Spring Hiking Has Arrived!
Spring is here and summer is not far off! The road to Parkhurst Ghost Town is accessible now! Whistler Train Wreck is free of snow too. Check out Hike in Whistler May 2022 for inspiration!
Cheakamus Lake is a wonderfully relaxing way to get in the wilderness easily and quickly from Whistler Village. The trail begins on the far side of Whistler Mountain, 8 kilometres from the Sea to Sky Highway at Cheakamus Crossing across from Function Junction. This 8 kilometre stretch of logging road is fairly bumpy and potholed, but does have the benefit of allowing you to drive the elevation gain instead of hiking it.
Easy trail with minimal elevation change- Colour of the water is extraordinarily beautiful
- Several area along the trail with amazing views
- Exceptionally nice campsites in a natural setting
- An unmarked trail extends further along the lake
- Fishing is reliably very good for trout
- Huge trees along the trail & lots of bear sightings
- Unmarked route to Russet Lake from Singing Creek
- Swimming is incredibly cold but exhilarating!
Campsites are crowded much of the summer
You can easily manage this road in a car, however carefully and very slowly in parts. Once you reach the trailhead/parking the entire 7 kilometre hiking trail to the end of the maintained Cheakamus Lake trail has barely any elevation gain. Just plenty of gradual inclines and declines along the winding route. In fact, this makes it one of the few trails in Whistler and Garibaldi Park that can boast that. The nearby Garibaldi Lake trail and the Wedgemount Lake trail make you work for the views, however, the Cheakamus Lake trail hardly makes you work at all. The trail to Cheakamus Lake takes you through an amazing forest of giant cedars that fill the forest with their amazing aroma. This forest is so packed with ancient giants that year to year the trail is adjusted by a monster of a tree fallen across the trail during some winter storm. Sometimes the trail bends around these behemoths, but more often they are laboriously chainsawed by BC Parks staff. The more enormous of these remain as fixtures of the trail. Either edging the trail or as a mighty obstacle to climb over. One monster of a cedar remained sprawled across, actually along a section of the Cheakamus Lake trail for much of 2012. It surely surprised every hiker to come to an abrupt end of the trail with a tree across the trail too big to even see over. The bypass route was a hilarious, yet dangerous looking scramble underneath and along the edge of the trail for about 20 metres to get back on the trail at the other side. Look for it when you pass by. Though it has been mostly moved the tell-tale wreckage is hard to miss and captivatingly beautiful. What a sound it must have made, exhibited now by giant cedar spears still menacingly pointing from a break in the massive trunk.
There are a considerable number of highlights to the Cheakamus Lake trail and Cheakamus Lake. The forest is amazing. There are lots of bear encounters. The campsites are very beautiful, much nicer than Taylor Meadows or Garibaldi Lake's overcrowded and packed in campsites. Cheakamus River along the trail is an impressive river with a nice suspension bridge to see at the start of the Helm Creek trail, 1.5 kilometres from the Cheakamus Lake parking lot. Cheakamus Lake itself is magnificent. You could hike there 100 days in a row and always be impressed by the varying colours. The lake is an extraordinary shade of green caused by glacial till suspended in the water. This surreal colour is surrounded by the bright green of the untouched wilderness across the lake. And above and beyond the forest you see majestic mountain peaks.
Black Tusk is the extraordinarily iconic and appropriately named mountain that can be seen from almost everywhere in Whistler. The massive black spire of crumbling rock juts out ...
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Col: a ridge between two higher peaks, a mountain pass or saddle. More specifically is the lowest point on a mountain ridge between two peaks. Sometimes ...
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Every unusual phenomenon in the forest seems to have a name, but one natural work of art seems to be without a commonly used name. Big trees with ...
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Neal Carter (14 Dec 1902 - 15 Mar 1978) was an early explorer of the Coast Mountains around what would eventually be called Whistler Valley. In the summer ...
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The rocky and narrow row of islands in Garibaldi Lake just offshore from the Garibaldi Lake campsite are known as Battleship Islands. Named by 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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Moraines are glacially deposited ridges of debris that accumulate at the sides or terminus of a glacier. Lateral moraines form at the sides of glaciers ...
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Northair Mine is a surreal little world of colourful murals on abandoned cement foundations, surrounded by an astoundingly tranquil little lake in a ...
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Whistler & Garibaldi Hiking
Alexander Falls 
Ancient Cedars 
Black Tusk 
Blackcomb Mountain Brandywine Falls Brandywine Meadows Brew Lake Callaghan Lake Cheakamus Lake 
Cheakamus River 
Cirque Lake Flank Trail Garibaldi Lake Garibaldi Park Helm Creek Jane Lakes Joffre Lakes Keyhole Hot Springs Logger’s Lake Madeley Lake Meager Hot Springs Nairn Falls Newt Lake Panorama Ridge Parkhurst Ghost Town Rainbow Falls Rainbow Lake Ring Lake Russet Lake Sea to Sky Trail Skookumchuck Hot Springs Sloquet Hot Springs 
Sproatt East Sproatt West Taylor Meadows Train Wreck 
Wedgemount Lake Whistler Mountain
January February 
March April May 
June July August 
September October November December
Black Tusk is the extraordinarily iconic and appropriately named mountain that can be seen from almost everywhere in Whistler. The massive black spire of crumbling rock juts out of the earth in an incredibly ...
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Callaghan Lake Provincial Park is a relatively untouched wilderness of rugged mountainous terrain. The valley walls were formed by relatively recent glaciation. Evidence of this can be seen in the ...
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Logger's Lake is an amazing little lake hidden up in the deep forest above the more well known Cheakamus River. The lake, almost unbelievably exists in a long extinct volcano. However, as soon as you see ...
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The Sproatt East trail is a beautifully wild, steep, but relatively short trail to the magnificent, wide open alpine and summit of Mount Sproatt. Mount Sproatt (1834 metres) towers over Whistler Valley ...
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