Vacation 2011: Honduras to Guatemala & Back (Part 1)

Tom and I, and our two friends Heather and Breanna, went on a 3 week vacation to Honduras and Guatemala back in November/December.  I'll admit that some of these pictures are shamelessly stolen from them (but 6 cameras between the two of them and 1 between Tom and I, so it was bound to happen... plus makes getting pictures of us WAY easier!).  As usual for these kinds of posts I've broken it up into sections.

We flew into Roatan, Honduras and were picked up by our friendly host Mike and driven out to West End.  We rented a little 3 bedroom house from Mike & Sue's Mariposa Lodge.  It was a convenient 100 m off the main "strip" - restaurants, beach, dive shop!  Plus we got our own kitchen and 2 bathrooms (and hot water!).  We lucked out with weather since apparently rainy season was pretty extended this year (lucked out for the first couple of days I mean since rainy season ended the day Tom & I left).  Evidence of the rain lingered though, mixed with random road work, to leave massive holes of soupy sand on the road.  Not a big deal as long as you were careful where you walked, and stuck to wearing sandals.

The road from Mariposa Lodge to the beach

Lunch spot... pretty staving on first arrival.  Restaurants in West End are really very good, just unfortunately not for typical Central American prices...

The West End Divers dock

West End Divers: our go-to dive shop!  Great service and super friendly dive-masters.  This is where I got my open-water certification and where all of our dives were based out of.

Scuba-Tom

Scuba-Becky

Snorkel-Breanna

Unfortunately our luck with the weather didn't quite last long enough to get to the mainland.  Our second full day there was a massive storm and we lost power for most of the day.  The ferry was closed down for a few days so we decided to take a little island hopper since the airport opened first.  Sue made us a reservation, but it was given away on us (typicaly Central American booking strategy).  We did manage to get a flight out later in the day, but spent some quality time hanging out at the airport in Coxen Hole.  At the end of the day though, we did fly to Pedro de Sula and then snagged a cab from there right to Copan... so ended up on "schedule" anyway!

Epic Elbow Weekend (Big Elbow Loop & Rae Lake)

This is a back-post to my epic weekend on Aug. 14/15 2010.  I started off biking Big Elbow Loop on Saturday - a nearly 43 km loop that left from the Elbow Falls Campground at the end of HWY 68.  There's about 750 m of steady elevation gain along gravel 4WD roads, followed by a long section down through single track (provided you go counter-clockwise).  The next day I went hiking with different friends intent on Rae Lake, realizing part way in that my two routes almost met!  We never did quite make Rae Lake due to an overgrown trail that we didn't feel like bush-whacking through... We still logged nearly 18 km and thankfully only ~270 m of total elevation difference (although as you can see from the log there was a little more up and down then that).  We almost made it to one of the other lakes in the area, but I had to call it due to exhausted legs and it getting a little late in the day... very tiring, but satisfying weekend!  Notice that Big Elbow Loop circles around 3 peaks that I was hoping to tag this year in an epic Solstice hike, but snow conditions have not been cooperative.

The routes

Big Elbow Loop

Checking out the rocks and cooling off by Elbow River... (okay, most likely it was an excuse to give my rear-end a break from the saddle).

The trail was pretty non-technical, but made up for it in length and prolonged climb up.

The single-track on the way back was quite a bit sweeter, but at least there were some awesome views the whole time!

The profile into the "Rae Lake" area... although this really rambled around a little bit (part in the middle) attempting to track the trail, then gave up and went to the intersection of the trail towards Tombstone Lake, then back out to Elbow Lake... There also might have been a wrong turn onto the Rae Glacier Trail.

Elbow Lake - this is a gorgeous backcountry campground that's up a short but steep hill from the parking lot.  Seems like an amazing place to take off to do some good hike & bikes (or hikes and bikes!).

There's not a ton of elevation gain on the main trail through the area but the scenery is amazing since it's up in Highwood Pass.  There are trails off to more elevated spots, but the distances in can be substantial.

The structure in these mountains was amazing - geo-geeks delight!

Some of the trail was more single-track like, but the connector trails between branching trails was double.

New Bikes

Tom & I replaced a few of our bikes this year.... okay, I have yet to sell some of my old ones yet, but I will be... honest.

Tom's new-to-him, never-been-ridden, 2007 Santa Cruz Nomad

My new-to-me 2006 Giant TCR 2 road bike... unfortunately discovered that riding road reaps havoc upon my hands so now I have to sell this sweet thing =o(

My sweet, sweet, new-to-me 2010 Ibis Mojo - bought it off a bike-shop guy - always a great deal!

