Squamish

Squamish is famed for the big granite monolith called The Chief, popular with hikers and climbers. Josie and Christain dropped me off at Squamish on their way to Whistler for the long weekend. I found a very nice place to stay called The Inn on the Water, which is one of the nicest hostels I've stayed, it's more of a hotel really with very nice dorm rooms, I had my dorm to myself for the last 2 nights there.
I met up with Wes for some climbing on the saturday - I'd contacted some people through a climbers website for people looking for other climbers and found Wes who lives in Squamish, or The Squish as he referred to it, and did some crack climbing at an area called Smoke Bluff. It's all crack climbing here and mostly trad, also met Larrissa who Wes had been climbing with the day before also and we finishing climbing as it was getting dark and went out for dinner at a nice place right next to the river.
The next day was too wet for climbing so I hiked up The Chief instead, being a bank holiday it was quite busy. It's a steep hike up with lots of steps but the views from the top are rewarding. The guy who runs the hostel later told me they had closed the area a few weeks ago as a cougar was in the area - it had taken a ladies dog, but a guy with a dog ignored the warnings and went up anyway and the cougar took his dog too.

The next day was raining hard so spent the time at the swimming pool along with half the town, it was their bank holiday and everyone was thinking the same thing. Later on it turning out someone from the hostel was travelling onto Whistler the next day I could get a ride with him. He just needed to buy a car first, he'd met a guy at the tourist information centre who was selling his Jeep so the timing seemed perfect, we planned to leave around 11am on the Tuesday, or so we thought. Being an old, cheap car it of course didn't start and had some problems so Tuesday was spent making several laps of Squamish town trying to get it fixed. It's currently at the garage, hopefully it'll be fixed by the time I've updated this blog. We'll see. Old cars, the ghost of Our Kez comes back to haunt, at least it wasn't my car this time!

Notes and thoughts:

• 'Our Kez' was a Mitsubishi Magna bought in Perth, Australia for a big road trip of the country, it broke down before we got out of Perth, and several more times after that.
• The Chief, also known as Stawamus Chief is a granite dome over 700 m/ 2,297 ft high with three summits.
• Locals sometimes refer to Squamish as 'The Squish'.