Farrer Peak - January 16th 2022

 Sam wanted to go ice skating with her college friends in PoMo and I wanted to go for a hike so we compromised and looked around for a hike near PoMo that wasn't too hard / long we could do before we went ice skating. I of course wanted to sneak in a peak to bag and this one ended up being the perfect hike. Its on the Diez Vistas trail and its pretty much an insignificant bump but its also the only official peak on the west side of Buntzen Lake between the lake and Indian Arm so there's no need for myself to go back up there to bag anything else. Woohoo!

We got to the parking lot at 9 and headed off. We had parked at the main parking lot because Sam needed to go to the bathroom and just decided to walk to the trailhead, instead of parking at the overflow lot as recommended. This was a bit of a mistake because it added 2km or so completely unnecessarily on boring flat trails which made us a bit late.

We headed up the trail finally after crossing the floating bridge and it was steadily uphill but not too steep for the first 2 or 3km. Then after crossing a logging road it got more seriously steep and switch backed up to the first viewpoint. While looking at the GPS I noticed a geocache at the viewpoint and we found it which was fun, nothing special in it though. Coen was actually the one who spotted it, good job!

The official "peak" was a few hundred feet away from the first viewpoint and I knew I wanted to hit that but there was also another, much better, viewpoint 1km further that the map showed. At the beginning we weren't sure if we were going to continue for that but when we got up there, we felt good and we were excited to get another geocache and we went for it.

The 1km between the first and second viewpoints was very flat with a little downhill. We stopped and bushwacked ~50ft to get to what we guessed was the top (hard to tell) and got to the second viewpoint at ~11:15. We stopped, ate and took pictures. It took us a while to find the geocache but eventually I did (yay me!). We hurried down to meet my mom and her husband for lunch. The going was slow but we made it back around 1:15 and quickly drove to their house, then went skating. Very uneventful going down and we were super tired! Fun day all around though.

Second, better, viewpoint

Us at the "summit"

First viewpoint, looking for geocache

Sam on the floating bridge