Demon Peak - July 8 2023
Mamquam Icefield, Squamish, BC
1784m
With a nice, sunny weekend and no on-call for me, I was champing at the bit to do some more "real peaks" after I got Alouette two weeks prior, but had to trashbag the next week to stay in-signal for work. I managed to convince some of my non-bagging friends to come out to have some fun, and eventually myself, Logan, Amour, and Sabine teamed up for the first time since The Judge. We went with Demon since it's a "real peak", but not a big (or at all) step up from my last biggest post-injury hike, was basically scramble-free for the less comfortable of the group (myself included to some extent with my ankle's current condition), and had both views and a lake as payoff for the non-peak-oriented among us.
We left my place just after 9:00. Despite hearing a lot over the last couple years about how bad the road to Watersprite is, having checked it out a few weeks ago, I was confident it would be fine. The winter route looks like a fun drive, but unfortunately, as far as I know, it leads to a total bushwhack that is only viable once snow covers all the bush. My confidence was well-placed, as I'd say a medium-clearance (crossover that is at least "better than sedans") AWD vehicle should be able to make it, and the collection of vehicles present verified that claim. We parked without issue, and set out just after 9:45am.
The trail is to the right+uphill beyond the gate (don't follow the road beyond). It starts off a standard old BC forest with soft, dark dirt and roots. The trail is clearly maintained with lots of steps created in the ground, bridges over marshy sections, and no bush to whack. It doesn't last for long though, and soon you're dumped out into some very new growth, and a mostly light/hard dirt trail. This section of trail goes basically until the fork for Demon Ridge, and despite being a pretty easy grade and nice terrain, it made us all sweat buckets since it was so freaking hot with minimal shade, especially past the 3km mark or so. The weather was low-mid 30s and it definitely felt like it.
The trek up to the fork went pretty fast, making 5km in about 1:20 and gaining about 370m in the process (a bit flat). A fascinating phenomenon that dictated our pace was how our least frequent hiker paces themselves. If they're in front, they hike at a pretty decent pace, but if someone else leads, they'll drop pace considerably. So, our pace graph has some amusing slopes, very distinct from each other 😀. This is something we're all conscious of, but somehow still happens.
As we neared the fork, the trail turned from "short forest which lets a lot of sun in" to "it's hard to tell if these are bushes or trees". While this made the sun a lot more powerful, it did also give us some views to compensate, at least.
Once we got to the fork, we confirmed that everyone was still happy to go to the peak knowing that it would mean gaining a few hundred extra metres vs the lake, but everyone was feeling good, so we headed up. It seems that the previously observed pacing behaviour only applies up to a certain grade, because we started going at a much slower pace on this steeper trail, even letting them lead. Given the heat (and the general expectations we set out on this day), nobody was really complaining, though. We were sweating enough just "existing in the sun".
The hike up Demon Ridge was still quite a good trail, although at times you had to brush through some overgrowth or step through some narrow bushes. It was still definitely a "real trail", just not quite as well maintained or used as the lake trail. In some sections, though, it revealed its original nature as a logging/resource road, and became very wide+open, as below.
At about 1550m the trail turned to climber's left to go from "on the side of the slope" to "actually on the ridge". This is a short section with a few spots of shade one might want to take advantage of and rest in, we definitely did so. Once we turned onto the ridge, we quickly rose out of the trees and into treeline, also finding our first snow of the day, although we were never forced to walk on snow the entire trip.
The ridge itself was about an hour for our party, slowly picking our way up and down the rolls until we hit the top, 150m higher than the start of the ridge (or at least where the trail gets onto it). The terrain looks like it could be scrambly from afar, but it's all flat enough that there's no need for hands. We hit the summit about 3:40 into the day, or around 1:30pm.
At the top, we chilled for around 20 minutes, eating lunch and resting a bit before heading down to the lake. Well, most of us, I ended up having only half my sandwich, as with the heat/dryness it was a bit hard to get down, and I didn't want to use all my water to enable that. I did pack lots of grapes, though, which were delicious. We briefly considered continuing to Dreadnought Peak, but decided against it since all 4 of the party wouldn't want to, and we were more out for the fun of hanging out and didn't want to split up.
The descent trail from the peak to the lake was quite efficient, if a bit steep. One has to be careful not to slip on the steep dirt in places, but the payoff is a quick loss of 350m. We went pretty slow, in part due to our non-hikers being a bit less comfortable in the steeper terrain and wanting to be careful, in part due to my desire to avoid touching snow even if it was the fastest path so I could make the claim that "one doesn't need to touch snow to do this hike" (I do a lot of random, arbitrary, dumb things, I know), and I'm sure at least one part "it was really freaking hot". About 45 minutes brought us down to just over 1500m, where we could finally get a good view of the lake (interestingly obscured at the summit).
Unfortunately, that last 75m or so to the lake was over an annoying boulder field. While we had stuck together through the rest of the hike, we were so hot at this point that we agreed to split up and go at our own paces to get to the lake and cool off 😀. Logan got down the fastest, being both a regular bagger and actually intact. I did my best to try and keep pace, though a boulder field is basically my worst enemy given my ankle's poor ability to take shock loads or make fine balance adjustments on-the-fly. I made him wait for a couple of minutes, but we managed to get down, find our way across the outflow creek, and get to the water ahead of the other two.
They were lucky we did, since we discovered on their behalf that (shockingly for a lake made of glacier and snow melt) the lake was, in fact, cold. Enough that we didn't feel motivated enough to fully swim, so Logan just waded around to a nearby rock, and I just got my ankles wet and dunked my head, but that alone was super refreshing. Once the other joined a few minutes later, they joined us in our non-committal attempts to cool off. We hung around for about half an hour before packing up and heading back down.
The way down, after some hunting for the right trail (lots of side trails going around the lake area) was quite varied, and probably the most tiring part of the day. The first bit was pretty good, steady elevation loss through a forest and a small boulder field, but with a good trail that had nice footing. However, it soon turned into a super flat trail which traversed along a super sun-exposed slope, stretching over 3.5km to lose just over 200m of elevation. Worst of all, about 1km of it was also a total boulder field, seemingly caused by massive landslides or something, as the entire slope both above and below seemed to be just rocks with no trees whatsoever, which was quite abnormal. The rest after that was easy terrain, but just a tedious, hot slog.
Once we got back to the junction for the Demon Peak trail, we were much happier, knowing that there were plenty of water sources ahead we could use to cool off and guzzle water. This made the descent much more pleasant, although unfortunately this was around the time my feet started to hate me, seems that 15-20km is about when they start doing that now post-injury. Hopefully I'll go back to more machine-like tendencies with some more regular hiking, I do miss not having to really care about that.
We finally got to the car just over 9 hours after departing, making for quite the long day. We did go out with the intention of having a fun hike and dicking around at the lake more so than efficiently knocking peaks out, though, so not an unsurprising or unwelcome result. Given how much we sweat while not working super hard, that's probably for the best. Amour+Sabine are probably moving away soon, unfortunately, so it was nice to get at least one more hike in before they go to some terrible flatland with no peaks nearby.
This is definitely a good peak to get with more casual friends since it's non-technical and has great views, plus a lake. If you're a pure bagger, it can easily be linked with Dreadnought by the looks of things for efficiency. Just watch out for the notorious vehicle thieves/vandals who seem to be around the area more often the last year or two, though thankfully my car is dirty and pinstriped+bruised enough that nobody seemed to care to touch it.