great divide trail Archives

Untaken Trails – Future Fortnights (two week thru hikes)

Hey readers! If you haven’t been watching our Youtube videos, you may not know that we did go to Arizona, and while we did start out at our intended start point, like all good plans, they did not survive contact with the enemy. The full story of our adventure on the AZT will be coming soon to this space, don’t worry, if you really really don’t want to go watch our Youtube videos.

This piece is coming from a look to the future. I (Oliver) am very future-motivated. I like to look ahead, plan, and dream about adventures to come. However, we have limitations right now, in this stage of our lives.

Current Limitations

Waiting for our kids to graduate. We have one finishing Grade 10 and two finishing Grade 9 right now, so we can’t just take off on a long thru-hike until they have graduated and are looking at their first steps into adulthood.
Our day jobs. Currently Cheryl gets 4 weeks of holiday per year and I get five. It won’t be until 2028 that Cheryl gets her fifth week. We can take unpaid leave if we want, but more paid leave would be best. There is a possibility of circumstances arising for us to do something longer sooner, if either of us gets sent out of country for work, as we get compensating leave before and after. But that isn’t predictable.

So with these limitations, and not wanting to spend more than 3 weeks in a go in this chapter of our lives, we have to dream of shorter trails: two week thru hikes, ones that we know we can’t get trail legs before finishing. That said, Here are some dream destinations we might get to do sooner:

Dream Two(ish) Week Thru Hikes

We would love to get back to Section C of the GDT for a two week thru hike sometime soon! — Resting up at the crest of Tornado Saddle, GDT Section B

North Coast Trail. 59km or so along the north coast of Vancouver Island. Very similar to the West Coast Trail, but free and much less crowded.
The O Circuit of Torres del Paine in Patagonia. We watched a video and were both dazzled by the 136km trail, and South America has been on my personal bucket list for a while.
Tour du Mont Blanc. A great excuse to go to Europe, circumnavigating the tallest peak in France. Clocking in at 170km, it looks glorious.
We both want to go back to the Great Divide Trail, after having done Section C in 2021. The most flexible section would be Section B, (195km) because it requires no reservations. I hiked half of it – from Coleman to Cache Creek before having to get my hiking partner out to catch a flight. I’d love to finish it, and share it with Cheryl.

So two of these two week thru hikes are “local” (in Canada) and two are international. That should take us through to 2028, when our calendars open up to longer opportunities. Honestly, we loved our time on the AZT and both want to come back and do the whole thing. We also both have an itch to do a big through hike. We have joked about one year she can do the Appalachian Trail while I do the Pacific Crest Trail… I don’t think any vlogging couples have ever simultaneously hiked two different trails and tried to edit their videos together!

admin

May 6, 2024

Bucket List, Multi-Day Trails

arizona trail, future, great divide trail, hiking, mont blanc, patagonia, vancouver island

VIDEO: Great Divide Trail – Section C

We’ve put together a video with highlights from our trip through Section C of the Great Divide Trail (GDT) in 2021. We will be putting out more videos in the future, so be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Cheryl

February 12, 2024

2021, GDT Section C, Videos

Alberta, great divide trail, video

Top 5 Bucket List Thru Hikes, 2024

With our upcoming trip on the Arizona Trail on our minds, we thought we would do a new Bucket List post – this time with both our perspectives. We will go through the list one place at a time, volunteering ours then commenting on the other.

Trip Report: Great Divide Trail Section C August 2021 – Days 10 and 11

Just about to the end folks! It has been a go hasn’t it? I had planned to take a friend of mine through two of the best trails in the Canadian Rockies, but instead I got to take my wife on her first multiday backpacking trip, which was even better! Our plan was this:

From my Facebook, ca. spring 2021 when I was uber-excited.

And if you want to read about how the first 9 days of the trip went, follow these links!

Day 10 dawned behind schedule. Our original itinerary had us bedding down 3 km and 300m above where we were. It doesn’t sound like much, but it was going to lead to the longest hiking day of our trip the next morning. The original plan:

Day 10 – Wolverine Pass to McArthur Creek Camp (Yoho National Park) – 21km, over Goodsir Pass.
Day 11 – McArthur Creek down to our car on the Trans-Canada Highway at Ottertail Trailhead – 15km.

Ready to see how that went?

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admin

April 16, 2022

2021, GDT Section C, Multi-Day Trails, Outdoors, Trails

Goodsir Pass, great divide trail, Helmet Falls, hiking, Rockwall Pass, Rockwall Trail, Wolverine Pass

Trip Report: GDT Section C August 2021 Days 7-9

It’s been a bit since I last worked on this report. Here we go again! If you aren’t up to speed, the Great Divide Trail is a stunning thru-hike in BC and Alberta, Canada starting where the Continental Divide Trail ends in Glacier National Park, MT and proceeding north for 600 miles of the wild Canadian Rockies. We didn’t do the whole trail: we only tackled 120 miles of the middle of the trail – Section C – the part that is perhaps hardest to book, though maybe easiest to hike, due to the popular National and Provincial Park trails that are well maintained. To catch you up on our trip so far, read days 5-6 here and follow the links back to our beginning.

