Stockade Hill

December 22, 2020

246m

Galiano Island / Southern Gulf Islands, BC

Stockade Hill is a lowly forested pimple on Galiano Island. The summit is officially named and the bluffs just to the south of the actual highpoint offers some nice views. Other than those, this is totally pointless summit that completely falls into the category of “dumpster-diving”. Angela and I bagged it in addition to Mt. Galiano and Sutil Mountain to make a full day outing on the island.

Dumpster diving on Galiano Island – Galiano, Sutil, Stockade. GPX DL

I did zero homework for this dumpster summit. I spotted some roads on the south side of Stockade Hill that could potentially shorten the hike and simply let Google Map direct us there. The highest spur road was not driveable thank to the recent dump of snow so we were looking at about 100 meters of elevation gain. After parking the truck we easily hiked up the spur road to the east side of the hill. The road seemed to continue in a direction that we didn’t want so I made the call to leave the road and bushwhack. We had a few stretches of bushwhacking through brambles type of plants and intersected a few higher spur roads.

Angela started the hike

The same logging road that we started on

After some brief bushwhacking we came to another logging road

We crossed that road and continued bushwhacking

The typical ascent through clear-cuts

I got confused a bit and checked the GPS multiple times to make sure we had our bearing correct. After a while we actually topped in a residential area. We walked passed someone’s home and found a service road that would eventually lead us to the communication tower on the summit. There’s also a trail paralleling the road and we took the trail. The trail led us to a couple nice viewpoints marked “lookouts #1 to 5”. We checked out “lookout #4” and then bushwhacked to the true summit where the only “view” was the communication tower. After taking an obligatory “victory shot” we retraced our steps back to the truck.

The residential area offered some views towards peaks in mainland

Mt. Galiano is that treed hill in foreground

Angela ascending past the houses

After a while we came to one of the lookouts on the south side bluffs

Angela on one of the lookouts with sunset behind

Me on the summit of Stockade Hill

Angela descending the communication tower road

Golden Ears and Mt. Judge Howay from the residential area

The typical Southern Gulf Islands scenery

We retraced our footprints back through the clear-cuts

Almost done.

We got down just before it’s too dark to see without head-lamps and despite all the dumpster-diving elements I actually enjoyed this sunset hike. We then drove to the ferry terminal with an hour’s spare to rest. The ferry ride back to Tsawwassen also took an hour. Angela found a nice Italian restaurant in Tsawwassen so we had a late but somewhat luxurious dinner once back onto the mainland.