A Beginner’s Experience Doing The Chief Hike

A Western Canada Road Trip – Day 5

The classic Stawamus Chief hike is probably the most challenging hike I have done in my life. I have hiked a lot of places in the world, but the descent of the Chief was a challenge.

At 702 metres above the town of Squamish, the Chief cliff face is one of North America’s largest granite monoliths.

Morning of the Chief Hike

To do the Chief hike, we had to wake up early (6am) and buy our permits (you don’t need to buy permits in 2024).

After having a nice brunch with my cousin, she drove us to a Wendy’s where we were picked up by Callum‘s brother and his girlfriend in her family’s giant pickup truck.

The Actual Chief Hike

This is a popular and classic hike within the Sea to Sky corridor as you get a beautiful view of Howe Sound, and the town of Squamish.

There is an option to take a gondola up for those who want the views, but don’t care to spend their day hiking.

The hike starts with a set of big stairs. I was feeling winded and already falling behind because my cardio isn’t really great. This also felt like the start of my first real hiking trip.

I hiked Mt. Rinjani in Indonesia 8 years before, but that wasn’t really the purpose of my trip to Indonesia. Hiking was the purpose of our trip to Western Canada.

Climbing up the Chief

The Chief hike has three peaks. We made it to the start of peak one, but I knew there was no way I could do the other peaks that were actually part of the loop if I did it, so the three of them continued up peak one while I went directly to peak two.

I put on my headphones, listened to my audiobook, took some videos of the hike so far and continued up the path to peak two.

I did get temporarily lost, but I managed to reunite with the three of them pretty quickly, and we continued down the path together.

The path has a chain where you have to pull yourself up from one chain to the next. This is the first time (and maybe still only time) that I have had chains involved in my hike. They were honestly pretty minor. This isn’t like via ferrata territory, but in this moment I was thinking, “what have I gotten myself into?”

I thought there would be more chains in the trail, but there wasn’t.

At the top of peak two were the beautiful views that people think of with this hike. Up here we ate sandwiches and apples, took some photos together and then moved on to peak three.

Peak three was probably the easiest part of the hike for me.

The Challenging Hike Down the Chief

This was the part I struggled with the most. It was like the path down used to be a riverbed, but it was just massive boulders.

I did not have the leg strength (or confidence) to get myself down from the boulders. Callum stayed with me and helped me which was very nice.

We were losing the light and were hungry so Callum‘s brother and brother’s girlfriend went on ahead and grabbed groceries. They were able to finish their hike and run errands in the time it took me to hike down 😂

Goodnight Legs 🌔

When we got to our Airbnb in Whistler, we had to climb up 72 steps (lol at my legs). This all seems like a blur to me now so good thing I wrote this down in my journal.

Callum’s brother and his girlfriend made us pasta while I took a shower and tried to stretch out my legs because we were doing a long hike at Garibaldi Park the next day.

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