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  • AtoZ
      • Ablation Zone
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Black Tusk

Wedgemount Lake

Black Tusk

Logger's Lake

Adit Lakes

Whistler Train Wreck

Cirque Lake

Brandywine Meadows

Wedgemount Lake

Callaghan Lake

Joffre Lakes

Newt Lake

Northair Mine

Spectacular Whistler!

Whistler hiking is wonderful! Check out our Best Whistler Hiking by Month guides! WeRentGear.com rents tents, sleeping bags, sleeping pads, camp stoves, packs, complete kits and more!

Best Trails This Week!

Best This Week: Whistler Train Wreck and Parkhurst Ghost Town are easy, fun and dog friendly. Check out our May and June Whistler and Garibaldi Park guides here!

Brew LakeBrew Lake is beautiful mountain lake just a short drive south of Whistler and is relatively unknown and seldom hiked. Laying at the base of Mount Brew, Brew Lake lays in a massive alpine valley of enormous erratics.  On first seeing Brew Lake it looks serene, yet wild and hostile.  The lake is surrounded on one side by idyllic tree covered hills and lakeside cliffs and on the other side a brutal looking wasteland of huge boulders sloping up to the sky.

  • Very off the radar, wild & infrequently hiked
  • Stunning, dramatic boulder field & windswept trees
  • Lots of excellent places to put your tent
  • Not as cold to swim as Joffre, Wedge, Garibaldi
  • Hut on Mount Brew is a surreal little oasis
  • Beautiful views of Black Tusk & Daisy Lake
  • Tricky to find trailhead & tough, steep trail
  • Lake is not stunning like Joffre, Wedge, Garibaldi
  • Snow restricts access well into June
  • Trail is only 5k, but feels like 10k!

Hiking into this wasteland of erratics reveals an amazing paradise of small, island forests, cute streams and endless worlds within worlds to explore.  You find yourself wandering along like a kid mesmerized at what you will find next. Brew Lake itself doesn't come close in wow factor to the postcard-perfect alpine lakes such as Wedgemount Lake, Joffre Lakes, Cheakamus Lake or Garibaldi Lake, but I does beat these lakes in other aspects.  Because Brew Lake is outside of Garibaldi Provincial Park few people have heard of it.  More often than not you will have both the lake and entire valley to yourself.  An increasingly rare occurrence elsewhere that gives the place a quiet calm and that strange and satisfying feeling that there are no other humans for quite some distance.  You have that exhilarating wilderness feeling that sometimes gets lost on other Whistler area hikes when you start the trail from a parking lot packed with cars.  The fact that the Brew Lake trail doesn't have a parking lot or proper trailhead actually makes it more mysterious, adventurous and in some ways more fun.  Brew Lake is shallow and absolutely crystal clear. Mesmerizingly clear.  You can look across the lake and see smooth and rounded rocks scattered across the lake bottom.

Brew Lake Hiking Trail Map

Brew Lake Map v18

The lake is also relatively small at just a few hundred metres across and unexpectedly warm to swim in. Breathtakingly cold lakes are the norm in the Whistler area, but Brew Lake is an exception.  Try swimming in Wedgemount Lake, Joffre Lakes, Russet Lake, Cirque Lake, Cheakamus Lake or Garibaldi Lake for any length of time and you will be shivering cold. You can manage a minute or two swimming in these lakes, but certainly not 20 or 30 minutes as you can in Brew Lake. There are even some massive, flat topped erratics in the lake to swim to and lounge on. The sun makes them amazingly warm on a sunny day. The edge of the lake surrounded by grass areas littered with erratics making it tricky to find a spot for a tent, but easy to find a place to sit.  Once you do find a place for your tent, further exploration reveals countless other great spots. Grassy clifftops, clearings at the edge of streams.

Brew Lake Tent

A third aspect of Brew Lake that beats the local, alpine lake competition is the hike itself. It is amazing. Comparable in difficulty to the Wedgemount Lake trail, though two kilometres shorter and packed with things to see.  From the dozen or so amazing viewpoints on various plateaus steps from the trail to the endless gnarled, weather-beaten, yet captivating forests of twisted, mangled, huge and bewildering trees. Over and over along the 5 kilometre trail you stop and stare in wonder at how a huge tree, 30 metres tall can have an absurd, sideways L-shape in its trunk big enough to stand in.  You see it over and over until eventually you work out that when these trees are young they spend most of the year under metres of snow.  Over the years they grow at an unusual looking right angle, as if growing sideways. Eventually the tree grows big and thick enough to not have the snow push it over and it grows vertical again.  But of course it keeps this hilarious L-shape as it continues to grow.  You start spotting the smaller ones everywhere you look.  The trunk comes out of the ground one metre, then one metre horizontal, then one metre vertical again.  Hilarious.  Absurd and hilarious.

