November 3, 2010
To take advantage of a sunny November day, Lisa and I did a quick self-propelled trip up to Coliseum Mountain, a relatively quiet spot on the North Shore Mountains. The entire route is mostly steep hiking from the forest, typical of the area. We biked up to the entrance of Lynn Headwaters Park, and then crossed over the pedestrian bridge to get to the beautiful paved road in the Seymour Valley Conservation Reserve. Nine kilometres of biking to get to the spur road, and all quite enjoyable on rolling hills through the forest. From the spur road, the trailhead is just before the washout. The trail is quite steep and a bit of a slog, but eventually after an hour or so you break out at the Seymour Valley lookout, a pretty cool piece of rock. There’s a bypass trail around this too to avoid the extra elevation gain. From here, there are great views of Seymour Lake, and over towards Mount Seymour and Vancouver.
From the lookout, it’s necessary to drop some elevation before climbing up back through forest and boulderfields to get onto a ridgecrest south of Coliseum Mountain. The alternative access from Lynn headwaters joins in from here, but that access is a bit longer.
Once we hit snow at about 1300-1350m, it turned into a slow postholing trudge onto the summit of Coliseum, just in time for lunch.
We wandered over towards Burwell for a short distance, but soon decided that thigh-deep postholing wasn’t fun, and I would rather be walking here in the summer on the granite slabs.
Snow covered granite and tarns. Next time I’ll come up here in the summer and go for a swim!
Goat Mountain, Crown Pass, and Crown Mountain. You can get a good view of the Widowmaker arete from here.
A quick nap, and some more food, and it was back to the knee-pounding descent back to the bikes. We made out with plenty of daylight left, and stopped at the End of the Line corner store for some well-deserved icecream. Next time, I’ll have to visit the remote alpine cathedral up there! This would also be a fun place to come back to in the summer with all the tarns and granite cracks to explore.
A couple more photos are here at Flickr
