Guest Post: Sunshine Coast Trail 2025 Pt. 2

Hello, I’m continuing the saga of Hiking with Dad. Once Rose and I had completed our hike of Tin Hat Mountain, I was home for two nights with the whole family (in which I frantically continued to build a fence) and then Pearl and I headed off on our annual adventure. Our goal this year was to finish the Sunshine Coast Trail!

I trained this spring for a trail half marathon that I completed in June. I was hoping I could transfer some of this fitness into hiking a few big objectives this summer. Pearl and I were about to embark on a hike of somewhere between 90-100km in length with about 4000 meters of climbing. I was a little nervous about just how much we had bitten off for this adventure and had food packed for about 5-6 days of travel. I had marked a couple points on the map where we could exit the trail and catch a bus (which came twice a day) if we couldn’t finish what we started. There were shortcuts we could have taken, but Pearl was adamant that we cover every meter of the intended trail – and that’s what we set out to do.

We started exactly where Rose and I had been dropped off less than a week before. Instead of heading North we veered South off of the logging road and headed into the bush to find Lewis Lake.

We started our hike at about 6 PM. Lewis Lake campground was a mere 1.5km in from the logging road. I wondered if we should push on to cover more ground and finish sooner to get back to building fences. It would be another 14km to the hut at Elk Lake. However, I knew that if we continued on to the next hut we certainly would end up finding our way through the night with headlamps. We both felt like a swim, saw that there was a bear-proof food storage bin, and a composting outhouse! We called it a day and decided to stay at Lewis Lake for the night.

It was absolutely worth it! The lake was warm, we dried off in the remaining sunlight, had some sandwiches and a pack of biscuits, and saw a beaver swim right in front of us.

My understanding is that the founders of the Sunshine Coast trail set out to create a path that linked all of the existing stands of old growth forest left on this northern stretch of coast. This section of the trail had an abundance of cut blocks of freshly harvested forest. Often we walked through a 20 meter strip of forest that was clearly designed simply to bridge the path in between two cut blocks. Our first morning we were struck by all the telltale signs of past logging activity, such as old machinery, choker cables, and oil drums, that were slowly being claimed by the moss and the forest. Here’s a bunch of old rusty stuff I found:

That morning we hiked the 14 kilometres to Elk Lake. I’m so glad we decided to not make the trip in the dark. I had a backup plan in my mind that we could stay at March Lake, but as we passed by there were no signs of a flat spot for our tent or access to the lake for water.

Elk Lake was amazing! There were some chipmunks who were very interested in us – they scurried across our feet in search of dropped crumbs from our tuna wrap lunches, but were too quick to photograph. We found a canoe stashed under the hut and went for a paddle.

After our lunch break we headed for Walt Hill. We trekked through mounds of salmon berry bushes taller than my head and increased the volume of our conversation to scare off any bears snacking on the berries as we tried to find remnants of the trail. Most adults with a loaded pack can cover about 20km a day on rough trails. Pearl and I set out to cover another 15km this afternoon, which would make our total 29km for the day. We took a quick dip and protein bar snack break at Coyote Lake and didn’t set down to cook dinner on the steps of the Walt Hill hut until the sun had begun to set at around 9:15 PM.

As we sat on the steps and ate our dinner (Annies noodles with dehydrated vegetables) we had a lovely chat with a family with two children who were visiting from Switzerland, a German woman who was beginning a year long world tour by hiking the Sunshine Coast trail, and a couple of women from Quebec. Walt Hill is an impressive precipice of rock that has several cliffs that drop away into valleys below in several sides. There weren’t any flat spots left on the ground for tents, so Pearl and I opted to sleep in the hut with the women from Quebec. In the morning they invited me for coffee on one of these cliffs overlooking the valley below, while Pearl continued to sleep.

One of the reasons I love these outings so much is that they are true adventures. I am discovering these locations and trails for the first time along with my daughter. It’s hard to describe what it’s like to hike all day. There is definitely some discomfort that comes from wearing a heavy pack, climbing and descending large hills, getting hungry, and gauging whether old sports injuries are flaring up or if I just slept on my air-mattress funny. But the greatest challenge by far is not knowing how much farther there is to go and what is up ahead. Will there be water which can be filtered? How much more climbing is needed? So I am constantly comparing what I’m seeing along the trail to what I’ve read in the guide book to gauge when we should take breaks, speed up, and slow down. I try to reveal as little as possible to Pearl as it can be very disappointing if she thinks the next stop is just around the corner when actually we have a long way to go. So I try to be very vague when she presses me for information and work really hard to play games and chat in order to stop our minds mind from focusing on how much farther there is to go or any discomfort in our shoulders and feet.

Speaking with our friends from Quebec in the morning I told them our plans to summit Mt. Troubridge the next day. They started laughing. Then we did the math to see how far it was and how many meters of climbing. It looked like it was going to be beyond reach. So, after some morning hot chocolate we headed out on our way – not sure where we were going to stop for the night. It was a long morning. We picked a few berries and headed past some wild campsites that looked just as appealing as Lewis Lake had on the first day with a full suite of features like an outhouse, picnic table, flat tent spots, and even bear bins.

