Seymour Saturday Nov 20

Due to the violent and scary weather last week the hot springs trip got cancelled at the last minute and I found myself without a trip. Seymour is a good solution to this problem so I posted a trip and soon I had people COMMITTED, too many for the Jeep. Eric would have fitted in the Jeep but he kindly offered to get a Modo if he could find passengers to fill it who were willing to pay $20 each. Apparently they were, but then Matthias offered to drive and he charges only $5, so that sounded like a better deal. Adam and Nelson drove up from the north shore, and suddenly we had lots of rides. Somebody else signed up briefly with a car that holds only one person (?), but I never did figure out what happened to him. Maybe he’s lost on Seymour as we speak, or has been eaten by hungry whisky jacks. I counted the people at the Seymour parking lot several times but I could only find eight. It turns out the three COMMITTED girls (Emily, Rachel, Macco) that were supposed to ride with Eric, then with Matthias, bailed around 11pm Friday night, no apology, no explanation, they just bailed. Maybe they were badass, or maybe they all caught Covid. It’s lucky that Eric wasn’t renting the Modo by then or he would be out by $100, which is too much to pay for hiking on Seymour.

 

It isn’t much fun being a driver. You have to get up earlier, drive all over town looking for your passengers, then on the way home you have to stay awake, often join the one-hour lineup to cross the Lions Gate Bridge. The passengers just want to get home and they complain about there being too many cars on the road.  But we do need drivers unless we are all going to save the planet and just go trail running, or ride bikes.

 

Briefly, the road was lovely up until the parking lot which was a scary sheet of ice. Beyond, there was about 3 inches (75 mm) of snow on a base of un-dentable snow that had been rained on, then frozen hard. I have never seen so many people with micro-spikes. The lifts weren’t running but they will be soon, weather permitting. Carla, Hirdesh and I turned back just beyond the VOC snow cave place while the other five made a dash for the first peak. They travelled faster than us so we all arrived back at the parking lot at about the same time. Nice day, no complaints. Pretty soon it will be time to bring skis up there.

What did we learn?

  • Seymour isn’t always crowded and snow is coming but only the keen back country people were skiing this weekend.

  • Micro-spikes are sometimes very good to have.

  • VOC people are tending away from the software that VOC has created, preferring one or more social media platforms. I thought we did pretty well with the old stuff, but times are changing, I guess.

  • People on the trip seemed reasonably pleased with the outcome, got some exercise, took a million pictures. Hirdesh will not wear jeans next time and he might even buy micro-spikes.

  • People should be encouraged to bail as soon as they know they aren’t coming just so others who may want to come will know that there is space for them.

 

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