Long weekend in Manning Provincial Park
Long weekends are for road trips and camping! In previous years we’ve gone to Seattle and the interior of BC. This July long weekend was Canada’s 150th birthday and there was lots going on in the city but we didn’t take part in it, choosing instead to rent a car and leave the city behind.
We left Friday after work with takeout sushi and made good time to Manning Provincial Park, finding a campsite in the overflow of Hampton Campground. The camp site was close to the highway so we could hear the cars going by, but we still slept well.
The next morning, we stopped at the Manning Park Visitor Centre and got a park map as well as some recommendations for hikes. Yuki asked about the alpine meadows but we were told they weren’t quite in bloom yet. Regardless, we drove up a mountain to the Paintbrush Nature Trail for a short hike.
The first section of the hike took us from the lower parking lot to the upper one, giving us glimpses between the trees of the surrounding mountain ranges. After the upper parking lot we hiked along the top of a ridge with valleys on our left and right. The trail wasn’t long, so we continued along the Heather trail until it started to descend to the first camp site. Not wanting to lose altitude, we turned around.
On the way back, we took a short walk through some snow and then through some more meadows with just a few flowers. Although the ridge lacked flowers, the views more than made up for an excellent walk, especially for such an accessible hike.
On the way down the mountain we marvelled at the view and decided to stop at the Cascade Lookout, but the view there wasn’t quite as good.
I didn’t really factor in how much gas we’d need for the day, so we were running quite low and decided to drive back to Hope to fuel up and get a quick lunch at McDonald’s. It was very busy with lots of travellers passing through, which was probably really good for the town. We also stopped at a grocery store for some snack food. The store lights were flickering because of the heat. This exit from the park made us miss the Canada Day celebrations in Manning Park, which supposedly featured a rendition of O Canada and free cupcakes. When we arrived at the site of the celebrations, the Lightning Lake day use area, the number of cars parked on the shoulder on the road leading to the park suggested that there probably weren’t enough cupcakes to go around anyway.
We brought the floaty that we used at Rohr Lake but after inflating it we found that it was slowly leaking air. Unable to go out on the lake, we chose to lounge in the floaty reading books until it slowly deflated to nothing.
Driving back to the campground, we saw some Chinese men with fresh firewood. I suspected that they had cut down a tree in the park. I was annoyed by this because earlier we’d seen another group trampling over the wildflowers to get photos on the ridge hike.
On Sunday, we set out to hike the Three Falls trail as suggested by the lady at the Visitor Centre the day before. It wasn’t that interesting of a trail, to be honest, and the falls weren’t that spectacular, but it was still a good hike for getting some exercise. The more interesting waterfall was visible through the trees from a distance, but the falls along the trail were mediocre and not as grand or unique. It also didn’t help that, to get down to the falls, we had to scramble into the canyon, making the hike out a tedious uphill walk.
We took a break at the last waterfall and ate some snacks before taking some photos. Then we made our trek back amidst stinging eyes (from sunscreen), making the total round trip about 3 hours long.
This time, when we went back to Lighting Lake, we had enough time to rent a canoe. It also helped that the rental shop was open an hour later than the posted sign. We spent an hour and 40 minutes paddling up the length of the lake to the far end and back. Fortunately the wind was with us on the way back and made it easier, though we were both pretty tired by the end of the paddle.
Yuki slept in early but I went back up to the Cascade Lookout to get some sunset photographs. A Modo car showed up to take some wedding photos and I didn’t realize I’d parked in their way until they had already left. It was really windy, but I managed to get a few self-photos.
On Monday we slept in and then had brunch at the Home Diner in Hope. With excessively full stomachs, we decided to find a park to relax in and selected Sasquatch Provincial Park on the eastern shore of Harrison Lake. It’s a pretty nice place and not at all busy, considering how close it is to Harrison Hot Springs. We spent a few hours reading books on the lawn.
Our last stop of the long weekend trip was for U-Pick raspberries. Because of the harsh winter, most of the berry farms are opening late and some aren’t even open yet. We called around and found one near the Abbotsford Airport that was open and got 5.36lbs of raspberries for $11.25. They weren’t very sweet when we picked them, but after a day sitting on the counter they sweetened up nicely.
While we were in Manning Park we saw 4 or 5 Modo cars. Crunching the numbers afterwards, I calculated that we saved $153 (gas included) by renting a car through Enterprise with Yuki’s employee discount instead of using Modo. That’s about 60% of what it would have costed with Modo. In total, we drove 734km over 4 days.
