Manning Park
Yesterday I went with my friends Rachel and Peter on a top secret mission to Manning Park. Manning is a provincial park located about 3 hours east of Vancouver ((You may recall it as the place that we shipped all the snow in from for the Olympics.)).
After our top secret mission, Peter continued on into the Interior, while Rachel and I made an ill-fated attempt to go for a hike before we headed home.
I say “ill-fated” because, despite it being the May long weekend, Manning still has a fair bit of snow. We were just going to go for a walk on the Lightning Lake trail to check out Rainbow Bridge, but it turned out to be full-on snow covered and since we only had our running shoes on, we decided maybe it wasn’t the best idea to follow that trail. Of course, this was after I’d already gotten trapped in some snow!
On our way to check out the trail, we had to cross a stream. And sure there was a bridge over the stream, but did we take the bridge? Oh no, of course not. We decided to walk over the snow pack that had formed a natural bridge. Good idea, right? Yeah, great idea – that is, until the snow below my feet collapsed and I sunk knee deep into the snow! I managed to get one foot out, but the other one was stuck! In the end, I had to wriggle my foot out of my shoe and then Rachel had to dig down to retrieve said shoe ((And she broke a nail rescuing me. What a good friend!)). So awesome. Thankfully, I’m very short, so even sinking knee deep into the snow, my feet didn’t hit the icy cold stream. I’m sure if I were a taller person they would have!
The other excitement on our trip was four bear sitings on our drive! We aren’t entirely sure if we saw four different bears or just two – as we saw two on the way up and two on the way back, in roughly the same spots. So it’s entirely possible that it was the same two bears, but since it was several hours apart, they could have been different bears. At any rate, it was easy to spot the bears because there were several cars pulled over to take pictures. Including one guy who was *out of his car* and shockingly close to the bear. Craziness! ((Note to self: check the news to see if any tourists were eaten by bears at Manning Park this weekend)).
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Tags: BC, bears, friends, Manning Provincial Park, May long weekend, snow, travel
I’ve been told that stupid people make the best bear food.
I believe that to be true. True long time!