Camping at Birkenhead Park, BC in our Roadtrek Zion

So it's a Saturday in late July and luckily we were able to get a last minute overnight booking at Birkenhead Lake Provincial Park. The site looks like one of the better ones. It's next to a creek so I think we lucked out. Birkenhead Lake is about 200 kilometers north of Vancouver and we're taking the Sea to Sky Highway 99 to get up there. We may run into some traffic this weekend since the Whistler Ironman is happening tomorrow and we understand there are going to be some highway closures for that. It's going to be a long 15k if it's going to be this washboard-y all the way. We're wondering what's going on in the cupboards back there and in the fridge. We'll have to be careful when we stop and open the doors. I'm sure things will come flying out. Just wondering if that was one of the coolers that got destroyed by a bear. Just getting into the campground area at Birkenhead Lake Provincial Park and just looking for our site number which is number 40. Oh I think we're close because this is 44 right there so we should be coming up to it shortly. That's it. Okay that's our site right here. Look a nice spot, fair amount of shade, a little bit of sun on the side. Mickey's saying the row was so bumpy when we came in that there's everything's just all scattered inside. See cushions are knocked all over. It wasn't too bad but it was certainly a bit shaky. So this is just a spot right behind where our campsite is which I think will lead me to a creek. Well the cushions fell over but otherwise it's not too bad a shape. I'll just slowly open the fridge and see what's happening in there. They might come flying out. This looks okay in the fridge. Fridge looks all right. The pantry withstood it too. Some of the cat food cans kind of fell over but not too bad at all. Good going Zion. I'm just gonna have to tidy up a little bit and get settled. It's pretty hot. We turned the air conditioning on for Precious for a little while just to cool down the van and we left the fan setting. We're just gonna go walk down to the beach to the lake and check it out. The spot's just down a little from us. They also have a creek access but a little easier to get to than ours and very nice. Dinosaurs and cabbage. The beach is busy. I guess this is where everybody is right now because the campsites are all quiet. This looks like the overflow camping area. It's kind of like a parking lot but each section has its own picnic table. It's not too bad. A little bit of grass. Yeah but it's definitely full. I don't see any empty spots here at all so it's a full house today. I suspect all the first come first serve sites are taken. I didn't expect there to be very many open ones anyway because this campsite is so far off the beaten track. You've got to drive out towards Darcy or Birkin which is a dead-end road effectively and then you've got another 15 kilometers of moderately rough gravel road before you get to the lake so it wouldn't make any sense to really come here for just overnight and a lot of the first come first serve sites tend to be people, at least what we've seen, is people who are just coming in for one evening and then going to carry on on their trip. There's not really anyone to carry anywhere to carry on from here so I suspect people that do come in for the first come first serve sites are staying for two three days. And it's about 20 past four on a Saturday and of course by this time all the sites are full so. That's the high density we're there. It doesn't actually say which of the first come first serve unfortunately. Yeah high density. Yes but we'll walk through here. Yeah so some of these are the first come first serve and they're actually nice sites as well so I'm sure they fill up first. I think they have 14. It's very hot. What was the temperature? About 32 Fahrenheit here. So the plan is we're both hungry so we didn't eat much for lunch. We just sort of stopped in Squamish and made a sandwich and just split it between the two of us. So we're gonna make an early dinner and then maybe go for an evening paddle. So if you saw our Manning Park paddling video our alpaca pack raft sprung a leak and we haven't had a chance to catch it up yet so Gordon's brought along a two-person inflatable kayak and he's working on trying to inflate it. A little bit more labor intensive than the papaka. A little bit more of a workout but that's good too. All right so it took a little longer than the pack raft but it's actually a very sturdy boat. We haven't used this boat in well over a year so it took me a little while to remember actually how to set up the seat. I had them backwards at one point. You can actually set it for one or two people depending on your needed use that day. I've had this boat for probably three years and I've backpacked it places but it's kind of heavy. It's about 33 pounds. The paddles, your PFD, the pump that you saw earlier. You're probably looking at about getting closer to 50 pounds carrying it which is a little bit much if you're going 8 or 9k up a mountain but if we're doing something like we're doing today it'll be perfect. It was just gorgeous out in the lake. Calm, beautiful, really warm. This is all settled down. She wasn't feeling very well today. She threw up. She threw up in her little carrier. Poor little girl. Yeah there's a lot of stop and go traffic and I think she got a little motion sick and she didn't want to eat at the beginning but now she's eating some food and she's relaxing and she's feeling much better. Well good morning. It's a little after 7 30 on the Sunday after our night here at Birkenhead. We just convinced Mickey to get up early to, took some convincing, to do a short hike up to a lookout above the lake. It's not very long. I think it's only less than a kilometer. Gandalf. Not a long trail but quite steep as you can see. Similar, similar view to below. That's the hard part. clambered down to another viewpoint but we both really enjoyed it. Got your heart going because it's steep. Not that long but it's kind of warm. So we're, looks like I was sweating a bit but just beautiful, beautiful country. All right morning at the lake and this is kind of the way I like it. Both Mickey and I prefer to have quiet remote lakes to ourselves but when you're in a park like this that's not likely going to happen except perhaps first thing in the morning like Had a great overnight stay there. If anyone's looking for land for sale we noticed there's several parcels somewhere around 100 acres, 120 acres ranging anywhere from I think about $800,000 to about $998,000. It's beautiful country if you wanted to live in a boat location there'd be no services. They'd definitely be offering. It's just beautiful wash but they also have an outdoor wash so for big rigs, for tall rigs like us it's very handy to have and just let Precious out to have some lunch. She's doing much better today. We're having a little issue with our power step on the driver's side and we think maybe there's some gravel or rocks stuck down there so it's not closing properly when we close the door. It's supposed to retract when we close the door and then open when we open the door but it it seems to open okay but then it doesn't retract so Gordon's gonna wash that area out and hopefully that'll get rid of whatever grit is in there and fix the problem. It's taken us a long time to go through Whistler because they're doing the Ironman competition today and they've closed off parts of the highway. They only have southbound going right now and it's been single lane alternating traffic through Whistler Village, detouring through Whistler Village. You can see all the bikers still. These guys are at the tail end. Yeah they still have, it's 36 degrees celsius It's about three o'clock in the afternoon and all these guys still have a 42 kilometer or 26 mile run ahead of them so it's gonna be a hot long afternoon. The northbound highway 99 is basically closed all day so they don't reopen until five o'clock. you