Packrafting River of Golden Dreams, Hiking Blackcomb Mtn & New Air Pump

Hi everyone, so this weekend we are heading to Whistler. It's the August long weekend, BC day long weekend for us and we're going back up there to celebrate our 12th wedding anniversary. So we can't believe it's been that long. The traffic's been really bad today. What usually takes us an hour and a half has taken us probably about four hours so far. So anyway, we are just waiting for the traffic to clear and we're admiring this vehicle, whatever it is. Is it a motorcycle? Is it a sport car? It's not an all-terrain vehicle but very interesting. For those of you who caught our Whistler video from last year, you know that we go back to Whistler every year to celebrate our wedding anniversary and 12 years ago we actually chartered a helicopter and went up to Rainbow Glacier on Rainbow Mountain and exchanged our vows there. It was a great day, beautiful August 5th and we have been coming back to Whistler every year ever since. If you are interested in doing helicopter tours, Blackcomb Helicopters is great. We use them and you can just do a tour of the whole area here and you can look at some beautiful glaciers and some beautiful lakes and yeah it's really really worthwhile. We've twice chartered a helicopter once to get married and once after our seven-year anniversary we went back as well. So maybe on 14 we'll fly up there again. We could hike up. I've hiked up there but it's about a 12-hour hike. And this year is also very special because Precious just turned 23 a few weeks ago so she's now a 23-year-old senior cat and she's doing really well right now. Our vet referred to her as super senior. So we are again staying at the Riverside RV Resort and of course being a long weekend we made sure that we booked well ahead of time. So there are two main entrances to Whistler Village Access. One is Village Gate Boulevard and the other one is Lorimar Boulevard and we actually have to pass both of those to get to the Riverside Resort. That was an amazing meal. I really enjoyed my vegan curry and Gordon had his Mediterranean pizza. And I have a job delivering pizzas too while we're here. As long as we don't run into any bears smelling that pizza we're good. It's only like a 10-minute walk from the campground so this is a great place to come if you're staying at the Riverside Resort. So well good morning. It's our first morning in Whistler. We came in last night. One of the interesting things about Whistler is you can get hot. Maybe sometimes as warm as 32, 35 during the day but then quite common to drop down to 10 degrees at probably 2 in the morning, 3 in the morning, something like that. But anyway we had a nice evening. I'm just out for a quick paddle on Green Lake. Beautiful lake. And then join Mickey and then we're going to do a hike. We've got sort of three hikes potentially planned. We're not going to get three in. One, maybe two at most. We may do just up at Blackcomb. I think that's highly likely. We'll take the tram way up there and do the mountains back there. It's really quite pretty and it's a nice sort of half day trip if you want to do it. The other two trips we may do Rainbow Lake which is probably one of our favorite trips. Not a particularly difficult but a more or less full day trip. And the other we are considering is Iceberg Lake and that's also a nice trip. Probably sort of three quarters of a day something along that line. So we'll see which one we get to. So something new trying on this trip is the Flextail Max Pump 2. Very small USB chargeable. Pumps the boat up in probably half the time. So you can use it also to deflate the boat and get most of the air out of it. Just attach this section instead of this section. That's really nice when you're putting the boat away. So I'm sort of mixed. It's much faster, easier to use, small and light. But it's kind of loud on a quiet morning. So probably use it sometimes. Not all the time. We got it off Amazon. I think it was somewhere around $40. Well worth it I think. So I can paddle as hard as I want here but I'm not going to be able to paddle up the creek. As particularly good for going up water. The other thing that's kind of funny is the water coming out of this creek of course is from the glaciers above and it's really cold. I can feel it through the bottom of the boat whereas the rest of the lake felt moderately warm. Yeah I'm not going anywhere. Time to head back to the van. It makes it so much easier to roll up. It rolls up about maybe 80 percent without having to do a lot of pressure to get it to fit into the bag. So that's nice. Start to our hike. So phase one of the hike. Oh it's a little echoey in here. It's expensive. We forgot about