Trying to get a final trip in for the summer and having enjoyed - even with the drama of the final 12 hours - our recent visit to British Columbia's Kootenay Mountains, it was @mrs.turbodb who suggested we head north again! Her idea - to take a ferry and then explore the Sunshine Coast - seemed like a fantastic one to me. Knowing a sum total of nothing about the area - and what there might be to explore - we started the process of planning. Books were pulled from the library, feelers were sent to folks we knew who might be able to suggest an overlook or two, and maps were contemplated as we put together our itinerary and purchased our ferry tickets.
And then, we decided to check the weather.
It was going to be tight. Depending on where we looked, we were either in for the last days of summer or the first days of fall. Hoping for the best, we set out in search of sunlight along the Sunshine Coast!
What if We Can't See Anything? | Sunshine Coast #1 - A few minutes after setting off - just before 5:00am - I realized that we've been doing this whole exploration thing entirely wrong for the last eight years. That's because our first stop was only minutes from home, for half a dozen servings at our favorite healthy breakfast spot - Family Donut. Daily calorie allocation exceeded before sunrise. With a schedule to keep - we had a ferry to catch - we managed to eat only one donut each before climbing back into the Tacoma. And, with a strict "no eating messy food in the truck" policy - of which…
Twelve Miles of Tetrahedron | Sunshine Coast #2 - Having had a successful first day on the Sunshine Coast, we hoped our second day would be one of the most dramatic - at least, from a view perspective - given the effort that was going to be necessary over the next several hours. With the amount of dew on the alders, the Tacoma started out the day with an organic carwash. Arrival at the trailhead. Our plan - a hike to the summit of Mt. Steele in Tetrahedron Provincial Park - entailed a 12+ mile (20km) hike along long-lost mining roads, through temperate rain forest, past a series of…
Camp on the Water | Sunshine Coast #3 - After a 12-mile hike through Tetrahedron Provincial Park, we'd planned only a single hike on the following day. That, and I'd also found a couple of extensive looking trail systems on Gaia, and figured that we could end up wasting away much of the day searching for overlooks as we wandered our way through the forest. It was 9:30am as we wound our way through the trees toward Mt. Richardson Provincial Park. Unsurprisingly in a region where logging is king, there were roads on the ground that were not on our maps. Newly graded and covered with bright 3-inch stone…
More Summits Means More Mushrooms | Sunshine Coast #4 - The rain that'd begun just as we were settling in for our post-sunrise, pre-breakfast nap only ended up lasting for about half an hour, a quarter of the time that our InAccuweather app suggested that water would be falling from the sky. And that meant we could stop - in the middle of the forest - for some sustenance. Breakfast time under nature's umbrella. After picking up a few aluminum cans that were strewn about, we figured that our proximity to Halfmoon Peak - and the fact that we could stay dry in the Tacoma, all the way to the…