Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

April 24, 2025

540m

Maple Ridge, BC

“Loon Lake Hill” is the forested ridge to the west side of Loon Lake and the high point boasts over 100 m prominence. I “discovered” this peak by simply browsing the maps and subsequently registered it in the Peakbagger’s database. There are two contenders for the summit more than 1 km apart, as the contour lines of the area are not detailed enough to distinguish them. I only ended up thrashing to the southern one (that has a larger contour area) due to time constraints, but for insignificant “peaks” like this I couldn’t care too much. This peak locates completely inside the UBC Malcolm Knapp Research Forest and the motorized access is supposed to be off limit. Even biking or walking a dog is strictly prohibited, as I had discovered already in “Gwendoline Peak” trip a couple years ago.

Normally one would have to walk ~7 km from the main gate to Loon Lake and that’s just the approach, but I got myself in some unique circumstances that I was legally allowed to drive up this 7 km approach. Xinran, my girlfriend had been doing a 6-day field trip with UBC and I got permitted to visit her during the course. According to the itinerary she was supposed to have a brief break on Thursday evening after 6 pm, and we made plan to take advantage of that. I would drive in, bushwhack up “Loon Lake Hill” with her and then I would drive her out to Coquitlam for a well-deserved Korean BBQ dinner before driving her back to the dorm. I got the key’s code from the department and we met as planned. A couple days ago she had soloed “Gwendoline Peak” as she’s keen on hiking.

There was no “beta” whatsoever on the internet so I simply planned my own route, up the east slopes aiming towards the forested saddle between the north and the south summits. The original plan was to bag both summits to be 100% sure. The initial stage was hiking down the Loon Lake loop trail but then I got a little bit impatient and left the trail earlier than planned. The bushwhacking appeared rather reasonable so we might as well aim directly towards the summit. The lower half of the thrashing was very steep but manageable but the upper half was a hell nightmare. About 70 vertical meters under the summit I got us in some sustained mess of secondary growth. This was shaping to become Xinran’s worst bushwhacking ever. I was not particularly pleased about the situation but I must keep my spirit high. Xinran, to my surprise, did not make any complaint and did reasonably well. We also encountered some confusing micro-terrain, at least one bluff and some thorny plants but with perseverance we eventually made the summit. There was as expected, no view from the actual summit but we got some views from the bluff lower down.

I consulted with the satellite images and planned an alternative descent route to avoid that secondary growth mess for as much as possible. This involved a very steep descent northwards into the aforementioned saddle, followed by some unpleasant side-hilling traverse to get out of the gully that drained from the saddle. We had a talk whether or not we should go for that north summit, which could potentially be higher but without any sure evidence, but we weren’t doing particularly good on time and the Korean BBQ dinner sounded more appealing. My experimental descent route worked out basically as expected, that we were able to finish the round trip in just over 1.5 hours. The dinner was also excellent though a little bit costly, and I eventually got her back to the dorm at Loon Lake at 11:30 pm. There was a closed secondary gate just before the main gate. I thought we were screwed but that secondary gate was actually not locked, and the code for the main gate still worked even in the middle of the night.