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      • Whistler Golf Course 5k(3.1 Mile)
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  • AtoZ
      • Ablation Zone
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      • Adit Lakes
      • Aiguille
      • Alpine Zone
      • Arborlith or Lithophyte
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      • A River Runs Through It
      • Armchair Glacier
      • The Barrier
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      • Bungee Bridge
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      • The Fissile
      • Fitzsimmons Creek
      • Fitzsimmons Range
      • Fyles, Tom
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      • Garibaldi Volcanic Belt
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      • Mount Garibaldi
      • Mount James Turner
      • Northair Mine
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      • Overlord Mountain & Glacier
      • Peak2Peak Gondola
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      • Rubble Creek
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      • Tarn
      • The Table
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Whistler Train Wreck

Black Tusk

Joffre Lakes

Northair Mine

Callaghan Lake

Black Tusk

Wedgemount Lake

Wedgemount Lake

Brandywine Meadows

Logger's Lake

Adit Lakes

Newt Lake

Cirque Lake

Spectacular Whistler!

Whistler hiking is wonderful! Check out our Best Whistler Hiking by Month guides! WeRentGear.com rents tents, sleeping bags, sleeping pads, camp stoves, packs, complete kits and more!

Best Trails This Week!

Best This Week: Whistler Train Wreck and Parkhurst Ghost Town are easy, fun and dog friendly. Check out our May and June Whistler and Garibaldi Park guides here!

Brew LakeBrew Lake is beautiful mountain lake just a short drive south of Whistler and is relatively unknown and seldom hiked. Laying at the base of Mount Brew, Brew Lake lays in a massive alpine valley of enormous erratics.  On first seeing Brew Lake it looks serene, yet wild and hostile.  The lake is surrounded on one side by idyllic tree covered hills and lakeside cliffs and on the other side a brutal looking wasteland of huge boulders sloping up to the sky.

  • Very off the radar, wild & infrequently hiked
  • Stunning, dramatic boulder field & windswept trees
  • Lots of excellent places to put your tent
  • Not as cold to swim as Joffre, Wedge, Garibaldi
  • Hut on Mount Brew is a surreal little oasis
  • Beautiful views of Black Tusk & Daisy Lake
  • Tricky to find trailhead & tough, steep trail
  • Lake is not stunning like Joffre, Wedge, Garibaldi
  • Snow restricts access well into June
  • Trail is only 5k, but feels like 10k!

Hiking into this wasteland of erratics reveals an amazing paradise of small, island forests, cute streams and endless worlds within worlds to explore.  You find yourself wandering along like a kid mesmerized at what you will find next. Brew Lake itself doesn't come close in wow factor to the postcard-perfect alpine lakes such as Wedgemount Lake, Joffre Lakes, Cheakamus Lake or Garibaldi Lake, but I does beat these lakes in other aspects.  Because Brew Lake is outside of Garibaldi Provincial Park few people have heard of it.  More often than not you will have both the lake and entire valley to yourself.  An increasingly rare occurrence elsewhere that gives the place a quiet calm and that strange and satisfying feeling that there are no other humans for quite some distance.  You have that exhilarating wilderness feeling that sometimes gets lost on other Whistler area hikes when you start the trail from a parking lot packed with cars.  The fact that the Brew Lake trail doesn't have a parking lot or proper trailhead actually makes it more mysterious, adventurous and in some ways more fun.  Brew Lake is shallow and absolutely crystal clear. Mesmerizingly clear.  You can look across the lake and see smooth and rounded rocks scattered across the lake bottom.

Brew Lake Hiking Trail Map

Brew Lake Map v18

The lake is also relatively small at just a few hundred metres across and unexpectedly warm to swim in. Breathtakingly cold lakes are the norm in the Whistler area, but Brew Lake is an exception.  Try swimming in Wedgemount Lake, Joffre Lakes, Russet Lake, Cirque Lake, Cheakamus Lake or Garibaldi Lake for any length of time and you will be shivering cold. You can manage a minute or two swimming in these lakes, but certainly not 20 or 30 minutes as you can in Brew Lake. There are even some massive, flat topped erratics in the lake to swim to and lounge on. The sun makes them amazingly warm on a sunny day. The edge of the lake surrounded by grass areas littered with erratics making it tricky to find a spot for a tent, but easy to find a place to sit.  Once you do find a place for your tent, further exploration reveals countless other great spots. Grassy clifftops, clearings at the edge of streams.

