Dewdney Peak - May 4 2025
Chehalis, Mission, BC
930m
With family in town, I didn't have a full day to get anything bagged on this Sunday. However, unlike the Saturday, where I had to pick people up at the airport in the morning, I was expected a bit later in the afternoon, so I had time for a short outing before heading to the North Shore. By this point, all the small peaks near my house were long-ago completed, so I turned to the Mission area once again to find a suitable quick-hike kind of summit. Dewdney Peak fits the bill quite nicely in that regard. It melts out fast in the spring, is not too far up the FSR system in Norrish Creek, and has an actual trail. So, with a very "treeline start", I made my way there and parked just before 11:30am. I didn't bother checking out the roads to the north, as I was pretty sure they were gated, having driven by them before, so I just parked at the South Grind trailhead, which is just a wide shoulder along the road, with space for a couple vehicles.
Given the short nature of this peak, I decided to go with a small pack and keep it to the essentials, and try to get some exercise. So, I tossed a shell and a couple other essentials in, and got grinding (this is referred to as the Dewdney Grind, after all) at 11:30, pretty much on the dot.
The trail isn't just stairs like the Grouse Grind, but grind is still a fairly apt name. It is a decent trail, but it is indeed quite steep. However, it is less steppy and more just a steep incline on dirt, so that made for a calf-burning ascent. I was hoping to trail run, but it was harder than my not-a-trail-runner self could maintain a jogging pace on, so I had to settle for "rapid walking". That was still more than enough to get my heart rate going nice and fast, though.
This terrain lasted for pretty much exactly half an hour, after which I popped out on a pretty good-looking FSR, marking the first half of the grind (by elevation) complete. I was feeling pretty good about the time, having knocked out 500m of gain in thirty minutes. However, this was where I started to sabotage my plan of an as-fast-as-possible ascent, and decided to follow a more direct route seen on my maps, instead of just following the AllTrails/most popular path.
While the route I took up the old cutblock above the road was marked on my maps, it was far from a good trail. At times, it looked like there was a faint one there, but I mostly spent the next 15 minutes thrashing through devil's club and rough terrain, followed by a large amount of log-hopping, the latter of which even had old trail markers on it, so clearly this used to be a route people took, but not any longer. My reward for that effort was gaining a whole 50m of elevation, so definitely not the most efficient route in the world. Just take the long looping FSR. Perhaps there are other more direct routes that do go, but my confidence is low after that experience.
After that side-excursion, I continued along the road for a moment, and then had another decision to make. The road would take me up towards the peak relatively efficiently, but the trail did seem to exist to climber's left as well, which would be a bit more direct, and offer a theoretical viewpoint for my work. I decided that, since it seemed to have that viewpoint, it would probably be a real trail, and went for it.
That decision worked out well, as the trail was well-made, and I made easy progress up to the viewpoint cabin. I didn't linger, though, as I still wanted to get things done efficiently so I could be home for family dinner.
The viewpoint trail section took only 5 minutes, and still gained 40m of elevation, so I'd say it was quite worth the time+effort. Once I got back onto the FSR, I found myself at a fork, where the correct way to go is the more-eroded path to climber's right. There, you walk across the old road, which is in rough shape for driving, but one can hike through fairly easily. This takes you up the last clear-cut, until you get above 700m, and you dip back into the forest. You get your best views in this section.
After a few minutes getting through that, I found myself facing another decision. I found a fork in the trail pretty much right at the start of the final forest. The "proper trail" goes steeper/higher up the forest on climber's right, but there also appeared to be a good trail on climber's left, which looked to offer a gentler ascent, and a more direct line towards the summit. There is a false summit early on the ridge, so my hope was that this lower trail would avoid going up and over it, and end up being more efficient, so I took a gamble on it.
This went well for the first few metres, but as I got further along the trail, it degraded more and more 😅. There were a lot of forks, each looking more and more primitive as I progressed, and the initially-wide and well-graded trail got more sidehilly, and the frequency of deadfall-hopping and light bushwhacking increased as I moved forwards. Eventually, after 15-20 minutes of inefficient progress, I gave up, and just started climbing up towards the ridgetop, right towards the false summit 😅. So it didn't even help me avoid the unnecessary gain 🙃
Around this same time, I started getting texts from my sister for some random tech support 😅, and it also started hailing a little as well, forcing me to take my shell out of my pack. I allowed that to distract me enough that once I gained the false summit that I actually started heading down the trail towards the trailhead instead of to the true summit! That was a fun waste of another 15 minutes (I really was failing hard on the "get this done efficiently" thing, apparently), but eventually I realised my mistake, backtracked, and made my way towards the actual summit 🙃
With that side-quest, and my other inefficiencies, I ended up summiting in a bit over 1:40. Without those distractions, I expect you could summit in just over an hour, probably. There aren't really any views to speak of on the summit itself, so I just walked around enough to ensure I tagged all the potential highest bumps in the forest, then started making my way down. Thankfully the hail had stopped by this point, so I could stash my shell, and avoid getting too hot/sweaty.
Only the finest of views here
I followed the actual trail on the way down, which was much more efficient, and was largely runnable as well. I've been trying to do that more on shorter peaks, with my ankle health being overall better than it has been in the last couple years, so this was good practice. I even got a few more view pictures on the way down, with the brief weather spell having cleared up.
For the way down, I followed the "easiest is best" approach, and took the longer FSR routes instead of the shortcuts, both in the case of the upper viewpoint trail, which is a good trail, but a bit steeper, and the bushwhacky cutblock not-a-trail route I used at the start of the day. The latter added nearly a kilometre to the day, but since it was highly joggable FSR, it was still much more efficient. I even got some more views of a couple other Norrish Creek area summits (though none are all that impressive to be honest, this is a pretty forested area without any alpine to speak of).
From there, I jogged down to the trail below the FSR, and cranked out the last 500m of descent in just over 15 minutes, bringing me back to the car in about 2:35 round-trip.
While my execution of a "fast and easy summit" was a bit flawed 😅, I still managed to be on the mountain for a pretty short amount of the day, and made it home with lots of time to spare, so that's something, at least. I think this peak is great for short outings and/or rainy days, as long as you actually stay on trail and don't try to get too creative 😄.