Telemagique - October 29 2023
Squamish-Cheakamus Divide, Whistler, British Columbia
1723m
With the previous day ending somewhat late, I was looking for something close and/or chill for Sunday. While I caught up on lost meals at dinnertime, Logan was chatting w/ me and I brought up the closing of the Callaghan Lake FSR as of November 1st by the Olympic Park (a rather annoying thing they do is gate/block all the roads in the area, charge you for access, make you park a good ways away, and force you exit by like 4:30 or they call SAR). We (in case my tone wasn't clear), aren't big fans of those things, so we decided that getting Telemagique before those practices came into effect would be a prudent use of time. So, after a late morning, Logan drove up to Squamish, and we left in my car at 11:30am.
The drive up to Callaghan Lake FSR was uneventful, and we were happily greeted by no gates at the beginning! From there, it's a well-enough-maintained road for 2.9km (from the time you leave pavement), with a few small-medium sized water bars. Even a "tall sedan" could probably handle these, though I'd strongly recommend a crossover of some sort to be safe. Once at that point, there's a large drainage ditch to drive over in order to get onto the "Into Woods" trail/road. We got over with the good angles of my Jeep Compass, but also definitely lifted tires in the process, so I'd say AWD and high clearance are a requirement if you want to drive all the way to the trailhead. From there, the road is a rockier but still pretty simple road to drive. There are a few cross ditches and a washout or two that pose similar challenges as the drainage crossing to get onto the road, but nothing we couldn't handle. That cut off about 1.6km and 160m of elevation gain, a surprise to be sure, but a welcome one.
As we geared up, an annoying amount of gnats started to harass us, which was also a surprise, but a much less welcome one. We got ready as soon as we could, and started hunting around for something resembling a trailhead. I recalled from a previous attempt to ski this in early season that there was a trail further in, but I never descended to this point, as I encountered impassable bush, and my car was elsewhere on that day, so I wanted to get back to that road instead. In the end, we chose to go straight ahead from the clearing at the end of the road, but it turns out the official "trail" goes up the side of the mound to climber's right as you face uphill from the road's end.
After a couple minutes of thrashing, we found ourselves on a rough trail in the bush, which improved as we got into the forest proper. In under 15 minutes, we even found some running water, and some less-running water on top of it. It turns out this would be a bit of a pattern throughout the day, this area is littered with ponds, many of which were varying degrees of frozen, which provided some fun views for me, as while I'm not much of one to be fascinated by forest views, I do have a thing for rushing water, and seemingly frozen water as well.
We continued hiking for about an hour in the forest, largely able to follow a combination of a beaten path on the ground and flagging, though with occasional detours or guesswork due to the existence of a few different sets of flagging which did not always agree, and generally ambiguous terrain, most of which was navigable. The fact that sometimes parts of the trail were themselves minor bushwhack did not help matters. On the plus side, since the terrain was so simple, it didn't really matter if one deviated a bit, as you could easily point yourself back towards the general goal if you went awry. I had a GPX track from "somewhere" that I couldn't recall, which we used as a rough guide along with generally just "going up". After an hour had passed, though, we got up onto the ridge at about 1530m, where the terrain started becoming more of a series of gentle valleys and rolling hills+ridges.
A few minutes later, we arrived at a frozen lake bisected by a ridge, and decided to have some fun crossing the rocks, logs, and ice itself to get to it for fun (though you can get onto the middle ridge from dry land if conditions don't permit shenanigans).
After that, the regularly scheduled gentle valleys through small ridges resumed, and by 2pm we even managed to actually find some terrain that wasn't just forest, but actually rock! This was part of the true top of the ridge that runs west of the route we hiked.
At about 100 minutes into the day, or 2:15pm, we'd only hiked about 4km, to give some idea of the routefinding, at least when all you have is a map and a GPX you're 90% sure is from winter. We were also going pretty slow, though, since we just weren't in a rush, and did things like play around crossing frozen ponds and the like. Speaking of which, here's on that looks like something a bit too heavy tried to sit in the middle of it.
As we climbed up to around 1600m, we could start seeing the divide between the western ridge and the summit area to the northeast. The terrain also finally changed from walking mostly straight (north) to turning up a steeper hill to climber's right to ascend towards the summit. We turned up a bit too late, and ended up having to do some steep sidehilling and some unnecessary scrambling compared to the way down, but it was all still pretty relaxed terrain.
After switching back through a few more little valleys, we finally arrived at what seemed like the summit area, and just had to keep walking to the northeast to get to the summit. The views were somewhat obscured the whole day by hills on both sides, but things finally opened up at the top, which was nice.
The actual summit was pretty uninspiring, as trees blocked the views, and it was just "the highest rock sticking out of the ground" on a wide plateau, so we quickly moved to the east a bit to get better views and have a snack.
After hanging out for 10 minutes, we wandered around the summit area for another 10 to find views of the other side, and hung out there for another 20 before deciding to head down. It isn't often we go for such a short and sweet objective, it's kinda nice to be able to just waste time and know you have plenty left in the day.
The descent was overall quite uninteresting, and I have no photos to show for it as a result. We mostly just retraced our steps, with occasional deviations to follow flagging we'd previously ignored, or to take terrain that we thought looked walked on, or potentially just "easier to walk on despite the lack of a trail or flags", with mixed results. Since the terrain overall was just "pretty chill", though, it all worked out without many slowdowns, and we were back at the car in an hour and a half. On the way down, I managed to collect a random hunk of metal, which our best estimates of were either a DIY bike part or murder implement, and then near the trailhead I found an orange disc-like object I guessed might be a shooting target, which a quick google seems to corroborate. That was a bit disappointing, but I guess I've seen worse.
Overall I'd say it was quite a nice day. I know that this is often cited as a touring objective, but looking at the terrain, I'd say it's better to just hike it and get it over with (or snowshoe), and save your skis for something more fun, like "mostly any of the mountains around it". I'm happy to have knocked it out while the gate was open, so in that sense, quite a success.