Backroad Van Life in the Kootenays - A lost trail and a road trip...

Good morning. So a couple weeks ago I hiked up to the top of Mount Brian with some friends off camera. It starts out as a bushwhack but about 600 meters up there's a good established trail. It's all cut in and everything. Maybe what happened was they harvested the trees in the lower section and that part of the trail was lost. So I'd like to see if I can relink that up. It's a good little summit hike outside of Invermere here so I'll see what I can do. Well I got about halfway there. That's all I have time for today. I'll have to come back later and finish linking this up. But gotta go down into town, do some laundry, get cleaned up, then gonna meet up with Mackenzie. We're gonna go on a road trip and have some mountain adventures together. Might as well just say it, get out of the way, yes we are dating. Normally I like to draw a line and keep private life private but we'll try to do things differently this time. Yeah she knows British Columbia very well, has tons of ideas for mountain adventures so you'll probably be seeing her around more often but also she works an office job midweek so she'll be doing lots of solo stuff as well. All right so we're over in the West Kootenays now across from Kaslo trying to get to the top of Mount Loki. A little early in the season to try to get up Mount Loki but we're doing Mount Loki. Hoping for the best. Oh there it is. You betcha. That looks awesome. Yeah it's looking pretty dry too eh? Yeah I feel like it looks doable so far from what we've been seeing. The weather is very rapidly changing here we can hear some thunder over towards Kaslo. What should we do? Wait and see if it gets better. The weather today has been very uncertain. The storm's been passing over. We almost certainly turned around and bailed on this one but then another clearing presented itself so now we're trying our best to race up to the summit, make the most of this little window. I think we just decided that no matter what the weather we're committed to getting to the top at this point. Snowing over there. Oh it's snowing here now too. Go that way. That's beautiful though. Look at that. Well we made it up. We definitely didn't set uh any speed records on this one. About six hours to get to the top. We were back and forth back and forth with all the crazy weather today. We did it. It's beautiful. We nearly turned around twice already but after seeing a promising weather window we decided to give it one last shot and it turned out okay in the end. The journey is only halfway done we still have a whole mountain to get down so time to get off this thing. For our next adventure Mackenzie's birthday wish was to watch the sunrise from on top of a mountain. In order to achieve this we had to start hiking just after midnight. Really late or really early depending on which way you look at it. This is a level of suffering that a couple of mountain addicts are willing to endure to witness something spectacular. Happy birthday Mackenzie. All right back to work on this Mount Brian access trail. Hopefully I can link it up today. I feel like this video is probably running like five minutes long right now but we should be at 30 minutes. The amount of adventures that I had with Mackenzie on that road trip. Just like without fail when I'm with other people I'm in the moment. I'm enjoying it. So I just neglect the film as much as I should but there was just so much more that I should have shown on that. Something I need to work on in the future for sure. So the price of renting a brush cutter just didn't make sense anymore for the amount of trail maintenance I want to do. So I did purchase this Stihl KM131R and with this brush cutter attachment does the job. It smashes through one inch thick juniper branches no problem. But the main reason I picked this one is because that it disconnects into two pieces so it's just really easy to store in the van. All right getting there probably 80% done now. I'm gonna go down to the van have some dinner. I feel like I've been living so much lately my body can barely keep up. I think once I have some food in my belly I'll feel better though. I can finish this off. Back to work on our project here. Hopefully I can finish it up tonight and you're probably wondering what's at the very top of this trail. Maybe tomorrow if the weather's good we can go all the way to the summit. Let Rocco stretch out her legs. She's getting close to 100 summits now so we should officially count this one in. All right mission success. I made it up to the ridgeline where the footpath is. Got some gas left so I'm just gonna go up a bit further and clean up as much as I can. Looks like a storm's coming so gotta be quick. I thought the ridgeline up is gonna be the easy part. There's like another hundred downed trees up there. Completely ran out of gas. It's getting dark. I'm gonna have to go into town tomorrow and get some more gas. Gotta finish this. OCD. That's as far as I'm gonna bring the chainsaw up today. If memory serves correct the rest of the trail is smooth sailing all the way to the summit. But yeah if you're in the area of Invermere you got Pinto, Swansea, Taggart, Four Points, now Mount Brian with all fully connected trails all the way to the summit. This one just needs some foot traffic now to break itself in. But yeah right now I'm the only person who knows this trail exists. I don't think anyone else is coming up here today but I'll still hide all my gear in the bushes over there and run up to take the summit. Yeah you can see how this suddenly becomes perfectly worked in trail. This must have been a popular route before the lower portion of the trail was lost. It's a really short and sweet summit hike. We will be up there very quickly. You can see there's some whitebark pine conservation efforts happening here. Whitebark pine is an endangered tree. There's this blister rust fungus that was introduced from Europe in the early 1900s and also the mountain pine beetle and forest fires are killing them off. So they put those cages around the cones and they'll come back later to collect them and study the seeds, set them in the nursery, see if they can find a strain that's resistant to the fungus. Another thing out of control is the ticks this year. All my years hiking in the Rockies, Brazils, like out in BC, never seen anything but this year I've seen about a dozen of them so far. Completely out of control. Whoa! Not a centiboine. Look at that. Beauty day, beauty summit. No more bushwhacking required to get up here. Come check it out if you're in the area and it's time for me to check out as well. Hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Hope everyone's doing well and I'll see you in the next one.