For some reason our Friday after work beers had got fairly out of hand the past few evenings and now 10pm seemed a respectable time to be leaving work. After that more people were having a few beers in town so I decided to go down there. Needless to say it was a pretty late night. At some point I found my way home and remember thinking "I need to set my alarm so that I get up in time to start drinking again"
On Saturday I had bought a ticket to go to a craft beer awards festival thing. I dragged myself out of bed at the crack of noon to get along there. The event was pretty awesome. Lots of different craft breweries around to taste lots of craft beer. It took a while to get back on the horse (should I say maggot?) after my 8th taster or so I was doing OK though. I mainly drank porters which I have decided I have definitely been neglecting. I especially enjoyed the "Sap Sucker" maple porter from Fernie brewing company. We hung around for the awards and then went to St Augustines for dinner. At some stage I suddenly got pretty knackered and we decided to call it a night. I was dreading another late night but I was stoked to find it was only about 9pm! I was into bed by 10pm which was good because I had a big Sunday ahead.
On Sunday I had jacked up a mission to get up the Lions with Brandon and a mate of his. I was pretty stoked because The Lions are a stand out feature of the Vancouver skyline and I had had my eye on them for a while. I was concerned I wasn't going to get a chance this summer but luckily we had another patch of good weather. I was also stoked because my company was fairly fit so we were able to tackle the more ambitious route to the Lions that went from Cypress Mountain and followed the Howe Sound Crest trail. The quickest and easiest way to climb them is from Lions Bay but apparently that is a pretty boring trail compared to the one we intended on taking.
I was up at 7:30 to finish packing and Brandon came round about 8. We picked up Brandons mate, Tim, on the way out of town. Tim was an old highschool friend of Brandons and they hadn't seen each other for about 5 years. Vancouver was enveloped in some pretty dense fog but I was confident we would get above it. As we drove up Cypress it thinned out and by the time we got to the car park we were above it. We got on the trail at about 9:30am and set of at a cracker pace. We got up to st Marks Summit at about 10:30am and got some awesome views of Howe Sound:
Then we realised why the trail was regarded as being quite challenging. We descended a hell of a long way and then had to climb up to the first peak of Mt Unnecessary, which was aptly named if you were just trying to get the The Lions. We got another couple of cool views of Howe Sound though:
The we went down again! Then another climb up to the second peak of Mt Unnecessary! From there we got a sweet view of our ultimate goal:
As you can see they are a pretty prominent feature. The we had to go down again before we could start the final ascent to the base of The Lions. For the rest of the trip our topic of conversation frequently involved discussing the climb to the actual summit of the West Lion. Brandon had been there before but did not attempt the sketchy scramble. We had all heard it was a pretty scary climb so we were a little apprehensive. When we got to the base our concerns were not alleviated at all by being able to see the face. We talked to a couple of guys that were just coming down from it and they said it was OK. One guy that seemed to know what he was doing said "just make slow and deliberate moves and you should be fine". Real comforting. We decided to go for it and were immediately greeted by a dodgy frayed rope to get down a 5m cliff. This bit was quite challenging but we were told it was one of the hardest bits too. Up higher it didn't really get harder but just got way more exposed. There was really only one other bit that I found challenging where I had to take a big step up on a slopey face with poor foot placement. My crappy trail shoes with massive holes in the sides of them (photographic evidence below) were too soft to place properly but I eventually made it over the step.
The rest of the climb was OK but it was super exposed. Just don't fall was definitely the aim of the game, below is a shot of the kind of terrain we were traversing. If you look closely you can see a pink rope on the left, somehow we got from where I took the photo to that rope!
We summited at about 2pm and when we got to the top it was all worth it. Just incredible. Here is a Panorama of looking North:
In the photo above you can see the East Lion and to the right beyond the fogged in Valley is where you would see Vancouver. It was such an incredible day up there. We estimated it was close to 20 degrees and not a breath of wind. Obligatory summit photo with celebratory beer (Tim in the middle and Brandon on the right):
We spent quite a while on the summit and ate some food. There was a couple of other people up there but not many people were ambitious/stupid enough to climb the sketchy section. I was a bit worried about the climb down but it turned out it wasn't too bad at all. There were a couple of difficult sections again but not too bad. We hussed along the trail but we were all realising why this route was regarded as difficult. On the way home we had all the downhill and uphill again and we were getting pretty tired. We were also running pretty low on water as well so we stopped at a wee lake thing to purify some water:
As you can see the sun was getting pretty low in the sky and when we made it back to St Marks summit we got some pretty golden photos looking out at Howe Sound again:
We were benighted with about 45 min left to go but we all had headlamps and we were back on a very well maintained trail close in to Cypress Mountain so no worries there except we were pretty knackered and hungry. We got back to the car at about 8pm which meant we were on the go for about 10 hours. We were pretty tired teddies but damn hungry so we went and gorged on some delicious burgers on Commercial Drive before going our separate ways.
I climbed into bed about 10pm pretty shattered but super stoked at such an awesome day. Cheers guys!
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