Mountain Footsteps Southeastern BC Hiking Guide

GPS correction for the turnoff highway #95 onto Kindersley Pinnacle FSRd. The junction given in the book is for a logging intersection farther up the road. The parking and the lake GPS are correct.

GPS correction for the parking lot on Hartley Lake Road

Many new logging branches. Stay to main road.

Stay to left fork uphill (don't descend on new logging road to the right)

Trail to Upper Haystack Lake is only new for 3.1 km. Then the trail is occasionally used and confusing.

3.1 km trail braids. Take a small trail uphill west toward the base of a white rock slide. Follow indistinct trail to a large grassy avalanche slope with good views of Haystack Lake and Haystack Mountain and the trail disappears.
Climb up the avalnche slope gaining elevation and find flagging tape leading to the continuation of the trail in the forest.

Road is mostly overgrown with alders for the final 2-km of road.

Access trail for the first 400m is wet with runoff and one end of the bridge crossing the creek is now underwater, but well fordable.

A small, unnamed group of retired fellows has been working for the last two years to clean out, repair and mark the trails up Pyramid Creek and Alki-Murphy Creeks. With the approval and support of the MTCA, official signs posts have been erected at the trail head along the St Mary and at the actual start of the Alki-Murphy trail (one can now drive the 3.2 km from the St Mary Road to the trailhead). There are also directional signs in place at the first mine site on the Alki trail and additional signs will soon be installed at junctions / significant points on both the Pyramid Creek and Alki-Murphy Creek trails. Both trails/routes are now well marked with orange trail markers or blazes where we ran short of markers and we had cut out all the winter/spring blow down on all trails except for a section on the Murphy route.

We had hoped to have all the work finished in time to have the two rehabilitated trails included in your latest edition of Mountain Footsteps but given our small number and the time needed to have both trails officially listed as MTCA hiking trails, it was not to be. We did manage to get the magazine Go Kimberley publish an article on our work in their Spring 2010 issue (#10) which you could probably still find. We also provided GPS data to MTCA to include with maps for the trails.

I am attaching some info on the two trails which should be of interest to people looking for interesting,and challenging hikes into the alpine and over high (8000 ft) passes and with geat views as a reward.

DD

Contact Janice

for info from DD

Kimberley