Sumas Mountain - April 2nd 2022

April 04, 2022

Sumas Mountain - April 2nd 2022

The weather wasn't supposed to be amazing so I didn't want to do anything too hard, especially because Coen was coming, so I decided to finally knock out Sumas Mountain. I've been to Chadsey Lake dozens of times but for some reason never took the extra hour to go to the top and so chose to knock it out.

Looking at the map I saw you could basically walk a logging road all the way to the top that would be the quickest and easiest but I wanted it to be a bit more fun and longer so I opted to go to Chadsey from the top parking lot and take the trail from there to the top.

We started late since we knew we had time and hit the trail about 12:30. Made quick work of the section to Chadsey as its pretty short and mostly downhill. Within ~40 minutes we were at the shore of the lake. It was completely thawed over which was a bit of a surprise as I thought it would still be a little frozen but it was not.

We made our way around the east side of the lake to get to the trail up to the summit. It was muddy but not as bad as I expected and had experienced about 5 years ago which was nice. We saw some evidence of recent landslides, probably from the heavy rains we had in November.

Hitting the trail we slogged our way up to the summit. This was where all the elevation came and while it wasn't that bad it was the hardest part of the hike. Before we knew it we were at the viewpoint, then we went down to Baker Rock and I left Coen and Jebby behind to scramble up for a picture.

For lunch we backtracked to the viewpoint as its much bigger and flatter so easier to relax and eat. There were about 5 other people there but none of them stayed for long and we ended up eating alone mostly. Coen had started to feel sick and he didn't eat anything so I ate my noodles and soup alone. The view to the East of the Upper Fraser Valley was stupendous and one you don't often see, I was very glad I came here. To the North you could just make out Dewdney Mountain and Nicomen was in clear view although rain clouds obscured the top. We counted ourselves lucky the rain wasn't on us which of course jinxed us and it started to hail a little.

Coen didn't want to dally for too long because he wasn't feeling good so we headed down after about half an hour. We decided to take the logging road down because it was faster and we didn't really feel like doing the Chadsey tromp again. It was MUCH faster and we were back at the parking lot in under 45 minutes (while going up the other way had taken ~1.5 hours). I wanted to check out a local crag I had heard of called Time Killer Corona which I knew was in the area but turned out to be a bit of a wild goose chase because we went the wrong way..... I looked it up later at home so I know where it is for next time.

Headed back to the truck and bombed on home, great day!