Our second hike in Golden Ears Park
I was excited to see the weather forecast clearing up – sunshine for most of the day whooohoooo!!! After lunch we headed out to the mountains. The trail we were aiming for was rated as an easy trail – practically flat – that went along the edge of the gold creek right back to the waterfall. There were supposed to be old growth trees along the walk, which I was really looking forward to.
It was a very long drive to get that far into the park to pick up that trail. Unfortunately we could see a lot of cloud cover… and then it started to spit. The last 180 metres of the road was unpaved, and after many days of rain it was more big potholes than road! OMG, it felt like we were in Cuba! So we had to drive accordingly! The regular road had a 60km/hr speed limit, but this section dropped it to 30, which was still WAY TOO FAST! We were going 10! And at several places, we had to cross over to drive on the opposite side of the road on the shoulder!
Finally we reached the parking lot, and figured we would just check out the trail. There really is so much cover that we figured we wouldn’t get that wet, and it was warm out (about 11 degrees). So off we went.
This is what we learned:
We need to travel with umbrellas in the car
Some waterproof hiking shoes would be handy to have
It was sunny and dry at our house the whole time when it was raining on us – and yes, we got soaked, but we stayed quite warm.
Rogers Satellite texting sucks in the mountains. We were in the “no service” area by the time we were within 10km of the trail. I sent a test text to Randy at 2:18 when we left the car, and we didn’t get enough signal to send or receive anything the entire walk, and half the drive out. They do say you need to see the sky – which we could, sort of. Not wide-open skies like we were in a boat, but some sky. Good thing we weren’t calling for help! Our messages didn’t go through until 4:45 when we were driving out of the park!
There was no old growth trees left standing in that area, but there were some very cool stumps, rocks, and even more moss than the Menzies trail trees had! (Don’t believe the AI summaries when you are looking for something specific.)
I think I need to test out how well my coral running shoes go through the washing machine now….
(follow up note – I attacked my shoes with the broom the next afternoon and got pretty much all of the mud off! Yayyyy!)
