Mount Britton

May 28, 2019

1350m

Coquihalla Pass / Tulameen FSR, BC

Mt. Britton is nothing fancier than a lowly and wooded hill that offers absolutely zero interest in anything but peak-bagging, but the name is official so I had to bag it at some point. I noticed this little hill a couple years ago when “mapsturbating” in front of my computer but it’s nowhere on my priority list. The best method to tag this summit is when I’m already in the area having several hours of kill. This happened to be the case in this past Tuesday. I slept in my truck on Coquihalla Pass because I was too tired to drive home from interior BC but I didn’t need to be back until 3 pm for work. I wasn’t motivated to do a longer hike such as Needle Peak so settled on Mt. Britton.

Over 40 km of round trip driving on a variety of logging roads was required to bag this pointless hill. The first 21 km down Tulameen FSR was in a great shape thank to active logging in that area. I met several logging trucks going the opposite direction while driving in. Then I turned left briefly onto Tulameen River Road before taking another left turn onto a much smaller spur road. I wasn’t expecting to drive high on this last spur road but it turned out that I managed to drive all the way to near its end, less than 500 horizontal meters away from the summit.

Mt. Britton drive and bushwhack. GPX DL

Ideally I could continue driving for at least 100-200 m but opted to park early because of the unknown status of the road ahead. The final stretch had to be bushwhacked no matter what. The bushwhacking was worse than I thought with a ton of annoying dead-falls and small plants to negotiate. The area is overall in a secondary growth forest and far from pleasant. The summit was a flat dome (hard to determine where’s the exact highest point), with nothing to see other than trees. I took an obligatory summit selfie nonetheless before starting the descent.

This is the typical condition on the last spur road. Narrow but easy

I parked at a great turnaround spot

I had to hike a bit of ways towards the end of the road

Time to bail the road into the brush..

Some views looking south but nothing worth noting

Not the most pleasant off-trail travel even with careful route picking

Me on the summit of Mt. Britton

On the descent I mostly retraced my route but somehow entered denser bush.

More bushwhacking on descent…

Once back to where I parked I immediately turned the engine on because the mosquitoes were pretty bad. The drive out of Tulameen FSR was long but uneventful and then I leisurely drove back home, earning about 1 hour of pre-work sleep even with all types of social media updates. All in all this was a great trip with variety stuffs covered.