When last we left off, we had hiked 6 days and heavily modified our itinerary, adding a camp on the fly using our Garmin Inreach to get family to book a site for us, then using an optional site I had foreseen we might need to get a night in the astonishing Mount Assiniboine basin. But we made it to Banff on schedule!

The plan was to get a hot meal and sleep the night in Banff in a hotel, then hit the trail bright and early the next day up Healy Pass. Like so:

Day 7 – Taxi up to Sunshine again, hike up Healy Pass, over Whistling Pass and camp at Ball Pass Camp (Banff) – probably 23km with two passes.
Day 8 – Ball Pass Camp to Floe Lake (Kootenay National Park) – 21km with a brutally steep ascent to start and end the day.
Day 9 – Floe Lake to Wolverine Pass – 20km over Numa Pass, Tumbling Pass, and Rockwall Pass.

But we didn’t do that.

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admin

April 16, 2022

2021, GDT Section C, Multi-Day Trails, Outdoors, Trails

BRS, Floe Lake, great divide trail, hiking, Numa Pass, Tumbling Pass

Trip Report: GDT Section C August 2021 Days 5 and 6

Section C of the Great Divide Trail according to most information is a hair over 200km of hiking trails running through mostly National Parks. I’ve been dreaming about this hike for 3 years, and I finally got to go, despite my hiking partner once again canceling on me, because my wife signed up to go with me! You can read about our first two days on trail here, and days 3 and 4 here.

The story so far: no plan survives contact with the enemy. So far we had made changes to our itinerary almost every day. But thankfully we had only fudged one campground (and that was only because Parks Canada said the campground was fully booked when it was empty!) Today (spoiler alert!) would return us to our schedule.

Our original plan was:

Day 5: Marvel Lake to Porcupine (Mount Assiniboine Provincial Park) – 26km
Day 6: Porcupine to Sunshine Village (Banff) – and sleep in a hotel! – 14km

But we weren’t starting in Marvel Lake. We made it up to Magog Lake in Mount Assiniboine. So things were going to be different.

We woke up in the Magog Lake Campground, or at least I did. I’m an early riser – once my body starts getting achy or my bladder gets full, I am getting up. Thankfully I only beat the sunrise by about a half hour so it was light enough to find my way to the outhouse over the frozen grass without my headlamp. I then proceeded over to the covered cooking area in the frosty morning air to make myself some tea, and was struck by this view:

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admin

April 16, 2022

2021, GDT Section C, Multi-Day Trails, Outdoors, Trails

great divide trail, hiking, Howard Douglas, mount assiniboine, Porcupine

Trip Report: GDT Section C August 2021 Days 3 and 4

Section C of the Great Divide Trail according to most information is a hair over 200km of hiking trails running through mostly National Parks. I’ve been dreaming about this hike for 3 years, and I finally got to go, despite my hiking partner once again canceling on me, because my wife signed up to go with me! You can read about our first two days on trail here.

The original plan was to take days 3 and 4 very easy, so that if my wife, who is new to long-distance hiking, needed time to recover from her first two passes she would have it. However, I had the feeling that because day 3 would have been flat valley-bottom walking, we may have a shot at combining days 2 and 3. The original plan for days 3 and 4 were:

Day 3: Palliser Pass (HOTR) over Palliser Pass to Birdwood Camp (Banff National Park, AB) – 11km, 100m ascent, 150m descent
Day 4: Birdwood to Marvel Lake Camp (Banff) – 14km, 50m descent, 50m ascent

But since we finished Day 2 at Burstall Camp (3km south of Birdwood), we had almost accomplished the combining of the two days and were ahead of schedule!

This opened up a few options.

Option 1: extend our time in Banff (night 6) between legs and give ourselves a true zero day instead of a nearo (and pulling 20km to get to Banff isn’t exactly restful), or

Option 2: take an extra day in Mount Assiniboine Provincial Park. I had planned ahead and booked a spot at Magog Lake (I had been efforting Og Lake to skip Porcupine, but no sites at Og ever came open) just in case we did combine the two days.

