Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

10:31 PDT

The last details are getting sorted out. Tomorrow morning, I'm taking the Greyhound from Vancouver to Pemberton to begin my trip in the bush. In Pemberton, I'm taking a taxi to the beginning of my hike, a closed and washed out forest service road along Lizzie Creek towards Lizzie Lake.

It looks like the weather is going to be excellent for hiking. The warmest of the summer is over and the rainy season hasn't yet started. According to the weather forecasts, it'll be around 18-20 degC every day with little chance of rain. There have been some reports of a little snow in the alpine stretch, but nothing really to worry about.

As it's always a good idea to leave a detailed plan before heading into the wilderness, here we go. :-)

I plan to traverse the Stein Valley in seven or eight days.

Monday afternoon, I'm hiking down the washed out forest service road to pitch my tent at Lizzie Lake. Depending on conditions, I should get to Lizzie Lake with plenty of daylight left.

Tuesday morning, I set out from Lizzie Lake, via Lizzie Cabin to Caltha Lake. Quite a rocky and uphill stretch, but after a warm-up day, it shouldn't be too much of a problem. The trail takes me via Arrowead Lake, Heart Lake and possibly Iceberg Lake.

On Wednesday, I have two options. If the weather is nice and I'm feeling up to it, I will take the short route from Caltha Lake to Tundra Lake. Uphill all the way and some nasty boulder fields along the way. Alternatively, I will do the detour via Figure Eight Lake. That's a pretty long hike and it's also fairly difficult terrain. We'll see...

Thursday will be a very dry day, from Tundra Lake to Stein Lake over the mountain ridge. If it's too much for one day, I'll take a detour via Puppet Lake and camp there for the night, but I'm hoping to do it all in one day. The decent and subsequent ascent from Puppet Lake is knee-busting. If I manage it in one day, I'll pitch my tent around Stein Lake.

Friday (or Saturday) things start getting a little bit easier. From Stein Lake, the trail goes across Snake Falls and runs along the Stein River. I should be able to make good pace here. If all goes well, I'll pitch my tent at Logjam Camp.

Saturday (or Sunday) will be a breeze as well, hiking from Logjam Camp to to Ponderosa Shelter, possibly even further if I have enough energy left. There are many well-developed campsites along this stretch of the trail and I'm told it's marked up pretty well too.

Sunday (or Monday) will get me from Ponderosa Shelter to the trailhead near Lytton. From there, it's an 8km walk to the town of Lytton where I'll catch the bus back to Vancouver. There are only two busses daily. I intend to catch the 16:55 bus on Sunday or Monday evening. If I miss that because of slow going, I'll take the 06:55 bus on Monday morning or Tuesday morning.

I should be back in Vancouver by Tuesday evening or Wednesday evening at the outside.

Watch this space for pictures!

18:49 PDT

I'm staying at the youth hostel on Jericho Beach in Vancouver. Great place. And it offers free wireless internet access. For some reason, I couldn't get it to work last night. That is to say, I could get it to associate, but I didn't actually see any IP traffic. Lots of control frames on Ethernet though.

After some fiddling today, I figured out what was wrong: wpa_supplicant thought that the 40-bit WEP key was a 104-bit WEP key. I had mistakenly quoted the wep_key0 parameter in my wpa_supplicant.conf file.

The failure mode of the access point (don't pass IP traffic, but do pass other broadcast Ethernet frames) made this fairly difficult to diagnose. I don't have a copy of 802.11 with me for light holiday reading (no, really), but I would be interested to know what it says about this.

Note that the wpa_supplicant.conf(5) manual page clearly states that the wep_keyX parameters are not to be quoted. It should probably mention that if the parameter is quoted, it will be treated like a string rather than fail with a syntax error.