Window to the soul of the earth.

Well we have had a few weeks off but we managed to get out this past weekend and do a hike into the Sooke hills. There was only 2 of us on this hike and it was a short hike only 8k. We did a simple hike up to the campgrounds and just hung out there for a bit and then returned back.

It was a pretty uneventful hike with the weather being pretty warm for the first week of February. With the weather so warm, it did make for some very green countryside with a few snowdrops poking their heads up though the ground. There has been very little rain for the past couple of weeks so as you can see by the pictures the river is running pretty low. With the river this low it get allot noisier than I described in the last post since more of the rock are uncovered. It is an interesting time to go out here every few weeks and see how the environment changes with the weather.

It did make for great refreshment since we both had been pretty busy lately and mostly stuck indoors. It made for some great bitch session to allow us to vent about the world and life in general. I would highly recommend this to anyone who is feeling stressed in their life to come on out a join us for the Hike Club.

We accept requests from others who would like to join us on a great hike and stress reducer. The only stipulation is that you must be male. Yes, this is a club only for men to enjoy, why well because we feel that men need a place to get away where they can act like men you know that simple male behaviour and some good male bonding.

We try to get out about every 2 weeks and go hiking sometimes every week sometimes every 3 week no real set schedule but we do get out regularly. If you are interested, and live in the Victoria BC area or are planning a visit here please email dragon@smartbomb.ca and I will contact you back.

Well until the next hike enjoy life.

We went down to the point to take some pictures this is a pretty big curve in the river you can see on the map. It was an amazing kind of day on the river since it had rained so hard in the previous days the river was running quite high. It is actually amazing how much quieter is along the trail when the river is running high. This was the second time we managed a hike shortly after heavy rains and I thought I had noticed it before. This time I was paying attention and noticed the quiet of the area. Of course the main reason it was so quiet was due to the rocks being covered by the water and not running over it. You can see from the pictures below that the banks and water fall where really swollen.

So how did our geocacheing go well, this was actually the first time we tried geocacheing and it went pretty well for the most part although either we where blind or the cache had been removed by someone. I was using the geocache program in my iPhone for tracking the cache and it led us to within 7 feet of the cache and we triangulated it by going past it and coming at it from different angles but where not fully able to find it. a bit of a bummer but as we practice this I am sure we will get better at finding them.

We visited the overlook near the ruins of that hotel that was to be built there about 20yrs ago. This area has a magnificent view of the fall shown below, it really quite amazing to see and when you hike around here on a regular basis you sometimes forget that such beauty exists. I highly recommend a visit to the falls area of the potholes and in general just do some hiking around.

After some discussions as was mentioned in my last post we have dubbed ourselves the “HikeClub” for men. Yes we are to be a men’s only organization and we are looking for any men in the #yyj Victoria BC area who would like to join us on our hiking adventures. If you’re interested you can contact me at dragon@smartbomb.ca the rules for joining us are simple whatever is discussed at hikeclub remains at hikeclub. Oh yea and bring your own water, snacks & pack, we hike anywhere from 8k to 20k depending on the day and how we feel. We go out about every two weeks at least twice a month on Saturdays, we start as soon as the park opens and the hike last from 3 to 7 h’s again depending on how far we go.

Great scenery you can see right from the campground area of the potholes.

It’s kind of like a great trip to a shrink but doesn’t cost as much and you get the great benefit of getting into shape at the same time.  I highly recommend this type of therapy for everyone out there, on top of getting into shape you also get to see great scenery like this. You can check out the map of todays hike from runkeeper here, or you can download the quick link to place it right into your Google Earth program here.   

Wide angle of the river rocks I will be watching and taking a shot of on each hike.

So back to the hike we left the parking lot at the usual spot and headed up to Leechtown. For today’s hike we only did 13.5k mostly because we had a nube with us today and we wanted to go easy on him. I did get a few decent pictures today and I now have a goal for some of the pictures I take. Like for instance this set of rocks on the river, if you look back at the other posts on our hikes you will see the same set of rocks covered in ice and once where the lower center rock is completely covered.   

So maybe for fun we will develop a complete set of rules for “Hike Club” so others can form their own, after all like I have said this can be the greatest therapy going and will cost you a lot less than a shrink.   

This is todays Complete Gallery of shots from the Sooke River Potholes along the Galloping Goose Trail..

Sunrise in the Sooke Hills

Well now that all the past blog updates are done for our journey to being able to carry everything we need for lightweight camping it’s time to sum up our hikes. We finished up the year with one final hike today, it was a great hike although the coldest yet it seemed.

We made some excellent time up to Leechtown making the 8k hike in only 90min (must have been the cold spurred us to warm up), although it did take 2.5 hrs to get back. Not too many pictures today just a couple a great sunrise pictures on the hillside and some interesting frost on the ground.

