Magnesia Peak - October 13 2024
North Vancouver Area, Lions Bay, BC
1586m
This trip report picks up from that of Brunswick Mountain, which was the second peak of the day on a traverse from Porteau Cove to Lions Bay. Check that out to see how I got to this point.
I started making my way towards Magnesia Peak from the intersection of the Brunswick Mountain and Howe Sound Crest Trails, at around 4pm. By this point, I'd been hiking for over 12 hours and had gained well over 2000m, so I was getting pretty tired. Annoyingly, despite the ~1.5km section from there to the col between Brunswick and Magnesia starting and ending at about the same elevation, the trail is not very flat, and the undulations force you to gain and lose over 100m in the process of getting from A to B. As I hiked over, I got a couple glimpses of the peak through the trees, but it never really got a full reveal through the bush.
It took me about half an hour in my now fairly-knackered state to reach the col (or at least as close as the trail gets to it). There, I could see a short stretch of steep but open terrain leading into the forest that guarded the summit. I knew the contours were a bit more spaced out further along, but not enough to justify walking past the peak and backtracking to the summit, so I took a few breaths and swigs of water, then started to make my way into the bushy terrain.
After the short bit of grassy terrain seen above, things got steep and bushy, with most of that bush being thick blueberry bushes. On the plus side, since it was October, those bushes were getting weaker and easier to move through, and the colours were quite nice with lots of oranges and reds. For most of the way up, I roughly followed the path of a partially-buried cable, which I occasionally saw in the ground, following the path of least resistance up the slopes.
Once I got near the top, I ended up on a more open ridge, where I then turned to climber's left and made the final hike up. I stayed mostly on the climber's right side, right by the edge of the cliff, and only had to make 1 or 2 easy scramble moves up and around a tree to get to the summit. There, I found a small cairn, and some decent views. I also found the time, being nearly 5pm, so I knew getting all the way to Lions Bay by sundown was going to be "a bit of a stretch" at that point (sorry Dad).
Since I was running low on daylight, I didn't linger long on the summit, just sending out a quick text and stashing my phone, now running rather low on battery (I forgot to charge my battery bank, and it turns out using VLC to listen to podcasts in the morning drained my battery faster than expected). To try and expedite the descent, I tried to aim myself more towards the shelter south of me, rather than retracing my route up, which would mean going a bit north to go south, and having to lose and regain more elevation on the trail.
This didn't end up working too well, though, as I cut down faster than I was planning to just following open terrain, which sadly didn't stay all that open 😅
Once I got down to about 1520-1510m elevation, things got denser and steeper, so I did my best to sidehill and aim for the spot where the trail reached the highest point upslope, at about 1480m. This worked, but wasn't all that fast, taking about 25 minutes to get from the summit back to this point on the trail. With nearly 10km and about 1300m descent to go before I was done, at nearly 5:30pm, I was in for a dark descent.
That descent wasn't necessarily a trivial hike on an easy trail, either. While the Brunswick Trail back to the north would be that, as would the Mount Harvey Trail to the south, both of those required more elevation gain than I was willing to make this late in the day, with over 2500m clocked in on my watch at this point. My plan was to take a trail that was marked as an old road on my maps, which was just south of Mount Harvey, and wound its way to join with the Lions-Binkert trail at about 830m elevation. I had walked a bit of that the last year from the bottom by accident, and it was good enough that I missed the turnoff for the Lions trail I was trying to use instead. I had also seen a short-on-details report on Trailforks saying that it was in usable shape, so I took that as a good enough sign, and staked my feasible return on that plan.
After chatting with a couple campers setting their tents up at Magnesia Meadows while I took my last big break of the day (they knew the rain was coming in the morning, but were banking on it starting closer to 11am. Hope they made it out without getting too wet, as that definitely did NOT happen), I made my way down the trail to the fork for my theorized route at 1400m. I got there right at 6pm, and was glad to see some flags marking it. That has to be a good sign!
After a couple minutes of working through a fairly narrow and slightly overgrown trail, I found myself at the start of the "road" section. The quotes definitely are doing some heavy lifting there, as the road was probably last used decades ago, and had since become some mixture of a singletrack hiking trail, a literal creek, a creekbed, and very rarely, a somewhat maybe driveable road.
The very top, with the least forest cover and least erosion, looked maybe almost driveable, and I managed to convince myself that maybe people actually used it for SAR uses or low-key dirtbiking or something. However, I was soon slapped with reality, and the road turned into a creekbed, with lots of large, loose rocks, stripped of vegetation, with large ruts carved into the former road by years of water flow. This slowed my hiking pace down a lot versus what I'd hoped for something shown as a road on maps, but it was at least easy to follow and not bushwhacking. This continued down to about 1150m, where the volume of large rocks and deep ruts went down, but instead, the amount of flowing water and slippery rocks/mud went up. It wasn't terrible, and my pace did still improve, but also still not exactly primo trail.
That sort of terrain continued down to about 1000m or so, where the trail narrowed to "definitely singletrack", but that came with less mud, fewer creeks crossing or becoming the trail, and faster travel, so it was definitely "worth it". I had to slap my headlamp on around that point, some time near 7pm. From there, things steadily improved, and soon, the "former road" status was quite believable. In about 20 minutes, my trail merged with the Lions-Binkert trail used to approach West Lion, which was a big relief, since I knew the hike from there would be fairly straightforward.
After that, it was a simple 90 minutes of hiking to get out, taking me about 5km to lose a bit over 600m. When I got to the Sleepless Nights/Trudi's Trail fork, I decided to take that, figuring it was a bit more direct and would save me time, but I'm not so sure it did, as the amount of winding switchbacks that don't make it onto the topo maps was fairly high, and that sucks up time that just yeeting down a forest road with gentle curves doesn't. While my guesstimation of when I'd get down was clearly not wrong, as I ended up spending over an hour in the dark when the goal was to be down by then, I did at least get the timing of when I asked my dad to leave home to meet me at the trailhead, so that's kind of a win??? Of course, in the dark, I accidentally turned off the trail a bit too early and went one road further downhill than anticipated, but when I finally hit pavement a casual 17 hours after leaving it in the morning, I was very happy to see someone waiting to drive me back home. Or at least to get my car while I still had motivation to move before a late Thanksgiving dinner.
Overall, t'was a fun and productive trip, even if I didn't manage to knock all the HSCT-adjacent peaks out. Over 30km and 2500m of elevation gain is enough for one day, I figure. And, most importantly, I didn't have to pay for Lions Bay parking 😆