that actually. It's about $72 each to go up but that gives you a full day and you can cross to the other mountain on the peak to peak. So I think for a full day's adventure that's probably fine. It's fun to be on the gondola. You can see behind us. These are new since last year. So now Whistler Mountain and Black Hole Mountains both have gondolas from the base. Which is probably better for skiing. It was kind of nice to be outside previously when you're just on the on the peak chair but still nice. A tip for RVing in Whistler. There aren't too many campgrounds here. There's only two. Actually only one in the village. Yeah there's only one in the That's the riverside. The Whistler RV park is actually about I don't know probably like 10-15 kilometers. It's about 15 minutes from Whistler proper. So south of Whistler which is nice as well. You've got nice views up there. If you recall we did our one-year review when we stayed there in January and there are some rec sites. There's a Kel Cheek rec site south of Whistler village and you could stay there for $13. And the rec sites we haven't been but it looks like it's quite primitive. So only outhouses. I think some have picnic tables and no showers or anything like that. And other than that you have to go past Whistler to the north to stay at Provincial Park. So there's Nairn Falls Provincial Park which is towards Pemberton. That's very close to Pemberton actually. It's probably a good 20-25 minutes past Whistler. And we'll link that video up here as well when we stayed there last year. Busy summer long weekend. You just have to prepare that it's going to be very busy and crowded and get as many reservations as you can before you arrive. Also a fitness trail that you can do sort of from the village coming up here. You can see it going up there and it kind of parallels the lift and then you can take the gondola down if you're so inclined. There are a ton of summer activities in Whistler and that's why it's so popular. You can rent bikes in town and there's miles and miles of nice paved bicycle trails. You can also rent mountain bikes and you can go on a ton of mountain bike trails. Easy to hard. You can take the lifts up and ride down and a lot of people do that. They really enjoy it. There's hiking on both mountains and all around Whistler and we're enjoying some of that this time. And paddle boarding. Lots of people paddle boarding. Yeah swimming at the lakes. And some really interesting people get up early in the morning and go paddle in pack rafts. There's wildlife viewing. There's helicopter tours. ATVing. Yeah anything you can think of. Climbing walls I think they have. Great restaurants and shops in the village. Or just to sit down by a river on a chair and watch the water go by which actually can be quite nice too. I know we sound like an advertisement for Whistler but at Whistler there is a lot to do and that's why it's so popular. We're going to scoot down the valley and then up that ridge. Follow up the ridge and then down the other side to some nice ponds. It's our next destination. That little tarn below all the glacier runoff. All right so we had a great trip. You couldn't get much better weather. It was actually a little cool up top when we started but pretty toasty now on the way out. The disadvantages of being at the RV park we still have about a three kilometer walk to do. So there was some very pretty flowers. Some of the creeks are nice. There was a lot of people on the trail today so we went actually farther up to near Decker Peak into a bluff up there. We got away from people and got some interesting views and just made the trip a little bit different. So very nice. We're back and we were a little bit worried about Precious but she's fine. It was 26 degrees inside and 26 degrees outside. Yeah the fan was going. We had the air conditioner go on in case it hit 32. It's perfectly fine. The van didn't hit the sun until right now about four o'clock so it's good. We raised up our water bowl because with our achy achy bones, old bones, we seem to have trouble laying down to get our water. It seems to be helping. Right Precious? Drink your water. Drink your water Precious. No you don't like it open. It's too bright. Too bright. So I already had a sip of Mickey's beer because it had the lime in it but cheers. Nothing exotic this time. Refreshing. It's refreshing. Yeah. We started about here. Go along and we're gonna work our way on the River of Golden Dreams up to Rainbow Park and hopefully paddle back. That's our plan but we'll see what happens. So we're just at Alta Lake. We walk from the RV campsite. It's about six kilometers and you walk along the Valley Trail which is a shared trail so there's bikers and walkers