Summary of some Summer Ultra's
This year was my best climbing year in several ways, but also one of my best running years. The irony is that I would hardly call myself a runner... more of a dabbler. When I run, I like it to have as few flat sections as possible, so I guess I just like power-hiking uphill and running downhill. Nevertheless, one can't really cover 50+km continuously on foot without running at least some of it...
There are two separate stories in this post:
Attempt on the Chilliwack Skyline Traverse
I had a big goal to run from my house in Columbia Valley all the way to Hope via the most mountainous route, totalling approximately 120+km and 11,000+m of elevation change. My friend Ihor, ultra-running legend, was the obvious choice to recruit as my partner for this venture. Both of us have knee issues, so we are self-dubbed the "Bad-Knees Boys". However, mine is the right knee and his is the left, so together we make one good set of knees!
Unfortunately, training over the winter didn't go exactly as planned and my seasons-old patellar tendonitis flared up in my right knee as I tried to build running volume in the spring. Without much hesitation, I switched over to the bike as my mode of training to maintain and build my fitness. I ended up biking a TON of hills near my house, setting an arbitrary goal of biking an "Everest" to help motivate me to get out more often. Ultimately, my cross-training on the bike worked really well, and the pinnacle of my weekly rides was a 10.5 hour training day in May, covering 146km and 5,000m. By that time, my knee was feeling better again, so I ditched the idea to Everest and decided to have fun instead. One such adventure was the Wahleach Ski Traverse with Sam in our local Cheam Range. My knee did quite well on this trip, which was encouraging.
Ihor and I did a warmup adventure on a cloudy weekend at the end of May by doing the "trail" up the North side of Cheam and making a big loop. Both our knees held up for this steep day... but my calves were locked up for about a week. This also made me decide to put the Everest bike ride aside, if I wanted to "run" 120km, I would need to prioritize on-foot training.
In lieu of 48 laps of each 100m hill by my house, Ihor and I biked to the Twin Sisters mountains and did the stellar traverse (or at least a variation of it by accident). This was another great warmup adventure for the summer, and also a wake-up call for just how fit Ihor still is despite rehabbing from knee surgery. I was proud of the effort I made to keep up with him!
I did some more running and training, including Watt Creek Ridge Trail, which I had been working on with a chainsaw, brushcutter, and rake in Fall/Winter of 2025. Sadly, my route to make a loop from home ended up being quite a bit more overgrown after a few months lying untouched. I got absolutely destroyed by stinging nettle. I also did a lot of Baker's grind repeats on Sumas Mountain - the most accessible steep hiking trail around! I started to feel pretty fit on foot again, doing a three-peat (3,000m) of Baker's 6 hours, and then a week or so later I did a speed-effort and got a huge PR (previous was ~1h10m and lowered to 1h2m up and down).
Ihor and I had set aside July 10-12 for the 120km trip. Unfortunately, as is often the case, weather took a turn for the worse and we were forced to postpone. My fitness was feeling pretty good though, having finished a nice rest week biking on the island with Jas, but I needed a confidence builder for "ultra-distance". I settled on doing a combo-effort of driving into town to drop off our car for repairs, running home via International Ridge, eating lunch, then retracing my steps back to the shop. This route made a perfect 50km route... although very bushwhacky and steep. Exactly my kind of route! It also was the first section of the traverse that Ihor and I would attempt, so I was getting more familiar with the lightly flagged trail up Watt Creek Ridge. The day went well and I felt pretty solid, arriving with time to spare back at the mechanic shop! This was a big fitness and confidence builder for me.
The Big Run
August 23rd, 2026
The next weekend (July 17-19) Ihor was busy crewing and pacing Andrea to her win at Cascade Crest 100 miler, so I did another workout on MacFarlane, followed by climbing Slesse with Jas! At long last, the weather looked decent for July 24-26 in the long forecast, so I wrangled the crew I had on hold to bring drop bags and get video footage along the way. As we neared the day, Friday looked incredibly clear (we had been dealing with terrible smoke from nearby forest fires) but Saturday and Sunday had shifted to be cloudy and rainy. Looking ahead to August, it didn't make sense to postpone it any longer (I had other goals and wanted to get this project done with), so we decided to go for it.
Last minute, Ihor suggested that we could start on Thursday evening after work and run through the night to make the most of the good weather and daylight on Friday. I was a little unsure if I'd survive without sleep for so long but agreed that it was our best shot at success.
With the decision made, I frantically messaged the crew, packed our drop bags and drove into town to give them to my brother, who would drive up with my dad and uncle to Cheam Trailhead for us to swap to overnight bags and restock food. I then picked up Ihor and we drove back to Columbia Valley, leaving my house just before 8 pm.
The first leg of our journey was International Ridge, which I had pretty dialled from doing three times in the months leading up. It started to get dark as we neared the top of the ridge, but our conversation kept us going as we donned headlamps and trudged up the relentlessly steep and bushy mountainside. Finally, we reached Amadis around 11:00pm and were back on a some-what prominent trail for the first time. The flickering lights down in Chilliwack caught my eye as we veered on and off the ridge-crest.
