Mount Strachan - September 3 2022
North Vancouver Area, West Vancouver, BC
1459m
After my plans to try and get up to Lake Lovely Water on the Saturday of this long weekend and spend the weekend bagging peaks around there fell through, I needed a backup plan. Since the reason they fell through was large amounts of rain on the Sunday, I found myself in need of a day trip. I was still feeling ambitious, though, so I decided to go with a modified version of the Howe Sound Crest Trail. I figured with all the side-excursions I wanted to do that doing the whole thing would be a big challenging. I also needed to find a way to traverse whilst being a solo party with 1 car, so I begged my dad who happened to be in town, and got a ride from the school in Lion's Bay (where one can park for free when school is out) to Cypress Ski Resort, where one can start at about 900m elevation instead of basically sea level.
My dad was very generous/accommodating in driving me at all, but since he's still a normal human being who isn't nocturnal, he dropped me off at about 12:45am, so I had to start a bit earlier than ideal. I had hoped to sleep a bit beforehand, but I failed to nap during the day and couldn't fall asleep before it was prep time, so I was already yawning in the car on the way up. This was going to be an interesting day... I did at least bring lots of food and 2.7L of water, which is a lot for me, since I knew there's basically no water sources on the route I was planning. So after a quick goodbye I set to work, hoping to get myself as close to West Lion before the sun came up, as I didn't want to do exposed scrambling in the dark, and I had faint hopes of getting there early and napping.
After setting off, I took a few minutes getting my bearings in the dark once the road ended, and found myself going up beside the small chairlift right at the front of the resort. It's not very eventful, you could probably drive it if someone let you try. Just walking uphill on a wide path with lots of loose rocks to make you still have to watch your footing. 10 minutes in, I got up to the top of that, and found myself wishing they just turned the night skiing lights on. The walking wasn't difficult, but on my own in the dark, I did have all the various animals that might take poorly to my presence on my mind. I would like to blame by dad for bringing them up far too much beforehand for that.
From there, I decided to leave Hollyburn for a winter day (hear it's quite nice, and inbounds so nobody will get upset if you go there), and walked up the Collins green ski run until I split off to the Strachan Trail at about 1200m, where the gravely uphill was finally replaced by a well-flagged, somewhat narrow mountain trail which felt much nicer to walk on (and less likely to be frequented by bears, which made me feel better).
This trail was a bit steeper, and there were some rather large steps up vs the gradual slope of green ski runs I was on previously. No hands required, though, so still quite an accessible hike. I wandered on up for the next 10 minutes until I got to the T-33 Plane Crash site at 1290m, where I snapped a couple hasty photos, and continued on. Sadly, I have none of the knowledge of the incident, personal interest in history, or light to properly observe the area to immerse myself in it, so I moved on rather quickly.
From there, it was another 20 minutes of walking up until I got near the top of the Sky Chair (although it wasn't actually present!). They are upgrading that chair, which was quite old and in need of replacement, with a new one. Hopefully they get on the "install the new chair" part soon, though, as ski season is only a couple months away... Once you get up to this area, though, the trail opens up, and the ground becomes rockier. It is also basically right beside the south summit of Strachan, which I consider to just be "a thing on peakbagger.com" more so than a real summit, as it wasn't visually notable or anything by my eye. The most interesting thing up there was the chairlift station that had a loudspeaker broadcasting RF interference which kinda tripped me out until I figured out that was the source of the noise.
From the south summit, it's a short 10 minutes to the true (north) summit. Sadly, there's a bit of elevation loss in order to regain it back up, but I wasn't tired yet so it was only annoying, not exhausting. There's a couple spots novices might take slowly when going down (gotta trust your soles' grip on the slabby rock), but nothing I'd call technical. Soon enough, at the far-too-early hour of 2 AM, I stood on my first peak of the day.
From the top, after wasting some time wandering down footpaths to nowhere, I decided to go down Christmas Gully to cut onto the Howe Sound Crest Trail and make my way toward St Mark's Summit. While this peak isn't part of the crest trail, I decided to tack it on since I'm not entirely sure how the resort might feel about ducking past the ropes to bag it in winter, and it doesn't add that much distance to the trip. Sadly, it does add a good few hundred metres of gain, but oh well. Onto the next peak!