Thursday morning I wandered through the village again & spent a good hour or so reading in the sun down by the Olympic Plaza. There's a sort of park area with a playground for kids & a grassy amphitheatre around which they've set up dozens of big, comfy, reclining wooden chairs. It's a popular place for people to sit & read the morning papers, so I was lucky to snag a free chair. Then for lunch I made good use of the value for money at the Old Spaghetti Factory & ate my leftover spaghetti from the night before. Like pizza, spaghetti is one of those things that almost seems to get better with age - day old spaghetti is delish! :D

In the afternoon, when Jess got off work, I joined her, Dan, & Briony (a friend of a friend who was also visiting Whis for a few days) to head off on a hike North of Pemberton. Pemberton is about an hour North of Whistler, & the place where we were hiking, Mount Rohr, was about another half hour on from there. So it was a bit of a trek just to get out there - good thing Jess & Dan have recently acquired a car!

Now, Dan is known for being overly ambitious & WAY understating the difficulty of any path he chooses to hike/bike/ski along, so when he told me this would be an "easy" hike, I knew better than to believe him. Briony & I studying the hiking guide in the back seat & found that the hike's difficult level was in fact rated as "moderate - advanced". Right. Easy my ass! Fortunately Jess had leant me a pair of sneakers, as all I had with me were my converse shoes, which has 0 grip & are really not remotely suitable for bad ass mountain hiking.

We pulled up a tiny dirt road, right out in the middle of nowhere, with mountains rising up all around us & began our trek. It was a beautiful, warm day & we were sweating in no time; fortunately it wasn't long until we found ourselves immersed in the forest & protected from the fierce sunshine. Because of the incredibly wet summer BC has been having, much of the path that would normally have been very dry & quite easily walk-able, was very wet & muddy. Jess's sneakers didn't really stand a chance…lucky there were old! :S

We scrambled, and sweated, & crawled our way through the muddy forest, slowly traversing up the mountain side. We finally stopped for a bit of a break & Dan told us we were almost there; "Bloody liar!" I said, & I couldn't have been more right :P He pointed over at a giant mountain & was like "No, we just have to climb up to the top there". We followed on for a while longer, but eventually Briony & I dropped back as Jess & Dan went further on up, climbing over boulders & trying to dodge knee deep mud. Jess's sneakers just couldn't cut it; I abandoned the climb & sat down on a big boulder in the dwindling afternoon sun to tuck into my supply of huge, juicy cherries.

Almost an hour later, Dan & Jess reappeared. It was now 6:00PM & Briony & I had started to worry given how close to dark it was getting & knowing that we still had a couple of hours of walking ahead of us to get back to the car. Dusk settled in over the forrest & we kept our eyes peeled for bears, who often come out at this time of day. Fortunately the bears in this area are unlikely to be dangerous (they're black bear, not big, scary brown bears). We finally made it back to the car around 8:00PM, with midgies & mossies swarming around u, despite our best efforts to drown ourselves in repellent. We got back to Whistler around 9:30PM, exhausted but content :)

Despite the hard slog, the mud & the aching legs, it was well & truly worth it. Thos BC mountains are some of the most beautiful in the world, & it's pretty special to be hiking out in the middle of nowhere where all you can hear is the sound of the streams & the wind in the trees.