Last Sunday two cool things happened. For starters we had a car booked for the day, and were going to do a day trip. Then we woke up, and saw… snow! Lots of snow, even here in the city! So about 10am (after scratching ice and snow off our car-for-the-day) we met up with Alex and headed across down-town to the Lower Seymour Conservation Reserve. This is actually the next park joining on the North side of Lynn Canyon Park, and after a few meters we crossed a path that we had been on before, but just passed, and continued on to new territory: up the Seymour river.
Our first stop along the way was a beautiful little lake called Rice lake. My only guess why it’s called that is because from above it looks like a piece of puffed rice. We should go fishing there in the summer! We found a small cache there, and then continued along the Fisherman’s trail up North. It was icily cold, and the snow often had a layer of slippery ice below (on one bridge we slid around – the only other tracks on it from a deer). The scenery was beautiful, and we only met 3 people on the trail! On the way down a break-neck mountain bike trail we saw some weird freaks of nature: ice worms coming out of the ground! My guess is that the ground was waterlogged, and that when the surface froze, and kept freezing deeper, the water pressure pushed water out through holes in the ice, making dense spaghetti-ice squeezed up to 10cm out of the ground! A small touch made the crystalline structure shatter like glass.
We took a short break at the mid valley picnic spot, watched, and were watched by a big raven, and then (having lost our map, and forgotten just how the paths went) went up “Suicide Branch“. The name should have given us a clue, but we trundled on heedless. I saw on the GPS that it was bringing us back towards the car, on the other side of the river, but about half way back we came to a dead end – this trail wouldn’t take us any further… Never mind – we saw some sunshine while we were there, and trees hung with moss, and icicles in the sunshine.
The return went much faster than I remembered the path there, maybe because we were all thinking of the hot chai tea in the car, so in the end, after 6 hours of stomping, we got back to the car in the dark. A great day out, and I’ll be coming back here in the summer for sure!
Check out the associated gallery for many more cool pictures!
Tags: Geocaching, Hiking, lower seymour conservation reserve, raven, spaghetti ice
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 at 21:59 and is filed under By Robin, Geocaching, Hiking, Outdoors.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
December 17th, 2008 at 11:40
What do you mean with “the return went much faster…”??? I thought it would never end! Alex and I were almost dying… our legs were stiff, aching and frozen! And – as if that wasn’t enough – we had to walk uphill most of the way back!
I think that’s totally against all hiker-rules: The way back should be downhill!
December 17th, 2008 at 14:33
The last kilometre was uphill. The rest of the time we were walking down stream!