Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

August 3, 2021

262m

Nanaimo / Vancouver Island, BC

Cottle Hill is one of those pimples in the vicinity of Nanaimo and because of its proximity to the city the hill’s heavily developed with service roads, residential areas and communication towers. Walking to the top of this hill could be a fun dog-walk for the locals but for us peak-baggers Cottle Hill completely falls into that category of “dumpster-diving”. This one however, despite the lowly elevation, is considerably better than expected in the end because firstly the road’s gated so we could not drive to the top. Alex, Vlad and I had to walk half a kilometer to the summit including some scrambling variation. Secondly the summit actually offers some decent views and the walk was not that boring overall. But still, other than trying to kill some time while waiting for the ferry I would not recommend tagging this summit unless you are a peak-bagger then you kind of have to, as the name is official.

There are numerous trails that lead to the top of this hill. Initially we were hoping to drive that service road up, so aimed for Linley Valley on the NW side. We then found out the road’s gated at the very bottom so we walked. Again the plan now was to just walk up the road to the summit but upon seeing the upper sections we took some variations staying on the ridge and actually got some hands-on scrambling experience in. On the descent we just walked down the road for simplicity. To our surprise we did not meet anybody on this walk.