July 18 – Burnt Bridge Lookout

We tried to do two short hikes today that were, after yesterday, not surprisingly right off the highway.

First we went to the Burnt Bridge area at the western edge of Tweedsmuir Provincial Park. You can do a 1 km climb to a lookout and / or a 5 km loop that gains 200 m in elevation.

We were going to climb to the lookout and then decide whether to go on. The description of the rest of the trail was not very exciting and with a suspension bridge for Jennie partway along, you can guess what happened.

The trails starts as a cut into the highway embankment.

Then a short flat walk through a second growth forest.

Then up a rather steep set of switchbacks. I think I read that the climb to the lookout gained 80 m.

There was a lot of deadfall in one area.

And to the lookout with a view back down the valley over the highway.

The front view.

The wider front view.

The view off to the left.

The highest mountain at the left had a very weird top. It almost looked like it had been sliced off, with a huge flat patch of snow on top.

The photosphere.

Looking down at the parking lot and Burnt Bridge Creek.

After we had lunch we headed back down to check out the creek.

From the parking lot, the viewpoint didn’t seem that high.

The creek must really get going in the spring because the area where you can tell that water has flowed is huge.

The photosphere.

After exploring around and watching the water for a while we headed back to the car.

Our next destination was the very short Kettle Pond Trail a bit farther into the Provincial Park. When we got there we saw that the trail was closed due to a “problem bear” in the area.

The smaller white sign says that the bear is a Grizzly sow and her cub, just about the worst type of bear to encounter. So that was a big NO.

In the parking lot was The Big Rock. It is even called that on the sign for the trailhead.

It’s called a glacial erratic and was dropped here by a glacier.

It only just split in two in the 1990’s.

Heading back home, we stopped in at one of the park campgrounds. It wasn’t much as there was just a parking lot with a bunch of slotted spaces. They did have a nice new building, although I am not sure what it was for.

We got stopped for the repaving going both ways. As we were waiting to go back we were stopped beside this carved sign.

Then home and some grocery shopping.