Nature Vancouver

Nine of us met at Park Royal and one more met us at the Squamish Adventure Centre. It’s a good place to meet and to park extra vehicles, but even on Saturdays in August it doesn’t open until 9:00am so if you need a washroom stop enroute it’s better to stop elsewhere or wait until the trailhead. And the highway entrance and exit are rather counter-intuitive and not where you’d expect them to be.

The road to the trailhead is in good condition and good for all vehicles though with one long potholed section on the upper section. Care should be taken near the gravel pit lower down where some larger stones have been spread along the road, and the paved section going past the back of the Quest University campus feels a bit surreal.

The forecast high was 31 degrees for Squamish, but the walk up the road in the woods was shaded in the morning, and a decent breeze up on the ridge helped us keep cool (and dispersed the bugs). It took us 1 hour 25 minutes to hike the 5km to Red Heather Meadows, then 1:45 for the further 6km to the lakes following a leisurely stop for elevenses. Anyone planning on backpacking should be advised that camping is no longer allowed at Red Heather Meadows. The trail report the weekend before reported half a metre of snow near the lakes, but another week of hot weather took care of most of that and all that remained was a few patches that were getting more and more slushy.

Surprisingly, we could only see three or four tents in the Elfin Lakes campground when we arrived, but a lot more people were hiking in later in the day; maybe word was just getting out that the area was free of snow. The old Diamond Head Lodge has now mostly been demolished, with a corner of it left maybe as a reminder or maybe with some intent to incorporate it into a kiosk or a shelter. The hut is in good condition, but the old outhouse building (almost a heritage building itself) has been demolished and replaced with a “spiffy new biffy”, as one of us put it.

Red Heather Meadows is well named, as the shrub Phyllodoce empetriformis is prolific everywhere there and up to the lakes, interspersed with white mountain-heather and one small patch of yellow mountain-heather. Surprisingly, apart from the heaths we saw few flowers in the meadows and on the ridge, apart from a few odd saxifrages including Tolmie’s saxifrage, and some Lewis’s monkeyflower right in front of the hut. Botanising on the lower part of the road, on the other hand, was excellent, especially the seeps and streams in the two kilometres just below Red Heather Meadows.