Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

November 1, 2026

1798m

Chilliwack, BC

Mt. Laughington is in the foothills of Cheam Range. It’s not one of the alpine peaks in the range but the access is from one of the three trail-heads (Airplane Creek FSR), and the name is official. For some reasons this one happened to be my last objective accessed from any of the Cheam Range trail-heads and it’s already been a few years since I paid a visit to the area. I had driven the Airplane Creek FSR on three separate occasions and honestly I wasn’t keen on taking my own vehicle for another round of tearing. I had already traded the Tacoma for a Subaru and there’s no way I could have pushed the Subaru up there anyway. My original plan was to team up with someone having and willing to drive a Jeep (or equivalent) up there but it never happened. To further complicate things the only time that “makes sense” to hike Mt. Laughington is the so-called “shoulder season” as there are way too many better peaks to do in summer or winter, but to get to the true summit in the “shoulder season” is also not a trivial fair, as we discovered in this trip.

The first weekend of November saw some guaranteed sunny weather but at least 30+ cm of fresh snow had been reported in the alpine. I knew that folks had already been skiing on Mt. Baker so the decision was made to bring the snowshoes. I thought they would very likely be carried on the packs the entire way up and down but they were actually quite needed. Originally I was planning to do this trip with Lulu Z. but Kostya, Anthony, Mike and William joined the team at the last minute. With 6 people we needed two vehicles, and the plan was to meet at the bottom of Airplane FSR at around 8 am as we weren’t planning to drive higher. There’s a major traffic delay on Highway 1 that costed about 20 minutes. By the time Kostya, Lulu and I got to the bottom of the FSR we saw no sign of the other vehicle. Coincidently another group of Chinese hikers showed up but they were going for Stewart Peak. I doubted if they would be able to make it because to do that at this time of a year would be a fairly serious mountaineering endeavor. Anyway Lulu had brought her walkie-talkie and Mike also had one (they had previously hiked together and knew the frequency), and we quickly realized that they had pushed their vehicle (a Tesla!) by about 1 km up the road. Fortunately we hadn’t been waiting for too long. Fine, we shouldered our heavy packs, walked and regrouped higher up on the FSR.

Kostya was mostly leading the FSR walking and the pace was downright blistering, but we were mostly able to keep up the pace but everyone was pushing quite hard. We passed a bunch of people from the other group descending as they were turning around on Mt. Laughington’s route. It turned out that they had missed their turn-off. After what seemed like eternity we finally started to hit snow at around 1300 m and the snow quickly became continuous. Before reaching the end of the FSR walking I called for a break to swap the trail runners for the mountaineering boots. Again I thought maybe the snow wouldn’t be that deep but it was actually quite wintery up high. The proper boots were definitely needed. I wasn’t too sure whether we would take the summer or the winter route but upon seeing the east side bowls we decided to take the winter routes but we ascended to the “lookout” to get some views first. I then led us bushwhacking down into the bowl and then we all strapped the snowshoes on.