We are gluttons for punishment, clearly. Armed with a fresh idea of how to get up to the sub-alpine ski area of Cypress Mountain using as few roads as possible, Rob and I took advantage of the long daylight hours and headed towards the mountain.
I took the trust Wombat once again, this time featuring some gears thanks to the Problem Solvers adapter to run a derailleur.
The ascent started with winding roads up through the rich neighbourhood of the British Properties along with some cheeky right-of-way paths to shortcut to the next street up.
Some of it was rather silly. You might think we took the curved overpass in the image below, but we actually had just emerged from the bushes on the right.
Off of Chippendale Rd we took a barely visible trail that snuck around the railing of a small bridge. This trail ascends along a ravine up to the Cypress Bowl Rd lookout point.
It’s good fun coming down, but it’s hike-a-bike going up.
The lupins were out in full force next to the lookout. From here we descended across a deep ravine knowing that a lovely trail awaited us on the other side. Well, mostly.
The above photos represent the traverse across on Millstream, but then it was time to start going up again. We climbed the Millstream fire access road until we reached Baden Powell.
Being aware that Baden Powell is no-bikes in this area, we hiked our bikes and didn’t ride even when the trail was enticingly rideable. And for the first stretch, it was enticing! Smooth and well maintained, not too steep. However this changed markedly as the trail went on, and soon carrying our bikes became rather exhausting. The sporadic older growth trees gave us life, though.
As we reached the sub-alpine a beautiful little pond appeared.
When we reached the top end of Baden Powell we were deposited into an open clearing; we were over 800m elevation now. From here we hopped onto the old Cabin road which led us westward towards Cypress Bowl Rd. The Cabin road is chunky, wet, and poorly maintained. Which is to say, it’s lovely.
We crossed over Cypress Bowl Rd and onto a trail that only shows up in some maps, which traces the perimeter of the Old Growth Conservancy near Blind Skier. It exceeded our expectations, starting out as a well-maintained path to some old growth examples before petering off into a low-traffic loam trail that needled through the dense trees with exceptional skill.
This tree (below, left) is a comrade.
Some appreciation for this capable rig. The rim brakes weren’t performing at their best during some of the water-saturated descending, but otherwise I rarely thought about the bike because it just worked for everything. Light enough to be easy to carry through hiking trails, but capable enough to send a couple spicy rock rolls.
We took the BLT access road down past all the Cypress MTB trails, onto Fern trail which deposited us near the bottom of Cypress Bowl Rd. From there, we took Rob’s favourite fence line along the highway before descending back into the city.
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