We had just diverted off the ridge and were trending left again to meet it when I started to see the lights of Chilliwack again.
"Hold on, why do I only see two lights?" I thought to myself.
In an instant, my brain registered that my headlamp was reflecting off the eyes of a cougar a mere 50 feet in front of me.
I yelled "HEYY!!" and informed Ihor of what I'd just seen. Before he could catch a glimpse of the cat's eyes, it had taken off without so much sound as a crinkling leaf. I know what you're wondering, "did you actually see the body of it?" No, I did not, but I have had a few run-ins with wildlife in the pitch black, and if it was a bear or deer we would hear it crashing away. A cougar, on the other hand, is silent as can be, as I recalled from the time a cougar stalked Jas, Maddy, and myself into the Middle Cheam Range. Unlike that encounter, I figured that this cougar was not stalking us, since it was almost a "head-on" collision. I told Ihor to turn his headlamp backwards as we stalked forward in tight formation. It was probably just as scared of our yodels as we were of it, and we continued our cacophony of chants for the next 2 hours as we descended to Little Tamihi FSR.
Finally back to the valley, we restocked our water and began the next segment: the dreaded rolling flats to Slesse Park. My mind felt surprisingly sharp as we trotted along the dirt road in the pitch black, matching step for step, stride for stride.
I entered what I can only describe as a hypnotic trance as we wordlessly pressed on through the night. The occasional interjection of an uphill climb snapped me out of the spell, only to be inevitably lulled back under by the rhythm of our gait.
We refilled our water at Chilliwack River before crossing the bridge and starting up towards the base of Army FSR. After our cougar encounter, I was less keen on hiking through the forest of "Full Monty" (a mountain bike trail), so we opted to hike up the main FSR until the turn-off for the upper half. Before long, we were refilling water one last time just before the Elk Trailhead. In the wee hours of the night, the fatigue really started to hit me.
This is where Ihor's expertise was greatly appreciated. As someone who has run numerous 100 mile races through the night, run for 107 hours straight at Backyard Ultra and sleeping >10 mins every hour, not to mention 58 hours with no sleep during the Barkley Marathons; he knows a thing or two about sleep deprivation. He encouraged me that if I could make it to sunrise, my body would reset.
For the most part, Ihor was right, and the beauty of the rising sun shone life back in through my eyes. At the lookout halfway to Thurston, I tried to take a dirt-nap, but it was too cold so we just kept moving. On the familiar ridgeline, we trotted along, spotting Cheam for the first time. It looked really far away, but I'd done this section before and knew that with every bend in the trail it would reappear much closer than before.
I'd underestimated how far we'd descend to the saddle below Archibald, which ended up being at 1200m. That meant we had another 500m to climb back up Archibald before dropping down to meet my dad, brother, and uncle at the Cheam Trailhead. One step at a time, we finally reached the top of Archie and I was able to radio down to Eric to give at ETA. Ironically, we were exactly on time for when I anticipated we've arrive on paper, but I was overly optimistic from Elk onwards and had given them an earlier time. Overall it worked out fine, and we reached Cheam TH at 10am, 14 hours after leaving Jas' and my place in Columbia Valley. Awaiting us was a sweet sight of camp chairs and my dad's rooftop tent deployed on his Xterra.
We ate some dehydrated food (whoops, grabbed the spicy one!) and changed out of our sweat-and-dirt-caked attire. I was pretty tuckered and wanted to try to sleep, but ultimately it had gotten too hot and I maybe slept for 15 minutes out of 30 that I lay in my dad's rooftop tent. My watch buzzed on my wrist and I roused myself to get going again. With overnight bags toted, we bumped into Marina Striker, local ultra-marathon crusher (she just finished the Cocodona 250 miler this spring... something like 90 hours of running at age 50+!!). We invited her to join us up the West ridge, which is a fair bit more scrambly than the trail. After about two hours of slogging with our overnight packs, which by contrast to our trail running vests felt ridiculously heavy, we reached the summit of Cheam.
I'd never done nearly this much vertical gain in a day before (having surpassed 5,000m), and I was shocked at how my legs just kept on trucking. However, I was definitely feeling the fatigue stack higher and higher. Below Lady Peak, I once again attempted to take a 5 minute dirt nap, only to be hindered by an onslaught of flies and hot sun. Ihor graciously let me lie there for 6 whole minutes before telling me to get up. We ditched our packs for the final scramble up Lady Peak, arriving at about 4pm. Our next logical location to camp would be Knight Peak, with a sketchy gully traverse and tedious glades of heather side-hilling between us and Knight. We retrieved our bags, and I was humming and hawing about whether to press on or not, weighing the mounting fatigue against a desire to persevere.
