Lindeman Lake: The Short, Rocky Hike to Turquoise Water Near Chilliwack
The shortest walk to genuinely turquoise water anywhere near Vancouver, and the parking lot is the crux, not the trail. Be at the trailhead by 8am on a summer Saturday or plan on walking in from the shoulder of Chilliwack Lake Road.
Quick facts
- Distance
- 3.4 km
- Elevation gain
- 200 m
- Highest point
- 840 m
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time needed
- 1.5-2.5 hours
- Route type
- Out and back
- Season
- Roughly late April to late October. The lake sits near 840 m so it opens well before the alpine, but the last stretch of trail and the boulder slope can hold rotten snow and ice into mid-May after a heavy winter.
- Drive from Vancouver
- 2 h 15 min
- Transit accessible
- No
- Dog friendly
- Yes
- Pass or permit
- No pass requiredNothing is required to day hike or park. Camping at the lake is a different matter: the six tent pads at Lindeman are a BC Parks backcountry registration site, and the permit has to be bought online through camping.bcparks.ca before you arrive rather than paid at the lake. It is a registration, not a reserved pad, so a permit gets you the right to camp but not a guaranteed spot. On a July Saturday people do turn up with permits and find every pad taken.
- Last hiked
- Traditional territory
- S'ólh Téméxw, the territory of the Stó:lō. The Chilliwack River valley and the lake itself, Sx̱ótsaqel, are the ancestral homeland of the Ts'elxwéyeqw (Chilliwack) Tribe.
On this page5 sections
Lindeman Lake is the hike I send people on when they want the reward of an alpine lake without the alpine day. It is 3.4 kilometres round trip and 200 metres of climbing off Chilliwack Lake Road, and at the end of it there is a lake the colour of pool chemicals sitting in a bowl of grey rock. That ratio is why it has become one of the busiest short trails in the Fraser Valley, and why the honest version of this guide spends more words on parking than on route finding.
The trail is short, not easy
The distinction matters because people bring the wrong footwear. Lindeman is a genuine mountain trail compressed into 1.7 kilometres each way. It climbs off the Post Creek trailhead through second-growth forest on a wide, rooty track, crosses a metal bridge over the creek, and then gets down to business.
Most of the gain happens in the middle third, and the tread there is rock and root rather than dirt. There are stone steps that are really just the mountain, log bridges that go greasy in rain, and one long section across an old rockslide where you are picking a line between boulders the size of a bar fridge. It is not exposed and it is not technical, but it is uneven enough that a rolled ankle is a real outcome in flat-soled shoes. Poles help more than you would expect for 200 metres of gain.
BC Parks has rerouted a portion of the trail near the Greendrop Creek crossing, so if your download from three years ago disagrees with the flagging on the ground, trust the flagging.
Kids do this trail constantly, and small people generally handle the boulder section better than the adults following them. Dogs are allowed and should be on leash. The one caveat is that the rockslide section is hard on paws and hard on short-legged dogs, and there is no way around it.
The parking problem, which is the actual trail report
The Post Creek lot is on the left side of Chilliwack Lake Road roughly 40 kilometres up from the Vedder bridge, just before the pavement gives out. It is reasonably big. It is also full by nine or ten in the morning on any decent summer weekend, and by eight on a long weekend.
When it fills, everyone parks on the road shoulder, and the line of cars can run several hundred metres in each direction. There is no formal overflow lot. That works, in the sense that nobody gets towed, but it means walking a rural road where traffic moves at highway speed with essentially no shoulder, often with kids. It is the least safe part of the day.
The other thing BC Parks flags specifically for this lot is vehicle break-ins. Treat it as certain rather than possible. Leave nothing visible, leave the glovebox hanging open so nobody has to check, and take your wallet with you.
My honest recommendation: do this on a weekday, or start at 7:30am on a weekend and be walking back down when the crowd is walking up. The trail is 1.7 kilometres long. Starting early costs you almost nothing and changes the entire experience.
Camping at the lake
There are six tent pads at Lindeman, tucked into the trees on the near shore, and they are a BC Parks backcountry registration site. You buy the permit online through the BC Parks camping system before you leave home. It is not a reservation. The permit gives you the right to camp there, not a specific pad, and on a July weekend the pads go to whoever arrives first. If you are counting on one, be up there in the early afternoon, not at sunset.
BC Parks lists the Lindeman Lake trail as open with a reroute near the Greendrop Creek crossing. The continuation to Greendrop Lake, 10.4 km return, crosses large active landslide paths and is signed for experienced hikers only. Backcountry registration is required for all four backcountry campgrounds in the park.
Reported by BC Parks, Sx̱ótsaqel/Chilliwack Lake Park
Getting there
From Vancouver it is about two hours fifteen with no traffic, which in practice means leaving before 7am if you want that to be true. Highway 1 east to Exit 104, follow the Cultus Lake signs onto Vedder Road, cross the bridge, and turn right onto Chilliwack Lake Road at the stop sign. From there it is 40 kilometres of paved, winding two-lane road up the Chilliwack River valley.
The road is paved the whole way to the trailhead and any car handles it. It is also narrow, blind in places, and shared with logging traffic, campers and a lot of people who have just realised their turnoff is behind them. Cell service dies well before you arrive.
If you want more than 3.4 kilometres
Two obvious extensions leave from the same place. Greendrop Lake continues past Lindeman for a 10.4 km round trip and involves scrambling over, under and around large boulders on active slide paths, which is a completely different day. And 200 metres up the road from the parking lot, the Goat Ridge trail climbs 1,040 metres to a ridge directly above the lake. Same trailhead, opposite ends of the effort spectrum.
Trail notes from the field
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Shooting this trail
Photography notes
- Best light
- Between roughly 11am and 3pm, which is the opposite of every other piece of photo advice on this site, and for a specific reason. Lindeman is not a light-and-shadow lake, it is a colour lake, and the turquoise only reads when the sun is high enough to push through the water column and bounce off the glacial silt. Come at golden hour and you get a dark lake in a shaded bowl, because the walls are steep and the sun leaves the water early. Overcast at midday is genuinely fine here and often better than harsh sun.
- Best season
- Late June through August, when snowmelt is still loading the lake with rock flour and the colour is at its most saturated. By late September the water clears and greens out.
- Compositions
- The polariser shot, and this is the whole trip: stand at the log-jam end of the lake, put the sun over one shoulder, and rotate a circular polariser until the surface reflection dies. That single move is the difference between a grey lake and the colour you came for. Do not max it out. Rotate past the point of maximum effect and back off about a third, or the water goes flat and inky and loses the milky glow that makes glacial lakes look like this.
- Shallows over deep water at 24-35mm from the north shore: frame the pale submerged rock shelf in the near third and let it fall off into the deep blue-green. The gradient between the two is the actual subject, not the mountains.
- Boulder field foreground: the old slide on the approach gives you angular grey rock to anchor a wide frame while the lake sits behind. Shoot it from low, 16-24mm, and use the boulder edges as leading lines into the water.
- The steep back wall in the last hour of light. The lake itself will be dead by then, but the headwall above it still catches warm side light, and a 70-200mm crop of that lit rock against shaded forest is the only good late-day frame here.
- Gear
- Circular polariser is not optional. Everything else is. A tripod is close to useless because the light you want is midday and handheld, and it is more thing to carry over boulders. Bring a lens cloth, because the outlet end of the lake is where everyone skips rocks and the spray carries. If you want the water without people in frame on a weekend, the only workable approach is to walk five minutes clockwise around the shore past the log jam and shoot back.
From the trail
