Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

March 4, 2020

110m

Chilliwack, BC

Mt. Shannon has nothing to do with the famous Shannon Falls Provincial Park near Squamish, and rather, this is a tiny hill in the city of Chilliwack with barely over 100 m elevation, despite the official status of the name. The hill is heavily occupied by residential areas and the summit holds a few communication tower structures and absolutely zero view. An ascent of Mt. Shannon is a pointless outing that falls into the category of “dumpter-diving”, from any perspective. To reach the summit one can drive to within 20 vertical meters from the east side but I would expect tricky parking situation due to the residential development. The west flank of this “peak” does provide some mature forest with a trail marked on my Gaia map, and this would be the side I chose.

I did not plan to head out on this particular Wednesday but the weather had been nicer than forecasted. I was not obligated in the morning so Kat and I made the spontaneous decision to at least do something outdoors. Our plan was to have lunch somewhere in Abbotsford and then decide from there. I didn’t have a particular objective in mind as we had hiked most of the easily-accessed summits out that way. We also didn’t have a ton of time due to the late start as I had to be back to White Rock no later than 3 pm for work. I was hoping for Sumas Peak but we simply didn’t have that much time, but then I picked up Mt. Shannon out of my memory. It’s such a shitty and insignificant hill that if not because of the topographic maps I would never have noticed such a “local maxima point”. I quickly went through my Gaia map and made the decision to ascend from the west side, and then used Google Map app to direct us there.

There’s a steep dirt road on the west side that I chose to drive up even though it looked more like an entrance to someone’s home. After a few switchbacks we indeed came to someone’s house as well as a (opened) gate. The road seemed to continue past the gate so instead of parking at someone’s house I decided to drive up past the gate, only to discover a parked truck with a dude inside. I parked at the start of the trail anyway but as soon as we got out that dude came by warning us that he could drive down and lock the gate at any time. Not wanting to risk getting locked in I turned around and parked at a sketchy pull-out about 20 m below that aforementioned house. This seemed a bit iffy but was the only option. We quickly got out, grabbed the poles and went for the summit. The trail had more side branches than I thought but all we needed was to “go up” at all junctions. I do not remember how long it took us to reach the summit nor to descend, but it sure was very quick.

When we hiked back down past the gate towards that “someone’s house” an unleashed dog came by barking aggressively at us. We had to stop and let it cool down for about 5 min. I looked around for an alternative route but there’s none without steep bushwhacking. A while later the dog cooled down and we rushed back to the truck, and then drove home. I earned about half an hour’s napping time before the routine afternoon/evening work.