In order to extend the Banff stay to a true zero, we would have had to camp at all subsequent campsites a day early, and risk the wrath of angry rangers, and fines for not having campsites booked. Granted, we had already done that once with Burstall, but the empty campground meant we didn’t feel guilty in the least. I had tried to book, they told us there was none, and that was a lie so…

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admin

October 2, 2021

GDT Section C, Multi-Day Trails, Outdoors, Trails

great divide trail, hiking, mount assiniboine, wonder pass

Trip Report: GDT Section C August 2021 Days 1 and 2

Ok, here’s the first two days of our trip, broken down. Our original plan:

Day 1: Upper Kananaskis Lakes (Peter Lougheed Provincial Park, AB) over South Kananaskis Pass to Beatty Lake (Height of the Rockies Provincial Park, BC) – 16km, 780m ascent
Day 2: Beatty Lake to Palliser Pass Camp (Height of the Rockies Provincial Park, BC) – 10km, 780m descent, 480m ascent

What REALLY Happened:

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admin

October 1, 2021

GDT Section C, Multi-Day Trails, Outdoors, Trails

great divide trail, hiking, Palliser Pass, South Kananaskis Pass

Trip Report: GDT Section C August 2021 Summary

It has been a month now since I returned from my planned hike through section C, if you have been watching this space for updates. The hike was awesome and only gets more awesome in the rear-view mirror. I think I needed a month to digest the experience before writing this post.

Cheryl absolutely killing it on the scree coming down South Kananaskis Pass

First, I am thrilled I got to experience this with my wife, and astonished that this was her first overnight hike since I dragged her up Mount Golden Ears while we were dating. Yes, it took her 23 years to forgive me for that travesty. All I can say in justification was, I was a stupid 22 year old. I hope I am a better man today than I was then. Thankfully this trip went so much better than that one. It was a challenge for her to complete – thankfully, the preparation I had done meant that had anything gone wrong I would have had tons of reserve to get us out of the situation. But nothing did, and though there were occasional tears, they were only tears of fighting through her own limitations, not frustration with me.

We set a fairly easy pace, which turned out to still be faster than many we met in the backcountry. I also adjusted the itinerary on the fly, both to ensure we didn’t burn out, and to deal with terrain challenges I could not have foreseen in the planning stage. I think I will post this trip report in two-day pairs, to break down everything for posterity, in case others who want to tackle this section want more detail. Certainly, we scoured the internet before we left so we could prepare. Hope this helps.

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admin

October 1, 2021

GDT Section C, Multi-Day Trails, Outdoors, Trails

great divide trail, hiking

Section C Update: Starting in 2 Days…

Wow! It’s hard to believe the trip is coming up in just a few days now. A lot has changed since I wrote this in May. For one thing, my hiking partner cancelled on me, and I put the call out to the world to find a replacement. I got my wish, but then my new partner came out early to hike Section B, but the westerlies across the mountains pushed a truckload of smoke from the BC wildfires onto her, and she tapped out.

But even more surprisingly, my wife expressed interest in coming! So I have spent the last month working with her to get her used to carrying weight and walking on trails, culminating in a 24 hour shakedown hike in Meadow Lake Provincial Park. We hiked into a campsite on Friday night 10km, then hiked out 30km on Saturday through 32 degree heat! She delivered like a trooper, so we are go, for sure.

Aside from physically preparing her, we have had to kit her out with good backpacking gear. I didn’t want her to experience the Cheryl Strayed pack from Reese Witherspoon’s “Wild” pack, and have her tap out from exhaustion. I lined her up with the Durstongear 40l pack like mine, only slightly smaller. I’m now carrying a 2p instead of 1p X-Mid, in my effort to save her some weight, as well as the stove, a Jetboil Stash. She is packing a litle heavier nonetheless, as she is managing chronic cold fingers. It wasn’t a problem on our Meadow Lake go – the temperature topped out at 32 degrees! But we all know the Canadian Rockies at elevation are much cooler.

I decided to stick to a longer itinerary for her sake, so the first three days are all under 16km. Hopefully that sets us up for success and lightens our pack before climbing Wonder Pass and crossing to Porcupine campground for 24km in one day!

Then, a short 15km out to Sunshine where if all goes as planned a wonderful trail angel will be waiting for us with our resupplies and a lift into Banff townsite. We will enjoy a town dinner and a warm bed, before an early taxi back up to Sunshine and the longest hike of the trip, 28km to Ball Pass. From there, the days get shorter as we descend and then work across the famous “Rockwall” hike of Kootenay and Yoho National Park. This is her motivation now – she saw this picture of Floe Lake and wants to see it for herself.

Floe Lake in all its majesty (not my image)

The fires burning in BC may still play a factor for us. Right now the winds have shifted from the north, so they aren’t a problem but if they return to the west it may get smoky. Additionally, the hot weather streak appears to have finally been broken, but now the forecast for the high elevations are hovering in the low double digits, and intermittent showers are forecasted for the first 3-4 days of the trip. That may well challenge her ability to stay warm on trail. So we are not without opposition. But excitement remains. Stay tuned for our post-trip report!