“Silver Hill”

December 13, 2023

370m

Mission, BC

This is a forested hill in the vicinity of Mission. The name of this “peak” is unofficial but there’s a town called Silverhill in the area. The summit can be reached by linking up some deactivated logging roads but the true summit requires a short detour into the bushes. This is entirely a “trash bag” as there’s absolutely no view whatsoever, but the short drive combined with the shortness of the hike means it can be easily done as a “before work exercise” without waking up at an ungodly hour. Sometimes I do need the sleeping hours so I appreciate objectives like this.

This objective had been on my “radar” for a couple years but there’s always something better to do. I eventually made the last minute decision on Wednesday morning with Cat. We wouldn’t be able to leave White Rock until 9 am but we should still have enough time. I actually woke up about an hour earlier so I spent some time at home cooking a beef ramen breakfast. The drive to the west side “trail-head” at Manzer Street spring took about an hour. There was one Mercedes van parked right at the trail-head pull-off collecting the spring water, but there’s another pull-out on the other side of the street for us to park.

“Silver Hill” west side route from Manzer Street. GPX DL

I did not pay attention if this deactivated FSR was gated or not as we took the trail beside the FSR to (mainly) bypass that parked van. If this road isn’t gated then one can easily drive a ways up. I only took the Corolla on this day as the plan was to walk the full length regardless if there’s a gate or not. The ascent was rather no-brainer as all we needed was to follow the road to basically the very top. There were a few confusing junctions and these roads weren’t marked on the Gaia map yet, but I had downloaded a set of GPS track from peakbagger.com, so the route-finding wasn’t a problem. The true summit indeed required an off-trail detour but the section was too short to be called “bushwhacking”.

The only downed tree on this road. Cat wanted to call this “bushwhacking”

The short “bushwhacking” to reach the highest point

We made the summit in just over an hour so we were doing fine on time. Still, we opted to descend as quickly as possible as Cat had ordered some meals to be picked up. I only made one stop for gas, and we got back to White Rock at around 1 pm, in time for that pick-up. There was then plenty of time for me to take a nap before showing up at work.