Travels in Cascadia: The Toughest Hike I'll Ever Do...Stawamus Chief in British Columbia

Note that I didn't say the toughest hike YOU will ever do. Every hiking experience is individual, and this one left me...breathless. Stawamus Chief is one of the most popular hikes in the Vancouver-Squamish region of British Columbia, and when we passed through the area last July, I knew I needed to give it a shot.

Stawamus Chief is a granite dome that rises more than 2,000 feet above the east end of Howe Sound, the southernmost fjord on the west coast of North America. The dome actually has three summits, the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, and the trail climbs to the first summit in a little over a mile. That doesn't sound so bad, does it?

The beginning of the trail is pleasingly flat, rising gently through the Stawamus Chief Campground. The wide flat trail offered no clue about what would follow. I know it sounds dramatic, but from the moment one takes the first step upward as the trail starts the climb in earnest, the trail is relentless and steep.

Some of the steps are on wood stairwells, but the rest of them are large uneven stone blocks that I found challenging. And there are no breaks. Many trails are steep, but most all of them have short breaks were the trail is level for a few steps. Not this one. It never stops climbing.

I climbed higher and higher, and grew more exhausted with each step. The thought was slowly building in my head that I was no longer young, and that some trails were simply too tough for overweight 60-somethings. But then another thought immediately followed: this quite probably was the only chance I would ever have at making the summit. Who could know if I would ever be here again, and with time marching on, my ability to climb would no doubt degrade with age. It was probably the toughest hike I would ever do (in the future sense). I decided I had to do it, and kept going. And going.

Everyone's experience will differ, of course, and some younger and healthier people would not have that much of a problem on this trail. Part of my own worries weren't so much the climb, but the descent. All of those huge steps had to be repeated, but going down, and I worried about the impact on my knees and ankles. But I had already come so far.

Stawamus Chief is a granite dome, and the resemblance to Half Dome in Yosemite Valley is unmistakable. One of the things about Half Dome is that it was never covered with glacial ice. The dome took it's iconic shape from exfoliation of the outer slabs of granite. The corners and edges snapped off as the pressure of burial was released upon exposure to the surface. Glaciers at the base quarried away the fallen rocks.

Stawamus Chief was different: as I approached the summit, a most unusual rock emerged from the trees. It was a boulder perched on a granite platform. It was a classic example of a glacial erratic, a rock left behind as the glaciers that flowed over this surface melted away. Unlike Half Dome, the summit of the Chief had been covered by glacial ice. And not just a little...the ice here was over a mile thick!

In the end, I didn't make the true summit. The young men in our group reported that another twenty minutes and 200 feet of hard climbing remained ahead. I just wasn't up to it. But I did make it to the summit ridge, which provided a stunning view of the eastern end of Howe Sound. From this elevation, the glacial origin of the fjord was obvious. And I was happy to be where I was. Elated, even. And thrilled to be alive (literally!).

The knees and ankles took the expected pounding on the way down, but no lasting damage was done. I would live another day, and take on the next challenge. It could well have been the toughest hike that I would ever do (in the future sense; I've done some really tough hikes over the years), but the neat thing about life is that you never know what comes next. Maybe I won't do this trail again, but there are many other trails and challenges ahead. Again, that sounds dramatic, but finding one's limits is always an exercise in drama.

Vagabonding on Dangerous Ground: Seeing Volcanoes from the Inside Out at Siám' Smánit (Stawamus Chief)

It's one thing to talk about a subduction zone from the outside, where one might see an oceanic trench, or a chain of volcanoes. It's quite another to explore the convergent zone from the inside out, by, for instance, standing under the volcano. Miles below the volcano. That's what one gets to do along the lower stretches of the Sea to Sky Highway between Whistler and Vancouver in British Columbia.

We were vagabonding our way through the landscapes of the Cascadia Subduction Zone between Northern California and the southern end of British Columbia. We were headed south towards home, but there were still some pretty intense sights ahead. As we drove down the Sea to Sky Highway back towards Vancouver, we had a chance to check out the awesome cliff of Siám' Smánit, Stawamus Chief at the head of Howe Sound. We got our first look of the immense cliff from several miles upstream at the Tantalus Overlook (below).

Stawamus Chief is a huge cliff and dome of granitic rock, specifically granodiorite (which chemically is a bit less rich in silica than actual granite). The chief has a height of 700 meters (2,297 feet), which is only a few hundred meters short of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park (900 meters, 3,000 feet). Interestingly, both names refer to "chiefs". The rock originated in magma chambers many kilometers below the surface of the Earth, underneath volcanoes that are presumed to have existed far above about 100 million years ago (the Cretaceous Period; dinosaurs would have wandered the slopes of these volcanoes). Tens of millions of years of erosion have removed the volcanoes and the many kilometers of intervening rock. We were quite literally standing within the internal plumbing of an ancient volcano!

One of the agents of erosion that has shaped Stawamus Chief was glaciation. We were at the head of Howe Sound, North America's southernmost glacial fjord, a spot where the ice stream was thousands of meters thick. The ice completely covered the "Chief" and eventually scoured and trimmed the edges of the huge rock.

In the 12,000 years or so since the ice melted back, the scoured and polished surfaces of the rock were weathered away, or buried beneath rock debris. Fresh looking glacial surfaces can be hard to find at times, but the 2010 Winter Olympics provided some excellent exposures here at Stawamus. How? The organizers widened the highway, and constructed a pedestrian bridge that provided access to the provincial park for people parking to the north.

The slopes in the Stawamus area were covered with glacial till and outwash deposits that hid the scoured granite surfaces. Engineers cut a low pass through the till. but they realized that the loose debris would be a road hazard. They carted away the till, exposing the beautifully carved and polished surfaces underneath.

Some of the till was still visible on the south side of the highway (below).

From north of the bridge, even more of the immense cliff could be seen. The mountain attracts legions of rock climbers, and we could see several of them inching their way up the rock face.

It was getting late, and the vagabonders had made no plans for the night. We continued down the highway, eventually finding accommodations in North Vancouver. The next day we would be making the border crossing back into the United States, where new adventures awaited. More to come!