Yesterday, I went for a hike. I did the BCMC trail. That’s a trail that brings you on top of Grouse mountain.
Officially the trail is closed during the winter, but everybody goes on the trail anyways.
Someone at the guest service desk told me how I could go around the fence.
First I was kind of lost and I didn’t find the rigth trail.
After walking around and asking for about an hour I finally found the trail.
I was already hiking for 2 hours and I passed a few people who came down. They told me that there was nobody up the mountain, because they were going to close everything due the strong wind.
I didn’t want to go back down after a 2 hour hike up and not even reaching the top first.
So I decided to go on with my hike till I reached the top.
After 2:30 hours of hiking up, I finally made it and like the people told me, there was indeed nobody on the mountain. Everything was closed, even the gondola to go back down. I was exhausted and I didn’t know if I would make it back down before it would get dark.
There was just one guy (Berm) and I asked him if I could take a gondola back down. He helped me to go and find someone who could take me back down. He planned to go back down by foot, but since I was exhausted I couldn’t do it anymore.
We went to the building of the gondolas and he called the guest service desk to ask if someone could take us back down because we were stuck at the mountain. They told us that they would sent someone to take us down.
At that point, my phone was already dead because of the cold weather up there.
There was another man (from Japan or China) trying to take a gondola back. He wasn’t prepared for a hike at all. He was just wearing a sweater, jeans and sport shoes. His clothes were wet because of sweating and he was cold.
Finally there was a gondola with someone coming up, but the guy told us he wouldn’t take us back down and that we have to figure out ourselves how to do it.
So the three of us tried to go back down by foot, but the Japanese guy was too cold and was sliding down on the ice.
We decided to go back to the gondola again and hoped that someone would be so kind to take us back down.
After 15 minutes, there was another guy coming up in the gondola who took us down. I was so relieved, because I was so cold and exhausted.
Because my phone died I could just take three pictures from up the mountain and I couldn’t look up for bus hours anymore. Berm offered me a lift back home.
When I was home I took a warm shower and I was so happy to be home again.
What would have been a normal hike turned out to be a big adventure and I’m happy it had a good ending.
The view from Grouse mountain
Butterflyperson 