Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

April 18, 2025

480m

Mission, BC

A couple years ago I’ve hiked Hunter Trail with Wendy as a before-work exercise. At the time this hike was just starting to become popular on the social media. I was not aware that the high point in the woods do actually boast over 100 m prominence. A couple years later that high point had earned the unofficial name “Hunter Hill” on peakbagger.com and thereafter I had to bag it. The simplest route was to dash up the trail on the south side with the true summit requiring a short bushwhacking detour, but it would make sense to do a loop hike to check out that viewpoint again, especially if the weather’s good. Xinran (Clair) and I had made the decision literally at the very last minute. The original plan was “Fletcher S3” but Xinran had some unplanned work to catch up in the morning, that we couldn’t leave home until 10 am. I was still pushing for “Fletcher S3” but slowly came to the conclusion that it would be wiser to do something shorter. As we got ourselves stuck in the construction traffics in Mission I pulled the plug for us and changed the objective to “Hunter Hill”. This was a reluctant decision for any of us but we had to be realistic.

I had made some errors for not bringing hiking shoes (as Fletcher S3 wouldn’t require that), so I had to wear the mountaineering boots for the entire outing. I wasn’t very pleased about that but there’s nothing I could do. We got to the trail-head and it was surprisingly not that busy, and we were even able to park in the middle of the main lot. The start of the hike was dashing up the gated logging road but we quickly left the road onto the unofficial “south view trail”. The trail was actually very easy to follow. Near the top I led us bushwhacking to the true summit which was completely forested with no view. I probably didn’t pick the easiest route but whatever.

After taking in the “scenery” we descended the east slopes which was quite steep and bushy, and joined the trail which got us to the uppermost end of the logging road. We then walked north to the aforementioned viewpoint but the view wasn’t as good as I remembered from the previous hike. The weather was decent but the lighting wasn’t as good. We nevertheless played with photography before leisurely walked back to the car. The overall length of the hike was longer than I thought, and doing the entire thing on mountaineering boots was far from being pleasant.