Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

June 13, 2019

930m

Mission / Fraser Valley, BC

Not to be confused with Mt. Dewdney near Manning Park further to the east, this Dewdney Peak is a much smaller objective immediately next to the city of Mission in the Fraser Valley. This is rather just a wooded hill with nothing to see from the true summit. Much of the peak is heavily logged and in fact, I believe with a trusty vehicle one can drive to within 100 vertical meters from the summit, but that wasn’t how I wanted to do this summit. The forested SE Ridge boasts a classic steep trail known as “Dewdney Grind”. It’s nowhere as popular as Grouse Grind or even the Abby Grind, but is still a popular hike among the locals. To fully experience this summit my plan was to ascend the Dewdney Grind trail all the way up from near sea level. There’s a cabin about halfway up the mountain and a neat viewpoint past the true summit. The wooded true summit itself offers no interest to anyone but the stubborn peak-baggers.

This was my last work day in this semester and the next day I would fly to Montreal for something elusive. In theory I should have rested at home spending more time packing and calculating but with the good weather it’s hard to resist the temptation of squeezing one last hike into the morning. I had to be back home at 4 pm for work and I didn’t want to wake up crazily early so I settled on the less ambitious objective.

I woke up at 6 am and was at the trail-head by 7:30 am. The day was already hot and humid and I didn’t quite enjoy the sudden steepness of this trail. I went at a below-normal pace but kept it steadily. I took the first break after gaining more than 500 m elevation to reply some emails and then resumed the hike. The trail then made a ton of crisscrossing over the logging spurs but route-finding wasn’t a problem thank to the abundant cairns and flagging. I met a local hiker near the cabin and he showed me some history of it.

I took several breaks along the upper route mostly to reply emails. The upper ridge wasn’t as steep as the lower portion of the grind and the trail did again, a ton of crisscrossing over logging roads. I had lost count on how many times I went onto the roads. There’s also one major dip to traverse up and over a false summit before climbing onto the true summit plateau. I took a short off-trail travel to the highest point, grabbed a photo and then hiked further to the aforementioned viewpoint, with over 50 m elevation loss. I was really debating to not bother with that viewpoint because of the elevation loss/regain but I did make the right call. The viewpoint had the best view from this summit and I would definitely recommend it… Otherwise you wouldn’t get much of view at all from this entire hike.

After snapping enough photos I turned my attention to the descent. I didn’t do much lingering on the way back but I somehow took a wrong trail on the lower Dewdney Grind. The trail led me to a clear cut area with views into Norrish Creek valley that I didn’t remember on the way up, and checking the GPS revealed that I had mistakenly taken the NE branch. No big deal as I just had to add ~2 km of road walk at the end.

My round trip time was just over 4 hours on a lazy pace with lots of breaks. This hike offered a bit more than my expectation and I would actually recommend it. Although the true summit is totally wooded with nothing to see this peak is not a complete dumpster-diving.