November Along the Sooke River & Galloping Goose

We had only managed one hike in the month of October but we are determined that we will get in a hike every two weeks from this point forward. It is now the first week of November in the Sooke hills and the weather is turning colder and getting damper as it does on the wet coast or beautiful British Columbia.

We headed out this time with a different goal in mind, now that we have done some wandering along the river’s edge and up the hills along the pipeline it is time to think about building up our legs and backs. This time I started with my pack carrying about 5 kilos mostly just water and snacks. We decided we would start heading up the Goose trail and actually work towards getting to Leechtown.

I had recently gotten an iPhone and downloaded a GPS program called runkeeper which my wife uses to track her runs (you can read here blog at http://www.littleillusions.com/ all about running) and decided to use it to track our hikes. Here is a link to the one we did on this date http://runkeeper.com/pub/act/2WOw0klazv2orbQMR5sn/map as you can see we did about 10k this time and actually have some proof on it, plus a great Google map to look at.

So what did we see on this hike well we saw a great big 5 point buck staring at us from across a ravine, the largest deer i had seen in years. He would not take his eyes off us as long as we were in his territory. It was also pretty wet on this day although we were pretty lucky in that most of the dampness was simply left over from the rain before we started.

The river was up a bit and pushing it pretty heavy, as you can see from the pictures the flow was heavy. Being November you would think the leaves would all be gone but we still saw some pretty stunning scenery. This is one of the benefits of living on the wet cost you get to get some beautiful areas no matter what time of year it is and the weather while damp is not usually too cold.

We did manage to get about halfway towards Leechtown as you can by the map. So our goals from this point forward is to work our packs up to 20 kilos and make it to Leechtown, beyond and back in a day.