We started off our switchbacks with excitement. We had a somewhat decent pace and then started feeling the shortness of breath and tired legs and opted for a few rest breaks. Our feeling of excitement remained, but we also started wondering, what did we just sign ourselves up for? Looking back at the timestamps on my photos of the km markers, I can see that that first km took us 17 minutes, then 20 minutes to km two, then 16 minutes to km 3. That makes our 5k time roughly 53 minutes and we reached Garbaldi lake in 3:10. This makes our average pace per km 23:45. I have no idea if this is good or bad in the world of hiking, or if everyone else is like us and is just happy to enjoy nature not to make it to the final destination, but what I do know is that finally reaching this lake gave me a huge sense of accomplishment and pride. After all, we had just hiked over 8 km with 800 m (3,280 ft) of elevation gain on our first hike in Canada, without any sort of training.

Read About a “Cooler” Hike we did on a glacier here!

We had packed a bunch of snacks with us, so we were sure to take some time to enjoy them while sitting along the lake. When we finally got up from our comfortable resting spots, we felt immediate muscle soreness and amped ourselves up mentally for the hike back down. If we went up the switchbacks, we were going to have to go down them and down was bound to be worse than up (thanks eccentric quad work!). I have no idea how long the hike back down took us, but our total hiking time was over 6 hours so I’m guessing it took about the same time to go down as it did to go up.

When we finally arrived in Whistler, we could barely walk because we were so sore. We grabbed dinner and High-tailed it (to the best of our abilities) to a grocery/pharmacy store before it closed. We stocked up on aleve and tiger balm and let the magic happen. Tomorrow’s agenda included another hike, so we needed to be ready.