Stein Peak July 2019
Dean and Adrien suggested to do a trip into Stein area, while me and Dean will go for the summit of Stein Peak, Adrien and Bonn-Tien will go and explore Stein trail.
So we all left Vancouver pretty early and Dean parked his car on Highway 12.
From there we dropped down to the CN railway bridge which looked pretty impressive and once we crossed the creek we soon left Adrien and Bonn-Tien and continued just 2 of us.
We followed the gravel road for about 10 km, this wasn't the fun part of the trip for sure, there were lots a of dogs that were not on leash and few of them were getting pretty close to us and barking at us, even some horses started to chase us, every time we will see another house coming up we will try to go a bit faster and hope for the best.
Once we reached Nekertch Creek we started our way up on something that looked like an animal trail.
Of course the trail didn't go too far up and soon we started to get into some heavy bushes.
We stayed on the north side of the creek following it up.
Half way up we found another old trail with some flagging here and there that later was gone and some pretty heavy bushwacking started.
Soon we finally got into alpine and didn't took us too much until we saw Stein Peak in front of us.
Both of us were pretty tired after hiking for 12 hours so we decided to camp there having the view of Stein in front of us .
It was pretty windy but we managed to find a spot to protect at least half of the tent from the wind.
In the morning we woke up and had some visitors by our tent.
After having our breakfast we soon left our campsite to the summit of Stein which was about 3.5 km from our campsite.
It was pretty cloudy that day but we continued our way up and slowly we were getting closer to the summit.
The route up was pretty easy,just lots of boulders and one steep section before the summit ridge, probably class 2-3.
Once we got on the summit we didn't really had any views so we just took a summit photo and started our way down.
It was pretty fast to get back to our campsite and once we got everything packed we were ready to go back down,but of course none of us were really excited about the 10 km road with lots of dogs chasing you.
We were trying to follow the GPS but it was loosing signal from time to time so we stopped to get signal again when we heard something in front of us, we looked and there was bear scratching the tree.
At first Dean asked me if it's a Black bear or Grizzly,I said I think it's Black,but once we heard us talking he turned back to us and stood up on his 2 feet and we could tell now for sure it was a grizzly.
Dean turned back and started running uphill and I started running behind him, you can't really hear him chasing you but you can feel the ground and you know he is behind you and he is getting closer.
At some point we couldn't get under a tree and had to drop our backpacks and continue running but we were trying not to run uphill but mostly just traverse and slowly drop to get some speed.
We couldn't hear or feel him but once we will stop to check where he is all you could see was his massive face pocking out of the bushes, and it was time to run again, while running we screamed as loud as we could.
He chased us for quite a while but then decided to leave us alone and now the hard part was to go back and get our backpacks knowing that he is still somewhere back there.
It was a pretty scary moment for sure but we got to our packs which were intact and soon slowly we started our way down.
Soon we reached the road and just after few km of walking we saw a car that was driving our way and it was a hiker going to Stein Valley trail so we got lucky and got a ride back to the walking bridge.
Once we got at the spot where Dean parked his car the car wasn't there and in few minutes Adrien showed up with the car, since they got back to the car earlier than us they went into the town to get some food and then drove back.
It was a pretty memorable hike and place for sure.
