Hiking Mount Frosty

September 28, 2020

We’d been waiting for the kids to return to school and their parents to go back to “working from home” or at least, not crowding the parks and trails, for a fall cycling trip to the Okanagan. By the time the smoke cleared, we decided to start with a hike to Mount Frosty in E.C. Manning Park, famous for the fall display of golden larches. This is usually best in late September/early October and that was now.

We planned to spend two nights in Manning Park, avoiding both a crack-of-dawn departure or a tired drive post-hike. The Manning Park Lodge offers the only accommodation but affordable rooms were fully booked (of course), so we decided to camp. We knew it would be cold, but we could still eat in the warmth of the restaurant at the Lodge.

Mount Frosty is a popular fall hike thanks to the Golden Larches, but being a 3-hour drive from Vancouver keeps the weekday crowds down to a manageable level. We chose to make a loop by taking the long way down and saw no other hikers on that part. The fact that it made the return trip 8 km further might have had something to do with it.

Junior larch. Relatively speaking. It's probably hundreds of years old.

This is as high as we went. The last few hundred metres (it seemed like forever) were rock like you see here, only steeper, and I had no desire to go any further. We decided instead to descend on the other side of the ridge (toward Windy Joe) for a longer route back to our starting point.

Look carefully and you can see me coming down the trail, watching my footing. This was actually the easier way down from the ridge.

The trail passed through an area that had burnt; no idea when.

Heart

Comment

Link

Rate this entry's writing	Heart	2
Comment on this entry	Comment	0