Hollyburn Mountain Snowshoe: Cypress's Classic Winter Summit

Hollyburn is the trail I recommend to people who have done Dog Mountain twice and want to know what comes next. It is roughly three times the climbing, it ends on an actual summit rather than a viewpoint, and it is still free. It is also the point at which a North Shore snowshoe stops being a walk in the woods and starts requiring you to think about avalanche conditions, which is a transition a lot of people make without noticing.

The route

Start at the Nordic area, near the mapboard just before the rental buildings. The first stretch runs alongside the groomed cross-country tracks, and the etiquette here matters: stay off the set track. The classic and skate lanes are what people paid for, and a snowshoe print in a set track ruins it. There is a walking margin - use it.

The first 2.5 kilometres are marked with closely spaced orange poles carrying reflectors, which tells you something about how often people are on this trail in the dark. This section is a steady, friendly grade through big hemlock and yellow cedar, past the old Hollyburn Lodge area and the warming hut the cross-country skiers use. It is the most sheltered part of the mountain and it stays pleasant in weather that is unpleasant higher up.

Then the poles stop, and that transition is the real information on this route. Above the marked section the trail climbs more directly, breaks out of the dense forest, and crosses a broad open slope that looks a lot like a ski run. On a clear day with a good track it is a pleasant thirty-minute grind. After a heavy loading event it is an avalanche slope, and Avalanche Canada rates the Hollyburn route Class 2 - Challenging terrain. That is not the same as saying it is dangerous today. It is saying that the terrain is capable of producing an avalanche that could bury you, and that whether it will depends on the forecast, which you should read at avalanche.ca before leaving the house rather than from the parking lot on a bar of signal.

The final push to the summit takes about thirty minutes and is the steepest ground on the trail. It is short. It is also side-sloping and wind-affected, and in a firm freeze-thaw cycle it is the section where snowshoe crampons stop being enough and you would rather have boot crampons and an axe. I have turned around here twice in six seasons, both times in February, both times because the surface was bulletproof and the runout was trees.

The summit at 1,326 metres is a small rocky knoll that opens up almost completely. Howe Sound and the Strait to the west, the Lions punching up to the north, Mount Baker to the south-east on a clear day, and the city laid out below. It is one of the genuinely great small summits in the region.

Parking, fees and the pass confusion

Two things get repeated wrongly about Hollyburn and both cost people money or a wasted drive.

First: climbing Hollyburn Mountain does not require a paid pass. Cypress Mountain operates a separate marked snowshoe trail network and a groomed Nordic network in the same area, and both cost money. The summit trail is a BC Parks backcountry trail. It is free. Second: Cypress Provincial Park has no BC Parks day-use pass requirement - that is a Mount Seymour, Garibaldi, Golden Ears and Joffre thing, not a Cypress thing.

What is real is that the Nordic lot is small, that BC Parks maintains free parking areas year-round while the resort may bring in pay parking elsewhere between November and May, and that if you show up at 10am on the first bluebird Saturday after a big storm you are parking a long way down the road. Leave the city by 7:30 and this problem evaporates.

Honest caveats

This is not a beginner's first snowshoe. Take Dog Mountain first, then come here.

The middle of the mountain is a whiteout trap. Above the marked poles the trees thin out and the open slope has almost no reference points, and when the cloud drops the way up and the way down look identical. Carry a GPS track and actually look at it, or turn around at the poles.

Dogs are permitted in the provincial park on leash, but they are not allowed on the resort's Nordic trails, and the start of this route runs along them. In practice this makes the first kilometre awkward and I would leave the dog at home for this one.

Finally: microspikes are not snowshoes. On a firm, tracked day people get up Hollyburn in spikes and get away with it. On any other day they punch through to the hip and turn a four-hour outing into a six-hour one, in the dark, at exactly the elevation where that stops being funny.