Camping at Brew Lake is Gorgeous

Brew Lake View of Black Tusk

Brew Lake Driving Directions Maps

Finding the Brew Lake trailhead is quite an adventure.  The logging road is long, windy, steep, narrow and unmarked.  The first time you encounter an indication for the Brew Lake trail is when you reach the trail and find the orange or yellow tree markers.  The last road bridge was decommissioned in recent years, so the farthest you can drive with a 4x4 is to this closed bridge one kilometre from the actual trail start.

Brew Lake Driving Directions Map v3

Brew Lake Directions Map v5

More Brew Lake Hiking Info...

More Whistler & Garibaldi Park Hiking Maps!

Brandywine Meadows Maps

Brandywine Meadows is a nice, relatively short hike to a massive flower filled valley high up in Callaghan Valley. Located 40 minutes south of Whistler, this tough and ...
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Garibaldi Lake Maps

Garibaldi Lake is the centre and base for much of the hiking in Garibaldi Provincial Park. The Garibaldi Lake campsite is located on the amazing, turquoise shores of this massive ...
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Panorama Ridge Maps

Panorama Ridge is easily one of the most amazing hikes in Garibaldi Provincial Park.  The 15 kilometre hike from the trailhead at Rubble Creek to Panorama Ridge takes you ...
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Russet Lake Maps

Russet Lake is a surreal little paradise that lays at the base of The Fissile. The Fissile is the strikingly bronze mountain visible from Whistler Village.  From the Village ...
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More Whistler Hiking Trail Maps

Incredible West Coast Trail Guide

Whistler & Garibaldi Park Glossary A to Z

Wedge Creek cuts through the valley that separates Wedge Mountain and Blackcomb Mountain and empties into Green River near the north end of Green Lake.  ...
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Crevasse: is a split or crack in the glacier surface, often with near vertical walls.  Crevasses form out of the constant movement of a glacier over ...
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Along Whistler’s Valley Trail near Rainbow Park you come across some impressively unusual trees. Unlike most other Whistler trees with straight trunks and ...
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The Peak 2 Peak Gondola connects Whistler Mountain and Blackcomb Mountain at a dizzying height of 436 metres(1427 feet).  It runs all winter and in the ...
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Corrie Lake is the surreal looking lake that can be seen across the valley from Whistler Mountain.  While hiking the High Note trail along Whistler ...
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Tom Fyles (27 June 1887 - 27 March 1979) was an astoundingly skilled climber and mountaineer based out of Vancouver where he was an early explorer of the ...
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Mount Garibaldi is the huge, potentially active volcano that Garibaldi Provincial Park is named after.  Mount Garibaldi also lends its name to the Garibaldi ...
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The Table is an extraordinary flat-topped mountain located in Garibaldi Park just one kilometre south of Garibaldi Lake.  Sometimes reflexively referred to as ...
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More Hike in Whistler Glossary

Free Camping Gear Delivery to Garibaldi Park

The Best Whistler & Garibaldi Park Hiking Trails!

Whistler has an absurd number of wonderful and free hiking trails and Parkhurst Ghost Town certainly ranks as the most unusual and interesting. Parkhurst was a little logging town perched on the edge of Green ...
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Russet Lake is a surreal little paradise that lays at the base of The Fissile, in Garibaldi Provincial Park. The Fissile is the strikingly bronze mountain visible from Whistler Village. From the Village ...
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Helm Creek is a cute, meandering creek that winds its way from beyond Black Tusk, down the valley to the wonderful campground that takes its name. From the Helm Creek campground, Helm Creek descends further ...
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Mount Sproatt, or as it is known locally as just Sproatt, is one of the many towering mountains visible from Whistler Village. Above and beyond Alta Lake, directly across from Whistler Mountain and ...
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More Whistler Hiking Trails & Maps

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