Direction to St. Mark's Summit
The trail head to St. Mark's Summit is located on top of Cypress Mountain, a short drive outside of Vancouver. The trail is very popular and is part of the Howe Sound Crest Trail that continues north towards Porteau Cove. The hike to get to St. Mark's Summit is around 5.5 kilometers and takes about 2 hours - depending on your fitness level of course. The views, as you can see, is phenomenal and impressive!
Hike to St Mark's Summit
Nancy is pretty into photography. Everywhere we go, she is lugging her camera around with a couple lenses. This hike was no different. "I think it would be really nice to get some sunset photos from St. Mark's", was the statement that prompted this hike. I thought to myself, yeah, sunsets are nice! So I went to look up the trail, and found out it would take about 5 hours round trip. I inform Nancy of this, and she replied with "Good thing you got a new headlamp! Looks like we will be hiking out in the dark"...
Being on the more cautious side of things, I'm not stoked about this and proceeded to inform a few people to call of help if they don't hear back from us by like 11pm . For safety measures, ALWAYS tell someone (or multiple people) where you are going hiking and give them a time frame. Between the two of us, I am the ever cautious, and Nancy is the risk taker. No risk, no reward, right?
We had great weather on of the day of the hike. It was nice and sunny with little cloud coverage. I generally consider us to be in decent shape, so it took us 1 hour and 45 minutes to get to the peak, rather than the suggested 2 hours and 30 minutes.
St Marks Summit at Sunset
At the summit, we found ourselves a nice ledge a bit further along the ridge, that had a couple other groups also waiting for the sunset. Seeing other people made me think that we had come to the right location. And voila, the sunset was as amazing as we had hoped!
Pro tip: Make sure to wait until the sun is below the horizon before leaving! The sky gets the best colors afterward.
After we finished taking our photos in the sunset, we started our hike back in the dark. Living in a city for a long time where the street lights are always on, I had forgotten what pitch black was. In the middle of the forest, we stopped and turned off our head lamps. Literally could not see a thing. Waved my hand in front of my face - didn't see it. Completely depriving yourself of the sense of sight is a really weird feeling.
Final Thoughts on St Marks Summit
All in all, it was a really fun hike and we got some nice photos while we were there. Definitely would do again and is a highly recommended hike from us. Happy Wandering! :)
