On Dec. 20 the skies opened up and dumped 1.5 meters of snow! A quote from the Manning Park Resort: "This has been an absolutely insane day for snow! Our entire snow base decided to come down in one day and we've been working furiously to stay on top of it!" By the 22nd the original snow base of 70cm had more than doubled.
So with so much fresh snow, breaking trail would be brutal. I went to the nordic ski rentals and gleaned some trail info off of the personnel there. We parked at the Windy Joe trailhead not a moment too soon. The grader had just been by to widen the road so there was room for our 4 vehicles.
Grant was laughing because as I was talking to him, my left leg gently sank into the snow, right up to my hip.
The first 1.5 km of trail was broken. Then Johnny's grandsons broken most of the next half a km. But it quickly became exhausting and there were still 6 km to go. So realizing we'd never make the summit that day, we turned back.
None of us had done this Canyon Nature trail before. Its right across from the Windy Joe trailhead. Its an oblong loop, high above the winding Similkameen River.
When we got to the end of the packed trail, we could see the bridge crossing the river. Jeremy broke the small section of trail to the bridge where we were pleasantly surprised to see the other side of the canyon had a broken trail as well.
Next we parked at the Lone Duck campsite where it was just a hop & a skip to the warming hut. It wasn't very warm though so Jeremy got a fire going in the wood stove.
From the hut it was not even 10 minutes to Lightening Lake. The trail had been cleared to Rainbow Bridge.
The canoe rental hut on the edge of the lake.
It was -5C but we were warm in the sun.
So we snow-shoed about 3 hours moving time, 1 hour per trail and did about 9 km & 260m elevation gain. Enough to get nice and tired and to earn our drinks at the lodge afterwards.
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