Trip Report: Paton Peak via Mt Seymour Valley Trail

As spring turns to summer, my thoughts turn to the eternal question: which unpopular trail can I do this weekend? This weekend, the choice needed to be accessible by bike. I settled on checking out Coliseum in the North Shore mountains, since I'd read some recent trip reports that said consistent snow started around 1800m. The fact that the report was from a skier in Squamish describing Garibaldi and that I was going to prance up a mountain in North Vancouver was irrelevant to me.

Queen of the Road

The past two times I've tried to bike up to Rice Lake and the Seymour Valley Trail, I managed to go halfway up Seymour Mountain instead. This time I learned about "maps" and "following directions", so it went a lot better. I set off from downtown at 10am, took Adanac down to Second Narrows bridge, and scooted over to North Vancouver and up Lillooet Road. At Rice Lake I guzzled a bunch of water and then set out on Seymour Valley Trail to the trailhead. The trailhead is at the Stoney Creek branch road, which my GPS tracks and the trip reports didn't mention. This was roughly 30km and took about an hour and half.

Of important note: the salmonberries are in season. This was the only thing worth photographing on the entire bike ride and at the start of the trail, apparently.

Peasant of the Trail

This trail isn't crazy complex. It's a very nicely marked trail through the forest to the Paton Peak sub-alpine area, which is a nice rock with nice views. It's pretty steep at 2.5km out and 760m elevation gain.

I wanted to check out Coliseum but unfortunately at about 1000m the trail was covered with nasty rotting snowpatches. I made it to about 1100m, punching through a couple times and getting turned around more than a couple times, before realizing this was a little sketchy and I wasn't having a great time. Coliseum was at 1400m so I would still need to battle up more of the steep and slushy snowpatches.

In light of my desire never to be featured on the hit TV series North Shore Rescue, I turned back to Paton, had my sandwich, and then napped on the rocks for a little bit before scampering back down to my bike. The downhill descent was immensely pleasant and so too was skipping all the traffic heading into downtown.

Overall quite enjoyable and good exercise. I like the proof of concept for human-powered adventures and I think I can scale this to additional Slightly Silly Solo Sufferfests in the future.