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.

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.