Took ye olde van out for a first real drive up any logging roads. We went to Brittania Beach and then took the main logging road up from there. No fences, although we did rather ignore a big sign telling us to go away at a worksite where they were fixing up a bridge. Van did fine on the Sea to Sky; tuning the timing to the proper 7.5BTDC (it had been at around 3...) seems to have cooled the cylinder head temperature down so it normally sat at around 300 and never got above 350. On the other hand, the 8% climb out of Furry Creek still spanked my speed down to 60km/h, but I'm in no hurry.
Once on the logging road, she still did fine, until we hit a large-ish water bar. I got a bit stuck coming up, then got a bit stuck on the side of the road backing out, and smelled a bit of burnt oil getting myself out of that... Then on the way down again, the oil light came on, which I *think* was on account of it being really steep and all the oil sloshing to the front of the sump, and a big old air bubble being sucked into the oil take-up. Still, I preferred to err on the side of not running the engine dry, and added a bit, and then the road levelled off anyway pretty soon and the light stayed off. I'll have to see if it's now overfull and risking blowing gaskets once it's cooled down and all the oil has returned to the sump.
We were hoping to grap a turn-off from the orange line on the map (big-ish logging road) onto the black dotted line, and hike up either a trail or a slightly overgrown logging road towards Utopia and Mountain lakes. It looks like the logging is still pretty active up there, and all the roads have changed a bit from the map, so we failed to find that turnoff.
I have no idea what this is, but it's about all that's left of the Mt. Sheer townsite. The dude at the mining museum said they're not supposed to recommend going up there and there's nothing to see, and lots of active rehabilitation of the mine site going on, and the roads are hazardous, and yeah, it would be this road right out the back. This looks like some sort of foundation, but the concrete walls are like 2 feet apart, which seems rather overbuilt for any foundation I can imagine...
Fuzziest piece of bear poo I have ever seen. So much so that it warranted a photo.
Despite the fact that we never found anything nicer than logging roads to hike on, we did find a reasonably scenic lunch spot.
I believe that's goat ridge on the left, Mt. Sheer on the right middle, and Sky Pilot in the background, but I could well be wrong.
The digital camera came with image stitching software, which of course I had to try. Apparently, it assumes all your photos are in one strip, so didn't seem to have a way to tell it that the 5th picture belonged above the 4th, and it didn't figure it out on its own. Oh, well. This is the abandonned open-pit mine in behind Brittania. We didn't see anything that looked particularly like active reclamation going on, but maybe we wouldn't know it if we saw it.