Exploring the Golden Ears

God was smiling on British Columbia this past weekend; the beauty outside was absolutely spectacular. Waking up to see blue skies and sunshine, Jared and I both knew we just had to get outside, but weren't quite sure where to go. After a bit of research, we'd picked a hike and decided to explore Golden Ears Provincial Park. The park is about a 45 minute drive from our house, and offers camping, beach time and quite a few trails.

The trail we took was called Golden River Falls--it was an easy hike along a river that ended at a beautiful waterfall. Here are some of the camera-phone photos that I took along the way. 

 

 Have I ever mentioned that the woods here are spectacular? They are squishy and wet, full of ferns and boulders and huge trees. And everything, everything is covered with moss. Some of the trees are just dripping with it. I absolutely love the trees!

 

 Most of the trail we were on just offered some glimpses of the rushing river through the thick trees, but we poked into the forest to explore a bit ourselves.

  

And as always when we're near a river like this, Jared wastes no time picking and climbing his way over the rocks.

 

Around each  bend was an awesome new view of the mountains. It was a beautiful day!

We weren't far enough into the mountains for it to be snowy, but the temps have been pretty low recently. Here, they were low enough to have left evidence of freezing. As you looked up into the hills, all the pine trees slowly got whiter and whiter, looking like they'd been dipped in powdered sugar. And as we picked our way across rocks near the river, we noticed that some puddles showed evidence of freezing too. The water had  frozen into awesome swirls that my camera did obviously not capture very well.

 And right next to it, the ice had been broken into sharp splinters. It was so cool to see the difference between the two, one was all curves, the other straight, wicked looking lines.

Scattered throughout the woods were these giant stumps. Having been to the Redwoods and Sequoias in northern California, I can imagine what these monsters must have looked like when they were still alive. But now, they're just serving as nutrients for other trees. This particular stump reminds me of a three generation family shot--what you can't tell from this picture unfortunately is that this old stump is actually "holding" a baby tree--the little guy is growing right out of the top of it.

Jared got much further out into the river than me--the rocks were pretty slippery from all the moss and moisture. Needless to say, I stuck closer to shore. 

 

This was the end point, the Golden Falls. It was quite beautiful. As you got closer to the falls, the air was just full of mist. At the look out point, we noticed that the mist had frozen, and the ground was just covered in tiny little ice pebbles. 

We poked around the base of the falls as well, and saw that there the water and mist had frozen and glazed each rock and fallen log it touched. It was slick, but once we found a dry, sunny rock, it was the perfect place to grab a snack.

After our hike, we headed home to cook up one of our new favorite dishes, chicken curry. All in all, it was pretty much a perfect Saturday.