Grouse Mountain, Vancouver

Just as we finished packing our gear, it began snowing quite decently and within only a minute there was a solid covering. Knowing we were about to ascend 1100m or so, we knew we were in for a good one. Grouse Mountain is ridiculously close to downtown Vancouver, but on this particular day we forfeited panoramic views in exchange for a massive snow storm. The Skyride was awesome, and brought us up above the snow covered Douglas Firs and into the cloud in no time. I had no idea what snow-shoeing would be like, and I was completely surprised — I could ninja up a steep snow bank without much difficulty, and walking through big pockets of snow wasn't too onerous. I couldn't believe how much powder there was on the snow shoe grind, and just how quickly we became immersed in proper winter wilderness — with only the occasional post marking the trail, it felt like we were on top of an untouched mountain. Either side of the narrow and slightly compacted trail, were metres of fresh powder, with tips of very tall trees protruding. Venturing just slightly to either side would land you sunken at least a few feet, or down a cliff face in a couple places. In one spot I got myself very quickly in a precarious situation, and while we goofed around with some photos, I was quite close to a vacant pocket surrounding a tall tree line that was slowly giving way about to swallow me up — so that was fun. The entire hike, was exactly that, and would have been a decent trek without the snow, with several steep passes which required a bit of effort. We finally made it to the peak, about 6 kilometres later, and then had the fun time of coming back down. It's hard to hurt yourself running full speed down a snowy decline with so much lovely padding about, so I had a great time crashing through the wilderness at speed.

Once we headed back down, the mass of snow we had brought with us began to melt, and the sack of snow in my hoodie gave me a good drenching. So we each put together a strange arrangement of pseudo-warm clothes, and headed to a department store to grab some extra socks and whatnot to survive the trip back in comfort. With my plastic bag socks, over-sized high-vis jacket, odd gloves and general foreign disposition, we ended up being not-so-subtley followed about by a staff member and what had to be a secret shopper, so that was a good laugh. This had to be one of the highlights of Vancouver, and I look forward to giving snowshoeing another go further on in Alberta.