and runners but it's nice. Mostly through forest. We were thinking of coming up here and paddling the River of Golden Dreams but having looked at the waterway just after it leaves the lake, it gets really low and really shallow. The water levels are just too low. We'd be portaging more often than not so I think what we're going to do is just walk back down and put in farther down the creek after mainly the portage points but didn't do another hike today. Mickey's had an allergic reaction on her knee to a black fly. So yesterday when we were doing the hike she got bitten and it swelled up fairly significantly. It was swollen this morning but not as bad but now they've been walking it's swollen again so we'd like to not to head back in the mountains for one of the other hikes that we considered. That'll be another time so we'll either we could take it easy and just go and paddle the lake and then walk back be another 6k back but I think what we'll do is probably just head down get in the River of Golden Dreams maybe 80% of the way down 90% and then hopefully make it back to Green Lake where we can walk back to the campsite in probably about what 10 minutes. Yeah you might hit some congestion because we saw a whole bunch of people on floaties launching there. Yeah there's canoe trips that go down and kayaks and then we saw like about a dozen people a little rubber floaty things so it's not really our style but we're here so we may as well try it. Pretty shallow. There's lots of navigating shallow areas and logs. There's a group of people in little floater boats they were kind of they all slid off to the way so he'd scoot through a little quicker but they had cold beer and we don't. Oh a log jam. I think we can get through left and then immediate right after. We got through okay but I got a knock on the head with the paddle. Just a light knock. You have to avoid a stick sticking out. I'm lucky if I get out here without a puncture in the boat. I know there's a lot of sticks. A little waterfall coming up. I don't know I just wonder if we can get out. I think we can make it. Go fast, go fast, go fast. Yay we did it. Uh-oh another log jam. We might be able to get through it I don't know. Those pesky beavers. I think we'll watch this one. So this is a very relaxing paddle especially when you don't have to paddle. The first third was a little tough just because the river is kind of small and we had to get out a couple of times just to get to a couple spots but the rest of it's been really nice. Yeah it's gorgeous and you know apart from a big group of guys in their floaties there's just been nobody else here so it's very peaceful and we feel like we're saying we feel like we're in a jungle. Well a jungle with mountains. It's called Green Lake. Look at the color. It's very green. We came back to Nicholas North for our anniversary dinner. We didn't want to walk all the way into the village so this is our starter. An essay place. Sorry we forgot to actually film our main courses. I had a beyond meat burger and Gordon had fish and chips. Nothing fancy we just didn't feel like fancy today. I think the actually the favorite part of the meal was the messe plate that was really good. Good morning everyone. We just stopped at Function Junction just to see if we could pop by the Whistler Brewing to pick up some beers. Gordon really liked the grapefruit beer but unfortunately they were closed. They don't open till noon today so we're off. It's the day of our departure and we're heading back home. Hope you enjoyed the journey with us. We really enjoyed our paddling and our hiking in Whistler. It was a really good weekend. We also enjoyed the staying at Whistler RV Park. Many of the sites are nice. Some are less private but ours was okay. But what I really like about it is just access to the village. You can walk about a half hour into Whistler. You can head to the lake. It's only about a kilometer to Green Lake, a little bit farther. You're right on the mountain bike trails. This morning I got up, went up into the woods, did a walk and rock workout. Just going through, you know, lifting rocks, doing some push-ups, walking through on the mountain bike trails. And it's just a nice way to have a quick workout in the morning. And it's literally a two-minute walk from the Riverside RV Park. So nice location. We really enjoyed the location. So thank you so much for watching our video. Hope you enjoyed the trip with us. If you enjoy our videos please give us a thumbs up and make sure you subscribe if you haven't done so already. We really appreciate that. And if you have any comments please leave below or any questions. We always love questions. And yeah, we'll see you next time. See you next time.