We did over 16k today although the map shows that we teleported for about 5k. Seems I had paused the GPS program when we stopped in Leechtown for a midmorning snack and forgot to restart it. You can see the map of this hike here http://runkeeper.com/pub/act/zGEYR3CfperIRz4nUI0v/map as you can see we made it to Leechtown and then we suddenly appear 5k back down the trail.

We did actually go about 500m past Leechtown this time just so we can start to get the lay of the land and start to explore the Kapoor park and check things out.

This was a pretty brutal hike not real sure why it may have been the fast pace up there of the fact that I had upped the weight in my pack to 10 kilos plus an additional kilo since I had to carry all the water today. For the last 2k back I was using my walking staff as a cane to help me along. Although as I am entering this my knee is feeling pretty good and bouncing back quickly, it could possibly be related to this great supplement that I am taking not real sure yet but am monitoring to see.

Now that we are on a regular schedule for our hikes I think we might make our goal of doing a 2 day overnighter sometime in March of 2010. In which we will hike out into the hills and spend the night do some sightseeing maybe even a little gold panning in the open areas that are available and head back. I do look forward to not having pain at the end of a hike and just feeling good about the hike.

I do think for the next couple of hikes I will keep my pack at its current weight and simply work on my endurance since my shoulders where feeling it today. Here is some information about the Kapoor Regional Park that might interest you http://www.crd.bc.ca/parks/reserves/kapoor.htm it does give a bit more information about the park.

2nd Creek of ice feeding the Sooke River

This was a great hike saw some interesting things along the way took some great shots of Ice Rivers flowing down the hillside and some pretty interesting icicle formations, including some strange plantcicles.

I hadn’t been as far up to Leechtown in about 6 or 7 years now and it sure has changed, it is now a park as shown in one of the pictures below called Kapoor Regional Park operated by the CRD. This is pretty excellent thing to find out because this means that at least that section of land is protected and should stay a park indefinitely.

So now that we have made it to Leechtown now what? Well it is time to build up our strength some more, I did notice that my knee which has bothered me on at least the last 3 hikes out, was hurting again but again we added more distance to our hike and I added more weight to my pack so it was not unexpected that it hurt. The last hike again only took a couple days to feel better so its healing pretty fast which is a good thing.

Now about this time I have added a vitamin supplement to my diet if it works out I will talk more about it as I see how it does for my hikes. Hopefully by adding this it will help me to heal up faster and be able to increase my distance and weight carried.

By now a few of you have been reading these posts please leave me a comment or two about what you think of the pictures, the trail or anything you may know about Leechtown and the Galloping Goose Trail.

As I said this was a wet hike and we made it about 3 quarters of the way to Leechtown this time so about a 12k hike. Being so wet I hardly pulled out the camera since my digital camera does not handle direct rain very well I just took a couple of pictures of the river which was running real high and fierce.

I did add an extra kilo or so to my pack for this trip bringing the total up to about 5 kilos now for my pack. I did notice we got much further along the trail before I began to have knee pain so the muscles are building. The last time out was similar to this one in that about 3 quarters of the way into the hike was when the knee started to hurt. Although from last time it was only a couple of days before it was feeling better not several.

If you’re looking for a place to get your training done for hiking the Galloping Goose is not only a great trail to do it on but it is also very picturesque. Enjoy the pictures from the weeks outing.

This 5 point buck was eyeing us

We had only managed one hike in the month of October but we are determined that we will get in a hike every two weeks from this point forward. It is now the first week of November in the Sooke hills and the weather is turning colder and getting damper as it does on the wet coast or beautiful British Columbia.

We headed out this time with a different goal in mind, now that we have done some wandering along the river’s edge and up the hills along the pipeline it is time to think about building up our legs and backs. This time I started with my pack carrying about 5 kilos mostly just water and snacks. We decided we would start heading up the Goose trail and actually work towards getting to Leechtown.

I had recently gotten an iPhone and downloaded a GPS program called runkeeper which my wife uses to track her runs (you can read here blog at http://www.littleillusions.com/ all about running) and decided to use it to track our hikes. Here is a link to the one we did on this date http://runkeeper.com/pub/act/2WOw0klazv2orbQMR5sn/map as you can see we did about 10k this time and actually have some proof on it, plus a great Google map to look at.

So what did we see on this hike well we saw a great big 5 point buck staring at us from across a ravine, the largest deer i had seen in years. He would not take his eyes off us as long as we were in his territory. It was also pretty wet on this day although we were pretty lucky in that most of the dampness was simply left over from the rain before we started.

The river was up a bit and pushing it pretty heavy, as you can see from the pictures the flow was heavy. Being November you would think the leaves would all be gone but we still saw some pretty stunning scenery. This is one of the benefits of living on the wet cost you get to get some beautiful areas no matter what time of year it is and the weather while damp is not usually too cold.

We did manage to get about halfway towards Leechtown as you can by the map. So our goals from this point forward is to work our packs up to 20 kilos and make it to Leechtown, beyond and back in a day.