went down them, but we couldn’t get anything going. We had gaiters which were a good thing because we often ended up waist deep in the snow. We got back to the parking lot just after noon, and by then the clouds had rolled in and some people were leaving. There was still a long stream of cars inching up from Vancouver.