Tim Lee and I made a recent descent of Deneau Creek, in the northern Cascades near Hope, B.C. This canyon is off the beaten track, draining into the Coquihalla River next to the popular media-named “Highway thru Hell”. The first descent was by local mountaineering prodigy Drew Breyshaw and company in 2015, and in keeping with the typical B.C. canyons, does extract a bit of pay-for-play. In this case, the payment is a steadily growing-in logging road. The brush is manageable (using my measuring system, which in the past has been questioned ), but we did require some time to locate the start of a road that I had driven 10 years earlier. Time car-to-car was about 8 hours, including construction of 2 bolt stations.
This canyon is quite pretty, but suffers from large log jams and slippery rocks (metasediments and serpentinites, if’n you want to know). Lots of maidenhair fern, streamside blueberries, and a few decent swims. v3a2 II. A bit of an “adventure” canyon compared to local favourites like Box or Lost, but if you think of Devils Club as an old friend, worth doing. Thanks Tom for the new Imlay rope, as the 9.2 was put to good use.