Elfin lakes is a popular overnight backpacking trip in the Garibaldi park region, generally accessed from the diamond head trail network in Squamish. 95% of people we saw on the trail were hiking. This was our first overnight backpacking trip of any kind, so we learned a couple lessons..
- Freeze dried food packs are the way to go. We brought a whole bunch of pre-cooked stuff and a bottle of wine. Next time we'll leave the bottle at home and empty the wine into an easier to carry container.
- Packing in water sucks - everyone there had water filters. We carried in 10L of water for the two of us. This was a lot of extra weight and we would've been much better off picking up a filtration system and packing only what we needed to get ourselves to the water source.
- Compression sacks are key. Our two sleeping bags took up almost my entire pack. That could've been avoided with a couple good compression sacks.
- Doing tables with a full pack is actually more fun.
The descent the next morning was a good time, and we were thankful we put in the extra effort to ride up rather than hike. Ascent
Descent
