Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

July 9, 2026

320m

Mission, BC

The forested bump on the east side of Devils Lake overlooking the lower Stave Lake doesn’t have an official name but boasts 200 m prominence and was recently added to the peakbagger.com database. A logging road goes up the north slopes to within close proximity to the summit, but to reach the true summit one has to deal with some bushwhacking in a nasty cut-block. The road is also gated from Florence Lake FSR and that adds a few kilometers of walking or biking. There were several recent trip reports on “SWBC Peak Baggers” Facebook group and it seems like there’s some decent views even just from walking the FSRs, so I reserved this objective for a day with decent weather forecasts. Then I thought it might make more sense to use “Devils Peak” to walk the cat .

Clair had some meetings in the early afternoon so we wouldn’t leave the city until 2 or 3 pm. Instead of dealing with the traffics from UBC it made sense for Clair and Cheesecake to show up in one of the Surrey’s Skytrain stations and we could go from there. The traffics out of Surrey was actually quite tolerable and in about an hour we were at the “trail-head”, which was essentially just the gate of the spur road that we were planning to take. The gate was locked as expected so we simply parked in front of it on Florence Lake FSR.

Clair had been training Cheesecake in following so we wouldn’t be carrying the cat entirely in the backpack. The first kilometer was actually on some downhills so Clair went ahead to set the pace, and I would leash Cheesecake to follow her. Clair unfortunately went a bit too fast for the cat so after a while Cheesecake was panting heavily like a dog. We made him walking a bit further but eventually had to carry him for the rest of the day. This was a hot afternoon, after all. Thankfully the panting did stop and it seemed like Cheesecake was more comfortable being carried in the bag anyway. Too bad the bag wasn’t large enough for Clair as I’m sure she would prefer to be carried as well. There were indeed some nice views of the various P100m pimples in the vicinity but it wasn’t as good as from the nearby Hunter Trail. The bushwhacking to the true summit was actually quite a “thing” with lots of thorny plants. Clair had problems with scrambling but was never too scared with bushwhacking, so everybody made the summit.

There were unfortunately plenty of mosquitoes on the summit so we didn’t stay too long up there. After carefully reversing the bushwhacking we leisurely walked down the FSRs back to the vehicle. We thought about to let Cheesecake walk but decided against it. It was already getting late and we still needed to find a restaurant for dinner. I eventually found one Japanese restaurant in Coquitlam which allowed the cat to go inside, and we eventually got back to UBC by 10 pm. Despite the lowly status this objective was actually not as terrible as I thought it would be.