Tenquille Lake: Summer Grand Finale
This has been an amazing summer. It started kind of slow with a very wet June, but July and August were pure sun. We’ve been lucky enough that this sunny weather continued on into September. On the first official day of fall, Gili and I headed for a three day trip to Tenquille Lake, as a finale of this wonderful summer. In the next couple of weeks we’ll be visiting our families in Israel, and by the time we’ll be back it’s probably going to be full-on fall. The drive was quite long, past Pemberton and then on to the Birkenhead Lake road. As we were driving the logging road…
Punch Bowl Loop: A Jungle in Manning Park
The plan was to sleep on the summit of Snass Mtn, half way around the Punch Bowl Loop. But things don’t always go according to the plan. Both on trips and in general, in life. We need to adapt our expectations to a constantly changing reality. Otherwise, we are doomed to be unhappy and unsatisfied. At least, that’s what I tell myself. We hiked up the Whatcom Trail through a beautiful forest, covered with bright green moss and stringy Old Man Beard, as thick as a sheep’s coat ready for shearing. Maya wasn’t feeling so well, so we took lots of breaks and a nap or two. Higher on the…
Banff-Assiniboine: A Journey Into the Centre of the Rockies
The Rockies evoke images of sheer black rock faces topped by glaciers, turquoise alpine lakes, high mountain passes, and wildlife encounters. This trip had all of this in abundance, it was a journey into the centre of the Rockies, an exploration of the very heart of the Canadian Crumblies. The crowning jewel was definitely Mount Assiniboine. For days we could see it on the horizon, tantalizingly close. With its sheer rock faces, this pyramid captures one’s gaze and won’t let go. Last year we spent some time exploring Jasper National Park. We still had our National Park Pass, so we decided to return to the Rockies, this time to Banff…
Easy and Delicious Lamb Shanks
There is a fairly famous and excellent Greek restaurant in downtown Vancouver called Stepho’s. Fame brought with it large crowds, and if you expect to eat around the normal meal time, forget it – you’ll often be waiting in line for an hour or more. But then again, the lamb at Stepho’s is amazingly tender, and the sides are almost equally delicious – baked vegetables, rice and tzatziki. Thankfully, the owners have kept their prices as low as can be, with a huge lamb shank plate costing around $10. But, if you don’t live in Vancouver or don’t dare brave the crowds, how about trying to cook up some lamb…
Wind Lake: Ben More and Ben Lui
It was hot and sweaty. Flies kept on circling around my face, buzzing to their heart’s desire. Every now and then they landed on me, and I’d swat at them, killing the slowest ones. We were stuck in a Catch-22. We wanted to stop in one of the rare patches of shade to cool down, but the heat brought flies that would swarm us if we stopped. So we kept going. I was starting to think this trip to Wind Lake would be the definition of hell, but from there and on it only got better, and I mean much better. As we got higher along the the trail, we…
Frosty Mountain: Free Light Show by Mother Nature
We haven’t done trips in Manning Park for maybe four years, and I had set my eyes on Frosty Mountain for a while. I think I especially liked the name, but this weekend it was definitely not frosty there, or anywhere close to it. As usual we packed late on Friday night as we were invited for dinner at friends, went to sleep late and didn’t get an early start on Saturday. The drive was quite long, nearly three hours, and by the time we started hiking it was almost noon. The trail starts at Lightning Lake Day Use area and immediately starts to climb. The first part is in…
Brunswick Mtn: The Giant Next Door
If you are in Vancouver and crave a quick gulp of alpine scenery, the North Shore Mountains can deliver. But you must be ready for some exercise. Brunswick Mountain, at 1788m, is the highest of the giants next door. Most of the 1550m ascent is through the trees, but once you pop out of them, the views are stunning: steep cliffs with the turquoise ocean below, speckled with islands. Even though you are close to the city, Vancouver is out of sight, which gives a distinct feeling of remoteness. I picked up Madeleine and Asaf in the city and we drove to the trail head at Lions Bay, a posh…
Saint Marks Peak: The Summer Version
Saint Marks Peak was our last hike before we started the skiing season and oddly enough it was also our first summer hiking trip for the season. My (half) sister Alyssa was visiting from NY and she said that she would be interested in doing some hiking. Since both Gili and I remembered this hike to be not so strenuous and shorter than going to Mount Seymour, but longer than Dog Mountain, we thought it was a good option. We picked up Asaf from his new apartment in the West End and headed to the Cypress Bowl Ski Area on the North Shore. Just as we left the car we…
- British Columbia (and nearby), Cycling & Cycle Touring, Rockies & Kootenays, Trip Reports, Western USA
Washington-Montana-Idaho-BC Loop: A Trip to a Different America
I am not even sure why we picked Montana. Maybe because it sounded exotic, not in the way most people think of exotic, but rather exotic for cycling. Big open sky, light traffic, expansive scenery. I don’t know where we got this impression, but the reality was that many of the roads actually had a lot of traffic and narrow or nonexistent shoulders. Luckily we spent half of our time in Idaho, which we actually knew almost nothing about, and was almost everything we expected Montana to be. Not that we didn’t like Montana, we did, but the surprise of this trip was actually Montana’s neighbor to the west, Idaho.…
The ABC’s of Juicing
Several years ago Maya and I got a juicer for free from the pick-up area of our building (“where all good things come from”). For a long time it sat unused on our counter. Then we made hard apple cider with friends, from scratch. This was a lot of work, since the two home juicers we were using (one of them ours), kept on getting clogged every two cups of juice, and we had to juice over 20 liters! When the cider was ready, several weeks later, we weren’t too impressed, but a month later it was much better. However, we realized that we actually much preferred the apple juice…