Brew Lake Tent

A third aspect of Brew Lake that beats the local, alpine lake competition is the hike itself. It is amazing. Comparable in difficulty to the Wedgemount Lake trail, though two kilometres shorter and packed with things to see.  From the dozen or so amazing viewpoints on various plateaus steps from the trail to the endless gnarled, weather-beaten, yet captivating forests of twisted, mangled, huge and bewildering trees. Over and over along the 5 kilometre trail you stop and stare in wonder at how a huge tree, 30 metres tall can have an absurd, sideways L-shape in its trunk big enough to stand in.  You see it over and over until eventually you work out that when these trees are young they spend most of the year under metres of snow.  Over the years they grow at an unusual looking right angle, as if growing sideways. Eventually the tree grows big and thick enough to not have the snow push it over and it grows vertical again.  But of course it keeps this hilarious L-shape as it continues to grow.  You start spotting the smaller ones everywhere you look.  The trunk comes out of the ground one metre, then one metre horizontal, then one metre vertical again.  Hilarious.  Absurd and hilarious.

Camping at Brew Lake is Gorgeous

Brew Lake View of Black Tusk

Brew Lake Driving Directions Maps

Finding the Brew Lake trailhead is quite an adventure.  The logging road is long, windy, steep, narrow and unmarked.  The first time you encounter an indication for the Brew Lake trail is when you reach the trail and find the orange or yellow tree markers.  The last road bridge was decommissioned in recent years, so the farthest you can drive with a 4x4 is to this closed bridge one kilometre from the actual trail start.

Brew Lake Driving Directions Map v3

Brew Lake Directions Map v5

More Brew Lake Hiking Info...

More Whistler & Garibaldi Park Hiking Maps!

Sloquet Hot Springs Maps

Sloquet Hot Springs is a wonderfully wild set of shallow, man-made pools fed by a small, all natural, and very hot, waterfall. The pools stretch from the waterfall to the ...
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Logger's Lake Maps

Logger's Lake is an amazing little lake hidden up in the deep forest above the more well known Cheakamus River. The lake, almost unbelievably exists in a long extinct ...
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Brandywine Meadows Maps

Brandywine Meadows is a nice, relatively short hike to a massive flower filled valley high up in Callaghan Valley. Located 40 minutes south of Whistler, this tough and ...
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Whistler Mountain Maps

The alpine hiking trails on Whistler Mountain are the ultimate in luxurious hiking. Little hiking effort gets you amazing views of turquoise lakes, snowy mountain, valleys of ...
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More Whistler Hiking Trail Maps

Incredible West Coast Trail Guide

Whistler & Garibaldi Park Glossary A to Z

Glacier Window: the cave-like opening at the mouth of a glacier where meltwater runs out.  Glacier windows are often extraordinarily beautiful.  A blue glow ...
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Back in 2011 Kups, a Whistler local and now professional muralist painted a hauntingly surreal, blue face on the side of this house.  This beautiful ...
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Russet Lake sits in a wide, glacier carved valley at the base of The Fissile.  In the direction opposite The Fissile, up on a plateau less than a ...
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Charles Townsend (1900-1997) moved from London, England to Vancouver in the early 1920's where he met Neal Carter while studying Agriculture at UBC. Townsend was ...
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Tom Fyles (27 June 1887 - 27 March 1979) was an astoundingly skilled climber and mountaineer based out of Vancouver where he was an early explorer of the ...
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Erratic or glacier erratic is a piece of rock that has been carried by glacial ice, often hundreds of kilometres.  Characteristic of their massive size and ...
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The Cloudraker Skybridge and the Raven’s Eye Cliff Walk are new additions to the summit of Whistler Mountain.  The Cloudraker Skybridge stretches 130 ...
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Moraines are glacially deposited ridges of debris that accumulate at the sides or terminus of a glacier.  Lateral moraines form at the sides of glaciers ...
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More Hike in Whistler Glossary

Free Camping Gear Delivery to Garibaldi Park

The Best Whistler & Garibaldi Park Hiking Trails!

Joffre Lakes Provincial Park is a gorgeous park with extraordinarily coloured lakes, waterfalls, stunning mountain peaks and ominous glaciers pouring into the valley.  Joffre Lakes is one of those incredible ...
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Hiking and biking trails are so abundant in Whistler that many go unnoticed, neglected or taken for granted.  The Flank Trail is one of these.  Most people in Whistler don't even know about it, but the ones ...
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Ring Lake is a fantastically serene and wonderfully remote lake similar to Cirque Lake, but considerably farther to hike to reach it. The 10 kilometre(6.2 mile) hike takes you through a rarely hiked forest, ...
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The short, winding, and ever-changing hiking trail to Rainbow Falls is the same as the much more popular trailhead for Rainbow Lake.  The trailhead is marked as the Rainbow Trail, and the trail quickly ...
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More Whistler Hiking Trails & Maps

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