In 1956, Trans-Canada Air Lines Flight 810 crashed on Mount Slesse, located in Chilliwack, killing…read moreall 62 people aboard. I had never heard about this crash, one of the worst aviation disasters, or of Mount Slesse, until my friend invited me to go hiking on the Slesse Memorial Trail with a Meetup group yesterday.
I'm not a novice hiker -- I have gone on my fair share of hikes over the years and have done a few this summer -- but I am definitely not an expert hiker; the majority of the hikes I have done are three to four hours, with the longest being around six hours. Reading the description of the hike, I knew it would be a challenge, and I was a little nervous that it would be above my skill level, but I decided to give it a try.
While there were about 20 people in the Meetup group all together, we hiked in small groups, and I hiked with my friend in a group of six. Unfortunately we got off to a late start for various reasons, including hiking up a very rocky and difficult path for about 20 minutes before we realized we took the wrong path and were walking up an ATV/access road, and not actually hiking along the trail, which took up about 45 minutes of our time. By the time we started hiking the Slesse Memorial Trail, it was 12:15pm.
The initial half an hour or so of the trail was fairly easy, especially compared to walking up that rocky path, but the trail gradually became more and more challenging, and I would definitely rate it as "difficult". There were lots of roots, rocks, and logs to scramble over, as well as a small rock face we had to climb up. The trail was quite narrow at many points (sometimes with a steep drop on one side -- don't attempt this hike if you're afraid of heights!), as well as muddy. While I enjoy a challenge, it was beyond my skill level, and there were a couple of points at which I was debating whether or not to stop and wait for the group to pick me up on the way back (I had a book to read, so I would have been fine waiting for a few hours). However, I continued on, but when we got to about 90% of the way up, I had to give up -- my left knee was throbbing, the terrain was just too difficult for me, and I was afraid that I would seriously injure myself -- the last 10% was known to be even more challenging than what we had already experienced, and I did not feel confident that I would be able to climb back down (assuming I was even able to climb up in the first place).
So I left my group and joined another Meetup member for my slow, three hour descent down. (It should not have taken that long to get back to the beginning of the trail head, but my knees were killing me -- I managed to whack my right knee against a log), and my legs were utterly fatigued. I was so slow that two minutes after I got to the bottom, my group, who had continued to the top, where they had spent about 20 minutes, arrived.
While it was disappointing that I had to turn back when I was so close to the top (where there is a piece of the propeller from the crash, "the Propeller Cairn"), it was the right call to make due to the challenging terrain, and I would have slowed down the group so much that we would have been hiking back in the dark. Including the 45 minute hike up the rocky trail, we had hiked from 11:30am to 7pm, for a total of 7.5 hours. Despite not being able to complete the hike, I still managed to get some great exercise and take in some amazing views.
[Yelp collections: Hiking]
