18km, 860m elevation gain. Total time 7 hours 13 minutes.
My previous plans fell through so I got in touch with Dean Beaulac to see what he was up to. He suggested we give Mount Porter a shot. It's a new summit for me so I was stoked and the weather looked like it was going to be pretty good!
We left his place at 6am and made our way to the logging road at the West end of Sproat Lake. I was surprised there was still snow on the ground here and we didn't know how far we would make it up the road.
We ended up making it to 500m of elevation before there was too much snow. This added about 3km of logging road to hike each way. Better than hiking in from the bottom!
We started with microspikes and followed the path up.
It felt like most of the trail was a hike up and down a logging road. Luckily we had a great view for most of it! There was a set of snowboard tracks down that we could follow sometimes. The sun had melted them in places making them harder to follow but it was easier to use them when you could.
Eventually we put on the snowshoes and they took us most of the way to the top. Dean had to borrow my old crappy pair of snowshoes and needed to take them off for the push to the top. He was poking some pretty big holes with his legs and it looked exhausting but we both made it up safely around noon.
The view at the top was even better than the logging roads below. You almost get a 360 view of the area. We could see Mount Washington, Comox Glacier, Mount Becher, Pogo Mountain, Mount Klitsa to name just a few!
We stuck around for a while, ate some lunch and eventually started to make our way down. We had both taken our ice axes and used those at the top to help descend the steep parts. The sun was out and the snow was starting to melt. We tried to stick to the snowboard track as much as we could for a bit of extra ground stability but it was a little sloppy on the way down.
The logging road seemed longer on the way down once we got there. I'm sure we made better time, the view was still great, but it definitely seemed longer. I wasn't really looking at the time so we must have got to the truck around 3 or so. Home by 5pm, not bad!
It was nice to be out in this kind of weather again. Could have almost been in shorts.
Thanks for the suggestion and getting me out here Dean. You definitely made the logging road suck less!
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