Finally getting out and about

Mt. Baker from Mill Hill
Watercolour and crayon
©2021 Charlene Brown

 As you may have noticed, I’ve been on lots of virtual hikes and camping trips in the mountains with my daughter and her family in the last 20 months. At long last, they’ve come out to Vancouver Island and I climbed Mill Hill with them!  So – Mill Hill at 200 metres is not what anyone would call a challenging hike, but it was Real!

My son-in-law took lots of pictures and I used one of them to paint the view from the top.  In order to identify some of the other features (Mount Douglas, Esquimalt Harbour, Cadbora Bay) in my reference  photo, I drew a line from Mill Hill to Mt Baker on a Google map of the area.  I’d always thought Mt. Baker was straight east from Victoria, but discovered it’s more like ENE, so a bit further north than we are. 

And, as Google helpfully added the distance, only 128 kilometres away! This also led to the discovery that the distance from where I live in Victoria to Mill Hill is only 10 kilometres.  Not only was our elevation gain only 200 metres, I wasn’t out and about very far. But for me it was still a Big Deal!