Snowshoe Trail: Black Mountain Plateau

Last weekend six of us headed to Cypress to try out a new snowshoe trail. We found it on the BC Parks trail update - it wasn't one of the ones that shows up on blogs.


I tried out a new app during this trip too (see below!).

Black Mountain Plateau

EveryTrail - Find trail maps for California and beyond

The hike starts out by going left instead of right at the first fork in the trail (going right will take you to the Bowen Island Lookout trail, St. Mark's Summit, and eventually the Lions.. best for the summer!). The first hour or so is switchbacks, but at the top is a nice plateau with lots of little hills and fun places for sliding. If you haven't snowshoed before and you are .. smart enough to climb up a hill, make sure you bring a crazy carpet, plastic bag or are wearing snowpants that are slippery enough to slide down on. It's so worth it!

At the top of the hill, there's a nice 1.6km loop trail that was really fun. Small hills, both up and down, good places to slide and generally beautiful scenery. After walking the loop, we stopped to have some tea, hot chocolate and to feed the adorable gray jays and somewhat intimidating raven.

The trip down was really fast - we slid on our butts/crazy carpets for as long as could, and walked the rest of the way. I think going down more than made up for having to walk up.

Stats:
Time: 3 hours (including a 15ish minute snack break)
Length: 4.7 km return