Hitting my limit on the Howe Sound Crest Trail
Bagged: ✅ St Marks, ✅ Unneccessary, ✅ North Unneccessary, ✅ Thomas, ✅ James, ✅ David
I 💚 hiking and the back country, camping and being out in nature. I like mountains and I’ve hiked lots of them. But I don’t like mountaineering in the sense of requiring vertical climbing, vertical drops, rock climbing etc. I’ve tried outdoors climbing and it just scared me, I just have a real fear of vertical drops. For the majority of hikes I’ve done this has never been a problem. There’s the odd moment on mountains I didn’t like, but that’s rare.
And then I did the Howe Sound Crest trail.
This day enabled me to bag 6 peaks but completely destroyed me physically and pretty much wrecked me mentally too, I hit my limit. Between Unnecessary the other side of James Peak there was so much scrambly, vertical stuff that it scared the crap out of me. There’s the traverse around the West Lion, Thomas Peak, ridge walk up James Peak and then the traverse between James peaks. There are parts with vertical cliffs on both sides, sometimes just one side, sometimes inches away. Sometimes you are scrambling down rough rocks, roots and dirts towards instant death on cliffs. There are multiple places where a mis-step won’t just result in scratches, cuts or hurt limb, but just straight death.
Many people do these trails and have no problem. This is likely just my problem. Some even love big drops and you’ll see them grinning on pictures. I don’t. It’s not just the medical problems I’ve had like inner ear vertigo type problems, I just can’t do it. Howe Sound Crest Trail pushed me over my limit and I was just terrified at points.
I was going to do the whole trail, but in the end found the quickest way off the trail when I realised it was just getting worse and went down into Lions Bay instead of camping. Of course, I’d done all the hard and scary parts and could have just continued, but I understood I was in a bad state and could not face anything else that day.
I understood that my problems aren’t shared and went back to read resources to check I wasn’t missing something. The Glorious Mountains of the North Shore says things like “There is no real exposure, but there exists the possibility for a fall and an injury.” and “Just take it calm and slow” and “Take care when approaching… a fall to the west would be fatal”. I like this book a lot, but for me the danger felt much worse and much more stressful than was presented. The Howe Sound Crest trail is number 2 in trails for search and rescue according to this list (actually this was a pretty accurate depiction).
Anyways, it’s done I’ll never go back and I can now definitely start crossing off mountains I will never, ever do. I’m no longer sure I’ll do all the peaks on the North Shore or even want to do this anymore, we’ll see.
One up side, because I did this with a full backpack on a hot day and took a longer route by exiting… I burnt through what I think is a record 6,309 calories, over 12 hours for one of my biggest single day efforts ever. I was a wreck.