Okay another borderline one because this is not a run… again. Easily arguably much harder than any of the runs I’ve been doing here though. The grouse grind is a hike up Grouse Mountain which is just a 25-minute drive north of downtown Vancouver. It is well known for being an extremely difficult hike and there are groups of people who competitively do it weekly I believe in order to beat their time and climb the leaderboards. The hike is only a total distance of 2.5k, or a little over 1.5 miles, but the challenging part is the elevation. Referred to as “mother nature’s stair master” it is an elevation gain of 800 meters with a total of 2,830 steps. Roughly 236 stories of a building. It is definitely a challenge. At the top there is the Grouse Mountain resort which is very popular among tourists, and you can take a gondola up instead of doing the hike, but where’s the fun in that?
The Run
The “run” portion is the hike that I just described. It was fairly busy and was pretty cool to look up at how daunting the endless stairs looked, and the different ranges of people doing it. Some tsking their time, others speeding up the mountain like they are trying to set a personal best. The beginning was a more gradual climb, more like a normal hike and it seemed that the further along you got, the steeper the steps were, with phases of natural rocks and carved path. Other times it was man made staircases climbing straight up. As for the views, there aren’t really any because you are surrounded by trees the whole time, outside of the odd glimpse through the gaps of them where you can see the blue water all around below. Those are the seconds you’ve got to savor along this hike. Other than that, there isn’t really much to write about this hike other than the insane difficulty, obviously ranging harder the faster you go on it, we took some breaks. I had an average heart rate of 132, but that was spiking then going down during breaks, so it wasn’t really representative of the difficulty. I think it would be interesting to do this more times to see if we get better or worse. We spent a total of an hour and fifty minutes on the trail, but that was including breaks and some stoppages for viewpoints when we got them. It seems a good number to aim to complete it in for a challenge would maybe be under an hour but it seems kind of hard to predict. The record is around 24 minutes, I think.
The Pub
As for the “pub” portion now, there is a big building at the top which is home to a restaurant, and a cafeteria with plenty of food options. So, this is what we are counting as the pub. The cafeteria is fairly normal, with the classic pizza and chicken tender options, plus a refrigerated food section. I got a pasta salad type bowl. The beer I got was a Strawberry Blonde ale from North Point Brewing Company, which is a brewery in North Vancouver. I thought it was quite good, though after such a hard hike it was a little hard to want it as my body just wanted to chug 3 waters. (which I got one right before). I didn’t get much strawberry from it, but the beer ended up being quite refreshing. The real selling point of this whole thong though is the view from our cafeteria (pub). IT is unbelievable, you can see the lake below, the ocean further out, downtown Vancouver, and all the mountains and hills in between. One of the best viewpoints I have ever been to. Picture will be provided below. There was a wedding going on up there and we were kind of sitting right above it, like we were attendees. There are also other aspects to the mountain and another trail so would be cool to come back at some point. Perhaps in the morning so we get to the top by sunrise.
Overall, this obviously wasn’t either a run or a pub, but one of the main ideas of this is to get active and support businesses. Support local, support yourself. That being said, I can’t necessarily give it a great score, but not a dead mediocre score given how much fun it was and amazing the view. So we’ll settle for something in between.
RATING: 7.8