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Logger's Lake

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Adit Lakes

Black Tusk

Black Tusk

Joffre Lakes

Whistler Train Wreck

Newt Lake

Cirque Lake

Wedgemount Lake

Northair Mine

Wedgemount Lake

Callaghan 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 July and August Whistler and Garibaldi Park guides here!

Cheakamus Lake Hike RatingCheakamus Lake is a wonderfully relaxing way to get in the wilderness easily and quickly from Whistler Village.  The trail begins on the far side of Whistler Mountain, 8 kilometres from the Sea to Sky Highway at Cheakamus Crossing across from Function Junction.  This 8 kilometre stretch of logging road is fairly bumpy and potholed, but does have the benefit of allowing you to drive the elevation gain instead of hiking it.

  • Easy trail with minimal elevation change
  • Colour of the water is extraordinarily beautiful
  • Several area along the trail with amazing views
  • Exceptionally nice campsites in a natural setting
  • An unmarked trail extends further along the lake
  • Fishing is reliably very good for trout
  • Huge trees along the trail & lots of bear sightings
  • Unmarked route to Russet Lake from Singing Creek
  • Swimming is incredibly cold but exhilarating!
  • Campsites are crowded much of the summer

You can easily manage this road in a car, however carefully and very slowly in parts. Once you reach the trailhead/parking the entire 7 kilometre hiking trail to the end of the maintained Cheakamus Lake trail has barely any elevation gain. Just plenty of gradual inclines and declines along the winding route. In fact, this makes it one of the few trails in Whistler and Garibaldi Park that can boast that.  The nearby Garibaldi Lake trail and the Wedgemount Lake trail make you work for the views, however, the Cheakamus Lake trail hardly makes you work at all.  The trail to Cheakamus Lake takes you through an amazing forest of giant cedars that fill the forest with their amazing aroma.  This forest is so packed with ancient giants that year to year the trail is adjusted by a monster of a tree fallen across the trail during some winter storm. Sometimes the trail bends around these behemoths, but more often they are laboriously chainsawed by BC Parks staff.  The more enormous of these remain as fixtures of the trail.  Either edging the trail or as a mighty obstacle to climb over. One monster of a cedar remained sprawled across, actually along a section of the Cheakamus Lake trail for much of 2012.  It surely surprised every hiker to come to an abrupt end of the trail with a tree across the trail too big to even see over. The bypass route was a hilarious, yet dangerous looking scramble underneath and along the edge of the trail for about 20 metres to get back on the trail at the other side.  Look for it when you pass by.  Though it has been mostly moved the tell-tale wreckage is hard to miss and captivatingly beautiful.  What a sound it must have made, exhibited now by giant cedar spears still menacingly pointing from a break in the massive trunk.

Cheakamus Lake Map v13a

Cheakamus Lake Highlights

There are a considerable number of highlights to the Cheakamus Lake trail and Cheakamus Lake. The forest is amazing. There are lots of bear encounters. The campsites are very beautiful, much nicer than Taylor Meadows or Garibaldi Lake's overcrowded and packed in campsites. Cheakamus River along the trail is an impressive river with a nice suspension bridge to see at the start of the Helm Creek trail, 1.5 kilometres from the Cheakamus Lake parking lot. Cheakamus Lake itself is magnificent. You could hike there 100 days in a row and always be impressed by the varying colours. The lake is an extraordinary shade of green caused by glacial till suspended in the water. This surreal colour is surrounded by the bright green of the untouched wilderness across the lake. And above and beyond the forest you see majestic mountain peaks.

Cheakamus Lake Hike in Whistler

Cheakamus Lake Floating - Garibaldi Park, Whistler

Beautiful Cheakamus Lake

Cheakamus Lake & Surrounding Area Map

Cheakamus Lake Large Map v15a

Cheakamus Lake Trailhead Directions Map

Cheakamus Lake Trailhead Map v3a

Cheakamus Lake Hiking Info...

More Whistler & Garibaldi Park Hiking Maps!

Keyhole Hot Springs Maps

Keyhole Hot Springs (aka Pebble Creek Hot Springs) is located 100 kilometres from Whistler(Village Gate Blvd). Though most of the 100 kilometres is on logging roads, it is ...
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Ring Lake Maps

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 ...
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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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Cirque Lake Maps

Cirque Lake is a wild and beautiful lake that hides high above and beyond Callaghan Lake in Callaghan Lake Provincial Park.  What makes Cirque Lake special among the other ...
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Best West Coast Trail Guide 

Whistler & Garibaldi Park Glossary A to Z

Western hemlock (tsuga heterophylla) is a large evergreen coniferous tree that is native to the west coast of North America. Unlike many other trees in ...
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Whistler spruce is a hybrid of the Sitka spruce and the interior Engelmann spruce. Sitka spruce trees thrive in the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest ...
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Scree: from the Norse “skridha”, landslide.  The small, loose stones covering a slope. Also called talus, the French word for slope. Scree is mainly formed ...
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Alec Dalgleish (1 August 1907 - 26 June 1934) was a highly respected mountaineer and climber out of Vancouver in the 1920's and 1930's.  His enthusiasm and ...
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The Spearhead Range is a subsection of the Garibaldi Ranges that runs in an arc that connects Whistler Mountain and Blackcomb Mountain.  The Spearhead ...
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Cornice: a wind deposited wave of snow on a ridge, often overhanging a steep slope or cliff.  They are the result of snow building up on the crest of a ...
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The second Caterpillar tractor in Parkhurst Ghost Town is considerably harder to find despite being just a few metres from the hulking Caterpillar at the shore ...
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Bushwhack is a term often used in Canada and the United States to refer to hiking off-trail where no trail exists.  Literally means 'bush' and 'whack'.  To ...
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More Hike in Whistler Glossary

Free Camping Gear Delivery to Garibaldi Park

The Best Whistler & Garibaldi Park Hiking Trails!

Cheakamus River is a beautiful, crashing, turquoise coloured river that flows from Cheakamus Lake, through Whistler Interpretive Forest, then down past Brandywine Falls to Daisy Lake, then all the way to ...
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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 volcano. However, as soon as you see ...
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Garibaldi Lake is the centre and base for much of the hiking in Garibaldi Provincial Park. The Garibaldi Lake campsite is located on the amazing, turquoise shores of this massive and mostly still wild ...
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Meager Hot Springs(aka: Meager Creek Hot Springs) is located 93 kilometres northwest of Whistler, was beautifully developed into gorgeous pools, with a caretaker and usage charge.  At its height of ...
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More Whistler Hiking Trails & Maps

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