About May Globus
Vancouver City Editor May Globus is obsessed with the sartorial and all that surrounds it: art, design, culture, music and film. Oh, and she really likes writing about it, too. A left coast girl at heart, her Sweetspot finds just might show why the westside really is the best side.
Hike Schmike
the view from vancity Vancouver
(Aug.25.09)
A true urban girl can walk miles (okay, long city blocks) in highrise heels, while rifling through a bag looking for her agenda with one hand and deftly answering work emails via BlackBerry with the other (and less dominant one, at that).
But can a true urban girl step into a pair of hefty hiking boots and trek through the Pacific Northwest wilderness, enduring fat mosquito bites, thorny bushes and numerous cougar warnings?
Well, yours truly did, and lives to tell the tale about it.
Last Saturday, a group of friends and I decided to get one with nature and leave Yaletown behind by doing a nice, long hike, located thirty minutes from downtown Vancouver above a beautiful little village called Lions Bay (tucked in between Horseshoe Bay and Squamish on Highway 99). If you wind up through its residential area, you'll arrive at a tiny little parking lot at the opening of a hiking trail that leads to either Mount Harvey or the peak of Lions Bay, and thus, the journey begins.
First warning: take heed of the parking lot signage or your car will get towed a very long way back downtown (thank you to the kind Lions Bay resident who pointed that out to us!).
Second warning: bring a supply of water and snacks, because you will get both parched and starving doing during this forest climb (the intial 45-60 minutes is ALL uphill).
Third warning: when that fork in the trail comes along, and you need to choose your own adventure, do not go the way of Mount Harvey because no one has probably done the trail in a few years (we waded through 30 minutes of thick blackberry bush and disappearing trail before throwing in the towel and admitting we made a huge mistake going so far).
The Lions Bay path is much more of an ideal hike in the conventional sense, and a very fun one at that -- think always-changing terrain, waterfalls, ladders with ropes and bridges straddling gushing glacial creeks. It was all very Kodak-moment and all very into the wild, minus Emile Hirsch.
So we may have been scratched up like cat posts when we got back to base camp, yet the war wounds were certainly worth the pain, the gain and the stories.
But an arduous four-hour hike still has nothing on walking ten city blocks in five-inch Fendis.