By the afternoon, we had descended the 1000 meter tall Walt Hill, crossed over Eagle River. This was the point where we could have walked down a dirt road and connected with the highway, where if we timed it right, we could catch a bus to the ferry. We had only been on the trail for two nights and decided to press on. We began to meander past the dam that created Lois Lake and stopped for a long lunch break on a gravel beach where Pearl was occupied smashing sandstone rock and breaking pebbles with larger stones.

After hugging the edge of Lois Lake we set off back into the woods to head uphill to our next stop, Golden Stanley Hut. We heard some branches break and the rustling of some 8 foot tall salmon berry bushes. I called out “Hey Bear,” in my deepest tone. I pulled the bear spray from its pouch on my hip and unclipped the safety, then blew a few blasts of our whistle. Whatever it was, was big, and ran off in the other direction. No match for the fox 40 whistle.

At about 4PM Pearl and I had walked about 23km. We got to Golden Stanley hut exhausted, hot, and out of water. I was disappointed to discover that we would have to descend a very steep bank to access the creek below. I read one of the pages of the guide book which I had taken a photo of with my phone. It showed a seasonal water access point further up the hill. For some reason we didn’t feel like staying. We both knew that if we kept pushing we could finish the entire hike the following day. That sounded appealing. So we began the 12km, 1300m push up Mt. Troubridge. Just as we were leaving our newly acquired friends from Quebec arrived and began to set up camp for themselves, flabbergasted that we were going to continue uphill this late in the afternoon.

It was a challenging climb. It took all of my positive-dad-encouragement-skills and many gummy bears to keep the morale of the team afloat. Thank goodness, about a kilometre from where we would stop for the night we kept running across tiny, high altitude toads who were criss-crossing the path.

Again the sun was setting, we were exhausted, and I remembered reading about a wilderness campsite at a place called Elephant Lake. We knew we couldn’t muster the energy to don headlamps and summit Mt. Troubridge this night. So we set our new objective of Elephant Lake which was just 3.5km short of the hut and 6km short of the peak.

Elephant Lake was beautiful in the fading sun. But we couldn’t find a flat spot of ground, an outhouse, or a bear box (unlike the pristine wilderness campsite we had passed earlier in the day). Eventually, Pearl and I decided the best place to pitch our tent was a patch of mud on the edge of the lake. I set up my stove, which quickly sank into the mud under the weight of our pot. I usually try to do research and find ways to combine lightweight ingredients from the grocery store to cook meals in the backcountry as pre-made freeze-dried meals can be very expensive. We had packed one name-brand camping meal (which Karissa had gifted me for Christmas), and another cheaper version from a discount store as back up meals in case we ran out of food. We rehydrated the name-brand meal first and took turns scooping spoonfuls of what seemed like the most decadent and savoury meal of my life out of the foil bag. Even in our famished state the second meal tasted like chunky cardboard. Pearl took a couple bites and claimed that she was full. Despite being tasteless in comparison to the name-brand meal, I wasn’t disappointed – grateful to have a quick warm meal. We had walked more than 32km.

We set up our tent on the mud. If you pushed on the floor of the tent you could feel it sink away beneath you into the quagmire. I repacked our food into our dry bag, loaded it with rocks, tied a rope to it and threw it into the lake to avoid any wildlife smelling our food (I’ve had a few run-ins with cougars – once while camping with the girls). I didn’t want to make a ‘bear hang’ in the dark. Pearl thought it was outrageously funny every time the bag bobbed back up to the surface of the lake each time after I had loaded more rocks. And eventually I was forced to hang our food in a tree.

We decided to pack up as soon as we woke and head for the next hut, where we would fire up the stove for warm drinks and breakfast. All of our gear was drenched in condensation and caked in mud. When we reached Troubridge hut, we unpacked our bags and dried out all of our gear in the morning sun.

We then packed up our bags and headed for the peak. It did not disappoint.

I remember being on the ferry which sails along the channel below and pointed out to five-year old Pearl that someday I would take her up there. And for better or worse, we had made it. I’ll have to be very careful what promises I make in the future – who knows where they could lead us. I have to say: I got a bit emotional. This would be our final descent. Pearl and I had been picking away at completing this trail every summer since she was in kindergarten. And now she is going to be in grade five.

The final push brought us through ancient hemlock old growth where we spotted more tiny toads. We eventually made it back to Rainy Day Lake where I have taken both girls on their first backpacking adventures, so now we were covering old ground. We had a leisurely swim at the lake and decided to head to the ferry, taking the quickest route, bypassing Fairview Bay (where we had been a number of times), not knowing that the old trail we had taken before was now a logging road.

Thank goodness we took this route. I went to point out to Pearl where the old trail had been as we looked down from on top of a new logging-road bridge, when I scared a massive black bear, which huffed at us and darted into the woods. Had we been on the old trail we would have walked right into it! When we made it to the kiosk which is the end of Sunshine Coast trail I could hear the next ferry loading cars. I said if we ran we could make the boat. Exhausted, Pearl laid down on the bench and said, “We’ll catch the next one.” And that’s what we did.