Dam Mountain - November 19 2021

North Vancouver Area, North Vancouver, BC
1349m

This is another short TR, as I took basically no pictures, and am writing this over a year in the future.

I was given a free gondola pass expiring before the ski season started at Grouse, and was looking for a good way to use it. As it so happened, me and Logan both recently acquired snowshoes and some overnight gear, and wanted to test our stuff out. So, I figured this would be a great place to do that.

We just went up after work without any particular plans. We had a vauge goal of wanting to go toward Dam and some of the other peaks further along, since I wanted to get a GPX for Goat Mountain, which I'd summited in the summer (but sadly will have to revisit since I did NOT record that trip). After much gear-fumbling, we set out, thankful we had snowshoes, as the resort was getting ready to open for skiing that weekend, and there weren't many tracks to make hiking very fun.

We encountered some staff soon after passing the giant sign saying the backcountry was closed (an unfortunate symptom of being close to the city, local parks often "close" trails for winter and put gates on roads, though they're not "you're tresspassing if you hike here" closures, they're definitely annoying). They warned us SAR didn't operate back there, and tried to ensure we knew what we were doing. They weren't aggressive or anything, though, and onward we pressed.

As neither of us had recent snowshoeing experience, it took a while for us to figure out that the flopping of the back half was normal, and what the heel risers were for, but we got used to it eventually. We only started tracking on our phones fairly close to Dam, and turned around there once we realized the sun was setting.

The way back was longer than expected, as we spent a while wandering the resort grounds with our headlamps on trying to get our bearings. We had yet to master the art of downloading GPX tracks and/or following maps, so we just wandered around a rather inefficient route for quite some time. Nevertheless, we eventually got ourselves back to the gondola before it shut down, and at least did accomplish our goals of figuring out snowshoes and seeing how heavy overnight gear was (note: heavy).

GPX Track + Map