Brew Hut with Max – August 21/22
Looking for something to do this weekend, Max and I decided to head up to Brew for the first time. Max has done plenty of hiking in England, so I figured this would be a good first hike in BC. After reading about people being ticketed in the Brandwine parking lot, I decided to get the anual parking pass for $25. Maybe not necessary, but I figured it would reduce the worry of being ticketted/towed.
Left the car at 10am and it took us a couple minutes to realize that there were some winds in the railroad that the map left out. The trail to the logging road went smoothly. But at the logging road came our next confused moment. We didn’t know which way along the road the trail went. After a few minutes, we saw the big, obvious trail marker just on the other side of the road. Duh! We could have lost a lot of time trying to hike one way or the other along the road.
The trail after the logging road became somewhat harder to find at parts. Our next mistake was to somehow lose the trail, get turned around,find it and head the wrong direction along it. We had a feeling we were going the wrong direction – this was confirmed when we once again arrived at the logging road – woops! This called for lunch.
Carrying on, we snacked on blueberries, huckleberries, and thimbleberries. We wondered if the bears would come after us for stealing their food. Soon came our big mistake. The trail came to a rock field. Seeing some cairns, we somehow got the idea that the trail started going up the rock field (while it actually just skirted around and continued through the forest). It took us some time to realize that we were quite a ways off trail. We looked at the route map and saw that it went straight through a steep section to the lake. Not wanting to turn back, we decided to make our own way to the lake – bad idea! We navigated our way through a series of cliff bands, going through sections of vertical and sections of steep rock littered with bush. What’s more, Max has never climbed before, so the vertical sections were especially tricky. After going through many exposed sections, scraping up our legs from bushes, and getting bitten by hoards of mosquitos, we finally came within sight of Brew Lake – thirsty and realieved. Seeing our bearings, we came upon the lake from the east, as opposed to the south. Looking at the map, we saw that we had made quite the detour.
We figured that the lake to the hut would be easy. But no, we both managed to mix up North with East. We headed east from the lake, thinking it was north up a ridge. After following it for a bit, we decided to do the smart thing and check our bearings. Low and behold, we realized we had been going completely the wrong way. We came down off the ridge and corrected our course.
Soon after, not long before dark, we caught a glimpse of the hut. Man were we happy to not be stuck outside as we hadn’t brought a tent. Upon checking the logbook, we saw that the last entry was August 2nd. I’m starting to get the idea that Brew is more of a winter trip than summer.
We had been lucky with the weather, it was great all day Saturday, but once we were in the hut it rained most of the night. Luckily, the rain died down by morning. We decided to try climbing up Brew. Upon realizing that it would be an ugly, trail-less hike to a not very spectacular looking mountain, we headed back to the hut, packed up our things, and set out on our return.
Despite the fact that it wasn’t raining, we got completely drenched going down. The trail was completely evergrown going down from the lake and the plants were still covered in water. Thought the trail itself didn’t have anything growing on it, plants from either side of the trail bent over top. There were also quite a number of a fallen trees that looked like they had been laying over the trail for quite some time (a good workhike maybe?)
We arrived back at the railway much faster than it had taken going the opposite direction. 4 hours coming down vs 8 hours going up. We saw a decent sized lake beside the railway and decided to go for a swim. Upon swimming to the other side, we realized that we couldn’t remember where on the shore we had left our bags. And our bags and clothes had completely blended in with the bushes. After a rather humerous, somewhat painful bushwack back to the packs, we headed back to the cars. No ticket – success!
Published on August 23rd, 2010 | | 2 Comments | | Posted by Andrew |