Once again, I’ve been thirsting for hiking and I found myself heading up to the Eagle Bluffs up Cypress Mountain with Sheena and Megan! It was very strange to see Cypress with no snow. The trip total was just shy of 8km.

View Eagle Bluffs On Cypress Mountain in a larger map

Or you can download the KVM file for Google Earth!

We didn’t quite make it all the way to the end because we squeezed this one in after work and made it out just before dark. However, the good side to this coin is that the fireworks were going on tonight! We stopped at the amazing lookout point from Cypress and watched the display with a couple hundred more people.

Mark brought his Nikon D80 SLR with us and took some pretty epic shots! The best that I’ve seen so far is this crazy panoramic shot he took up from the very top of the Black Tusk!

There’s also a whole bunch more in a photo album on his website.

We just got back down from the Black Tusk hike this afternoon, and it was amazing! The five of us had a blast – Nate, Sheena, Mark, Chloe, and myself! Yesterday we hiked about 18km from the parking lot, up to the top of the Black Tusk (the very top, even up the chimney), then back down to our campsite at Taylor Meadows. Today, we hiked 10.24km from the campsite down to the parking lot. A trip total of 28km!

I took a grand total of 562 photos (all on one battery – with juice to spare!) which you can find all of in my web albums!

• Black Tusk – Day 1
• Black Tusk – Day 2

I also brought my phone with me on airplane mode, logging our tracks via GPS.  You can check out the maps easily on google maps for day one and day two separately.

View Black Tusk Day 1 in a larger map

My phone battery died about 10 minutes into our descent down from the Tusk.  But it logged the important part of getting up there! A really cool thing that I just tried out was that you can download these KML files (day one – day two) and open the GPS log in Google Earth! It pops all the mountain terrain into 3D and has our little path along it! Also, here’s the screenshots from the GPS logging program on my phone called MyTracks with some more cool info:

Day 1 Data From GPS

Day 2 Data From GPS

Tomorrow morning, I’m heading out with Nate, Sheena, Mark, Chloe, and one of Chloe’s friends to Garibaldi Park. We’ll be hiking up the Black Tusk tomorrow, then spending the night up at Taylor Meadows. The next morning we’re planning to hike up Panorama Ridge, then head down and back to the cars in the afternoon. Should be tonnes of fun!

It’s been an awesome weekend!  I went on two hikes yesterday, and a canoe trip today! I tried to log our trek’s each time, but only a couple of them came out properly:

Saturday morning, Sheena and I went out to Jug Beach in Belcarra and hiked about 5.5km I believe.  Each direction only took us 26 minutes.  We also spent a bit of time wandering on the ocean beach!  The map data was fairly inaccurate, and only started logging half way to the beach on the way there!

After our hot morning hike, we stopped in for slurpee’s at 7-11, then wandered over to Minnekhada for yet another short hike!  This time, the GPS was way out to lunch (I guess it was having a bad day), so I have no map data.  However, timestamps on photos and Sheena’s stopwatch prove that we got down from the high knoll in just 19 minutes!  We really booked it and were running like crazy at the end!  Check out photos for both our hikes!

Today, Ray joined Sheena and I as we strapped the canoe to my roof and drove up to Widgeon Creek!  We set in around 2:30pm, and went for an hour in, then an hour out.  My GPS was really on the ball and logged our trek pretty amazingly – it’s crazy to see how we pretty much hit the end of the creek!  I also took a few good lookin photos you can check out.

View Widgeon Creek in a larger map

Yesterday evening, Sheena, Nate, and I went for a quick hike up Minnekhada to build up an appetitite so we could chow down on a couple platters of Nacho’s later!  I believe it’s my first hike with my phone, so I ran this app called “My Tracks” to record our path via GPS.  At the end, I hit a button and it uploaded it to Google Maps:

• http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=104912563206901689020.00046e0b8a71b5232ffcf&ll=49.299494,-122.698789&spn=0.021437,0.033903&t=p&z=15

Also, it’s got a couple more pages where it can show you your stats, and also a cool graph on your elevation change.

It even takes out the time when we were sitting at the top for 20 minutes, and gives us an average speed when moving! Neat stuff – I’m definitely going to use this one more!