Theta Peak - October 8 2023
Fannin Range, North Vancouver, BC
1092m
With the previous day being a late night for me, and this Sunday being "one of the last good weather days of the season", I knew I needed an easier outing for the day. I also had been falling behind on my 100 peaks for the year goal, so I was looking for something efficient. I was originally eying the Howe Sound Crest Trail, but decided against that due to time, and a wasp nest near Deeks Lake. As I was prowling around, I realised I had a lot of peaks around Seymour I hadn't yet summited, so I planned out a rough course, saw it was under 1500m gain and 20km, and figured that meets my metrics. So, after sleeping until my body decided to wake up and otherwise casually getting ready, I headed out and got to the trailhead parking for a casual 12:20pm start.
I went pretty fast (by my crippled and generally unfit standards) off of the beginning, figuring since the day was supposedly low-stats, I should compensate by pushing a bit, especially since on the previous day we were going pretty slow. I started off taking the Mystery Lake Trail before cutting up onto a ski run/road until I was beside Mystery Peak, where I had to duck onto the Mount Seymour Trail. The former trails were quite nice, as I only encountered a handful of people, and was able to grind out the elevation in relative peace. The Seymour Trail, however, was a total zoo, with people coming in both directions constantly. It wasn't as packed as a mall on Black Friday, but in the relative scale of hiking trails, it was quite busy.
Despite the crowds, I largely was able to avoid having to slow down for traffic (though I did have to get creative with terrain choices to do so), and I made the first high point (Brockton Point) in a bit over 25 minutes from the car. From there, the next high point was the turnoff for the Elsay Lake Trail, which I hit at 41 minutes into the day, bringing me up to 1270m, amusingly the highest point of the entire outing, despite not being a summit itself 😅.
Once I got onto the Elsay Lake Trail, it was a total change of pace. First, it was downhill, dropping me down to a minimum of 1000m, amusingly lower than I parked! Second, I saw not a single other soul on the trail, which was a stark contrast to the Seymour crowds. The trail was also less simple terrain, with more steep roots and boulders. It's not "hard", though, and conveniently the trail largely stays on the side of the boulder field, which helps make travel more stable and efficient.
Getting down past the boulder field took about 20 minutes, and I was back on a nice dirt trail at about 1050m. Here, I had just drawn a random line to the peak on my GPX track, but had heard there was a real route, so I spent some time wandering around to try and find it. After a few minutes of wandering, I managed to discern a cairn in the boulders below me, and started making my way down the rocks.
The boulders were overall pretty stable, if a bit grassy, and led me down to skier's right where I saw some flagging in the trees. There was one further to the left, which I entered at, but I'd recommend the one further right, as I had to bushwhack for a minute or two before I ended up on the trail.
After those first couple dozen metres, the trail became a somewhat overgrown but overall easy-to-follow trail, with lots of flags and no big obstacles like deadfall in the way, just some brush to slap aside every so often. I made my way down to the low point in about 15 minutes, and back up to 1030m in another 10, where I finally got to see what the peak looked like (it wasn't much to look at).
In the final 50m of elevation there were a few steep sections, but nothing that couldn't still be walked. I even managed to spot a few rocks between the trees! I managed to summit in just over 90 minutes, which I was overall pleased with. There, I finally took a couple minutes to rest and have some water before making my way back.
Tracing my steps back to the main Elsay Lake Trail was pretty uneventful, except for a little routefinding that was necessary to get back into the boulders, as the flagging tape led me into a bed of deadfall that was less than ideal. I got back to the trail about 2 hours from start of the day, and was quite happy to be back on a maintained trail, although I was somewhat dreading the steep climb up the boulders towards the main Seymour Trail.
Getting back up to the Seymour trail took half an hour, 20 of which was the majority of the work in the switchbacks up the boulder field. After that, I kept on going for another 15 minutes until I was back at Brockton Point, where I stopped to have some lunch.
Bugs had been present but not really bothersome as I was moving to that point, but as I was eating I was definitely attracting a lot of attention. The good news was it was all small gnats/midges which didn't bother me. I relaxed and ate my sandwich for about 15 minutes before heading off to my next objectives, the first of which was Mystery Peak.