Read's Tower

Last weekend Tom and I decided to attempt a hike we've been wanting to do for a while: Read's Tower/Sparrowhawk Tarns... but we only ended up doing the Read's Tower portion, so will have to go back to explore the Tarns.  Read's Tower loop is about 11 km round-trip with 1125 m of elevation gain.  It starts from the Sparrowhawk Tarns parking lot on the Spray Lakes Road, but quickly branches off for a slog up steep scree slopes.  We still managed to reach the summit of the Tower in about 1:45 of moving time, so a respectable pace.  We started losing some people when we got back down to the bottom of the saddle and informed them they had another scree slope to head up to get to the pass... from there it's a dryas meadow slope down to the Sparrowhawk Tarn trail.  Because it was getting late and some of us had enough we just took the pleasant rolling, well-packed dirt paths back to the trailhead rather than ascend into the tarns.

Read's Tower Hike profile

Tom on the ascent.  Read's Tower is the triangular feature on the right, Mt. Bogart to the left.

Tom above Spray Lakes.  It was a bit hazy out because there was a controlled burn going on just south of us along Buller Creek.

Xavier & Anka

Duncan & Breanna

There was a lot of scree on the way up to Read's Tower... we ended up cutting across to the far right or the slope (going up) where there was more exposed rock and vegetation, making for more stable footing.

The shutter-bug... snapping a photo of me setting up for the group shot.

The group shot

Panorama view from the top of Read's Tower... Spray Lakes in the centre, Mt. Bogart on the right, Buller Creek is the next cirque over the mountains to the left (where the fire was).

Read's Tower from the saddle between it and Mt. Bogart.

Having a bit of a rest in the saddle.  After coming down ~300 m of the Read's Tower there was another disheartening scree slope to ascend to get to the saddle... but well worth it because heading out on the Sparrowhawk Tarns side is much easier on the knees!

View of the Sparrowhawk Tarns side (Read's Tower centre, Mt. Bogart just to the right of it, Sparrowhawk Tarns is the valley in the centre, Mt. Sparrowhawk on the far right.  Exit out to the Spray Lakes Road is to the left of Read's Tower).

Galatea Lakes: revisited

A couple of weeks ago I managed to get out for a hike with Xavier and Anka.  I took them up to Galatea Lakes... Tom, Breanna and I did part of this hike last year - we went to Guinn's Pass and then as far as the first sighting of the Lower Galatea Lake.  This time I got to see both of the Galatea lakes!  It was a 17 km round-trip with about 580 m elevation gain.  I also had a quirky bit of luck on the way back down the trail... met up with friends Chad, Mandy, and their dog Duke at the outhouse at Lillian Lake.  Awesome day!

Lillian Lake

Lower Galatea Lake

Snowball Fight!

Upper Galatea Lake

Ridgeback - House of Pain - Sugar Momma - Strange Brew Biking Trails

Tom and I have been wanted to try out some hidden trails in the Bragg Creek area for a while... they're not really official trails, just kind of raked in.  We managed to get around to it when he was home in June.  We left from the West Bragg parking lot, headed up the 2wd road to the top of Ridgeback, the flew down Ridgeback to the turn-off to House of Pain. House of Pain was a pretty sweet, whipping descent that really would have been hurting if we did it in the other direction! Once we got down we jumped the creek and then headed up the other side... by headed up, I mean primarily pushed our bikes up (check out that nasty profile!). Apparently this trail is kind of uni-directional, but that would be a brake burner for me to do the other way! From there we spun up the ridgeline, past the turn-off to Fullerton Loop and then down Strange Brew to Sun Dog. Super awesome ride! It would have taken us about 3 hours to complete except we stopped a bunch to do some trail assessment along Ridgeback.

Trail profile with names

Slogging up Sugar Momma

What the hell?!

Chilling at the top on the stone lounge chairs

View from the top of Sugar Momma

Mount Indefatigable: 2010

Still working on getting caught up on posting.  This was a hike from July 17 with Duncan, Steph, Breanna, and Andrea.  Even though it was relatively late in the season we weren't sure what conditions were going to be like since there were still reports of snow in the mountains... so I decided to march everyone up one of my favourites: Mt. Indefatigable (aka Fatty).  It's about 920 m elevation gain, 7.6 km round-trip (see previous trip here: http://bekham.blogspot.com/2009_06_01_archive.html).  This time there was less snow so we got to explore further, but we still opted not to take the ridge-top back down - although we there was still enough snow to boot-ski part way down!

Upper Kananaskis Lake was beautiful and I couldn't help taking a few pans of it on the way up.

View of the Goat Ranges and Upper Kananaskis Lake

Cirque below Mt. Indefatigable

Panorama from the Mt. Fatty outlier

View from up the slope of Mt. Fatty, down towards teh saddle and the northern outlier