DIRECTIONS: Head north from Vancouver on Hwy 99 to the Duffy Lake Road. Turn right onto Blowdown FSR immediately after the first avalanche control gates about 3.5 km east of Duffy Lake. The trailhead is another 9 km. The road is 2wd and only requires (modest) high clearance for the last 0.5 km to the trailhead to get through a series of waterbars.create
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Blowdown Pass
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Oct 1, 2017
A dusting of snow on the burnished meadows made for a beautiful scenic hike.
Blowdown FSR is in pretty good shape - a bit wet and slick in places, and there are 30-odd little water bars between the Duffey Lake road and the usual parking area at 10.5-ish km. Perhaps the water bars could be tackled with a regular vehicle, but I think a little bit of clearance is definitely a good idea. What was the start of the trail is now a big wide logging road - we could have driven up there through another handful of water bars to save ourselves 600 m of walking. Watch for where the trail (old road) goes off left - others have built a couple of cairns and made an arrow out of alder branches to make it more obvious.
The road/trail is easy walking, especially downhill - it only took us an hour to get back to the car from our lunch spot.
Snow began around 1800 m and was more or less continuous by the time we reached the junction where the road splits, but it was only a couple of inches deep. Easily brushed off a rock for a lunch spot :-) The pikas and marmots are still out and about
Best of all we saw no one on the trail.