Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

October 3, 2024

717m

Harrison Lake West, BC

This is just a forested hill on the west shore of Harrison Lake but it’s fairly popular thank to a well-defined trail that leads to a fire lookout on the summit. The name “Hale Peak” was given by bivouac.com due to the proximity to Hale Creek and the status is unofficial. In the hiking community it’s better known as Harrison Lookout. These days I had expanded by targeting range to include all unnamed and unofficially named bumps as long as they boast over 100 m prominence and this one clearly falls into that category. There’s only 300 m elevation gain required so it made the perfect sense to do this as a before-work exercise, but I decided to save it for a good weather day as this isn’t quite a forested summit. At least some views of the neighbouring giants could be seen on a clear day.

I was still recovering from the exhausting 44-km death mark to North Hozomeen but the weather on Thursday was too good to stay home. I wasn’t planning anything until Wednesday afternoon when I suddenly remembered that I still needed the mighty Harrison Lookout. I thought this would be a perfect objective to take Wendy M. out and sure enough she was instantly game. We together invited Kostya to come along as he had just come back from Mexico recently. Forming a last minute team on a weekday trip isn’t often an easy task but we succeeded this time. All three of us had to be back home for the later half of the day for work and Wendy had the most strict requirement to be back by “noon”, so I decided for us to meet in White Rock at 5 am to ensure that. In the end we were late by about 20 minutes but that would still make do. I drove us in the trusty Taco and the condition of the Harrison West FSR wasn’t as terrible as I remembered from the various outings I’ve done in the past few years.

There’s a trail marked on the Gaia GPS map so we did absolutely no research. I simply parked the truck on the side of the road at the supposed “trail-head”. I was a little bit surprised about the lack of official parking lots given the popularity of this hike. While gearing up a logging truck came by asking us if there’s a lookout structure on the summit and we said yes. I thought he wanted to kick us out as we had encountered quite a few logging trucks earlier on, but this dude was actually very friendly. The hike itself was rather boring and there’s nothing worth noting. The trail condition wasn’t the greatest but at least there wasn’t a lot of dead-falls so this trail does get maintained on a regular basis. I had read at least one trip report saying the pick-up sticks situation was rather “awful”. Wendy and Kostya are runners and my legs weren’t as terrible as I thought, so we made good time to the summit where we spent almost an hour taking pictures. Wendy had some professional level photography skills so it’s also a learning oppourtunity for me.

Eventually it’s time to head home to catch our respective work in the afternoon. I led the slow but steady trail-run and we got down in something like 45 minutes. I then immediately turned on the engine and drove us home. Surprisingly I was able to stay awake for the entire way back to White Rock. Wendy hastily made me some food and then went for her work, whereas I still had a couple hours of spare so I took a nap in Wendy’s house.