VanAussie Daily

Camping at Harrison Lake

Author: Jared

Camping… in winter?!

Going camping in the middle of winter is not usually one of the top rated ideas in Canada, and when I mentioned last week to coworkers and others that we were heading for the hills on the weekend they did give me a look like I was one beer short of a six pack, however there was some method to our madness:

The weather over the last few weeks has been amazingly mild, in fact they’re saying that it has been one of the mildest winters on record… typical that we get it for the Winter Olympics of course… Still, it’s makes for great weather to get out and about in! We also car camp, so everyone is sleeping in their vehicles, which means nobody has to deal with sleeping on the ground and damp tents in the morning.

Saturday had to have been one of the nicest days in quite a while, and with Nat away in Australia (she took the camera too, which is why I’ve been borrowing pictures from everyone) my friend Amy filled in. Well, she was full of bubbles about the weather, the flowers all coming out because they think it’s spring (fools, it’s gone cold again now) and all the beautiful snow on the amazing mountains.  I also got her hopped up on coffee before the drive, so the combination made for an entertaining trip!

Anyhoo, Harrison is about 2 hours east of Vancouver, so within an easy drive. Distances are all relative over here, as in Tasmania where I’m from, you’d be on the other side of the state in two hours, whereas we’ve only made it out of the ‘burbs and into the first mountain range in that time. We wanted to head up the west road beside Harrison Lake, so headed out the highway to Harrison, checked the town for a whole five minutes (resort town, not much to it), then went and found the forestry road, which actually starts some distance from Harrison itself. The road winds its way north beside the lake, and when open (it’s blocked by a land slide at the moment) it can actually take you right through to Pemberton, north east of Whistler, if you have a suitable vehicle.

We found a nice camping spot on a wide rocky beach about half way up and parked up there for the afternoon – because of the mountains you lose the sun at about 3 or 4, so we wanted to hang out and enjoy it while we could.

A campfire on the beach certainly made the trip very memorable too. It was so nice watching the sun go down on the mountain, the stars come out, and the lake get darker and darker.

(Thanks to Amy and Aidan for the pics : )

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 11th, 2010 at 9:57 pm and is filed under Downtown Vancouver. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.