Another factor to continue was that Liam was going to film us in the Middle Cheam Range, and had hiked up solo to below Baby Munday to capture drone footage the next day. Without direct line of sight, I wasn't able to reach him by radio, and I had foolishly neglected to get his InReach contact uploaded to my own InReach for two-way messaging. Standing on the edge of the first gully, Ihor looked at me and said,
"If this was a regular 100k, I would tell you to get your butt in gear and keep going. But this isn't, and we have a lot of technical terrain left ahead of us; if you don't feel confident continuing with your level of fatigue, I leave it up to you Greg whether to turn around or not."
Ultimately, I was feeling far to fatigued to feel confident on the nasty gully section, which I had PTSD from crossing with Ben in 2022. That paired with impending weather made the decision for us to bail easier.
We hiked back to the Cheam TH, hoping to catch a ride down from another group. Unfortunately, no one had enough room (or at least the one group took one look at our stinking carcasses and denied having 2 spots...), so we toted our packs once again and started walking down the road after InReaching my dad to see if he could come back to pick us up. About halfway down the road (another 7km) we finally saw his black XTerra rumbling up the FSR. We slumped into the back seats and settled in for the drive back into town. After a stressful evening of trying to get a hold of Liam, I finally drifted off to sleep after his sister was able to get a message through. In the morning I was able to contact his InReach myself and found out that he wasn't waiting for us as I'd feared, he had received the message in time.
All in, I'm much past being disappointed when things don't go exactly as planned in my outdoor adventure career, and this situation was no different. While I did have an itch for a re-attempt before the end of summer, I knew we'd be better off waiting til next year. Mostly, I wanted to spend early August with Jas before she started a 10-month teaching program, so that was a priority for me, and I had my eyes on alpine climbing for the last bits of summer. I'm really proud of my effort (especially with the impromptu overnight start), and I am even more in awe of my friend Ihor, who was not even at the peak of his abilities for this trip (being on the road to recovery after a knee surgery). He seemed legitimately unfazed by the lack of sleep, which I guess is not surprising considering he had gone over 4x longer with barely a wink of sleep.
Ihor and I have gotten up to some pretty silly adventures together so far, and this certainly won't be the last. I'm grateful to have friends like him that push me further than I thought I could go, and graciously accept when it was time to say "no."
CRUEL 50k
Cultus Ridgeline Ultimate Endurance Loop 50k
Sam Lewis and I had some ideas for adventures together, but with weather looking sub-par, we postponed an alpine objective for better conditions. Instead, Sam suggested that we do a repeat of a route I did in 2025, running around Cultus via Amadis and Vedder Mountain. There is a popular trail race every October called "Around the Lake Give'r Take 30k" that stays closer to the lake perimeter on some fantastic trails.
Our route, on the other hand, involves a lot more bushwhacking. Starting at "The Eddy", some flat running leads to the base of International Ridge and some poorly maintained trails, followed by some flat roads, and finishing with a long ridge run over Vedder and back to Banter for icecream (mandatory upon finishing).
This past year has truly been the "year of Sam", with our first two outings being the drop-bags for the Horseshoe along with tagging North Nesakwatch Spire and Slesse in August of 2025. We skied a bunch over the winter, and did two awesome ski adventures in spring together. Since 2021, I've done at least one 50k run each year, and I'd already done two in the summer, which was more than usual for me. Sam had done some really big mountain days himself in the summer, but this would be his first "50k" - which I knew he would crush!!
We met up at Banter at 6am on Sunday, August 30th and jogged along the roads leading to International Ridge. Things went pretty smoothly, and we cruised up to Amadis in good time. It was a bit wet getting over to Watt Creek Ridge Trail, but we began our descent in good spirits.
A few hundred metres down the ridge, as we were looking for the next flagger, I paused to survey the trees ahead.
All of the sudden, I heard the unmistakable sound of BZZZZZ .... "RUN! WASPS!"
Okay, those weren't the only words that left my mouth... but regardless, I took off, crashing downhill through the trees as I swatted the wasps clinging to my clothes and skin. I suffered about 10 stings total, 5 on my left leg and 5 on my left arm. Sam, who was right behind me, was trapped behind a tree and wasn't so fortunate, getting tagged on his neck in several places. Thanfully neither of us are allergic and we walked off the pain, acutely aware of any more buzzing sounds.
We used my house as an "aid station" to restock on some snacks and water, pausing also to kick our shoes off and dry them out on the boot dryer. After a good 30 minutes break (after about 6 hours of moving time and ~25km), we began the 8km section of dreaded pavement. For this, we turned on some tunes and got into a rhythm, passing the kilometres by with Gable Price and Friends. We turned off of the main road up an FSR, winding our way up the mountain. After a few hours, we reached the summit of Vedder, and bumped into my friend Dawson! After chatting for a bit, we set off on the last segment of our run. Charging down the rail trail and onto the Qoqolem trail was exhilarating, and we found ourselves jogging the final kilometre to Banter along the sidewalk. 11 hours and 39 minutes later, we stopped in front of Banter and got in line for a cone. Aside from the wasp stings, it was a great day of exploring the pain cave.
Perhaps I don't call myself a runner, but I'll admit, I did enjoy the rhythm of running the flats... only a little bit.
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