Camping at Chilliwack Lake, July 2021

We had already booked the weekend portion of this trip a while back, and Katie decided to use a few of her extra days off to take off with the kids by herself. She loaded up the van and headed up on Wednesday with the kids knowing I’d be up after work on Friday. Katie was excited, and a little nervous about having the kids by herself for a few days.

We’ve been up to Chilliwack Lake a few times, and it’s a pretty quiet campground, and so of all the campsites to have the kids by yourself, this is a pretty good one. The sites aren’t too close to the water, there’s a decent playground, so there’s usually something to do. Last year when we were here it rained for 2 of the 3 days, so with the weather forecast looking pretty clear, things were looking good.

Thursday was a bit of an overcast day, so Katie decided to skip the beach, and take the kids on a nice hike up to Lindeman Lake. She looked at a brochure for the hike and it said it was a ‘moderate’ hike. But she realized once they were well into it that this was not a moderate hike for 5-year old twins. But they’re good little hikers and climbers, so they did fine, but I would imagine there were a few tense moments on some of the steeper parts of the trails. But nothing a handful of gummy bears can’t solve.

The weather was great the rest of the weekend, which gave us a chance to dry out the Mazda. Just as Chris was unpacking the car just after pulling in, he noticed that he didn’t put the top on the 20-litre water jug very well, and approximately 18 of those litres were distributed around the underbelly of the car. Not my finest hour. I really enjoyed that last 2 litres to their full potential though.

We had some pretty lazy days of floating around on the lake and doing some short paddles around the close end of the lake. We looked crazy as we put damn near every single thing that we own on the two blown-up paddleboards and wheeled it down to the lake (see the picture below). We had a full couple of days playing in the nice sand and laying around, which we rarely do, so it was a nice, quiet change. The lake is glacier-fed and pretty cold, and it’s pretty shallow for the first 50+ feet out, so that water warms up a little bit more than after it drops off and gets deeper. The water is crystal clear and a nice dreamy azure blue colour, but once you’ve got your head in that water you snap out of your dream pretty fast.

On Saturday night, we took a walk down to the lake’s outlet to see the high water level and watch the water rushing out down the river. We walked around the area and took some time to walk along the huge old tree that’s been laying around for years and shot some photos on it. Shortly after having all that fun, Chris got stung by a wasp just under his left armpit, and it hurt like hell. That gave us all something new to talk about for the next several days (a week later, we’re still talking about it!).