Elevation Gain: 3,291m
Distance: 45.15km
Total Time: 13 hours 31 minutes
Date: September 30th, 2024
Lone Goat Mountain is a straight forward hike in the Manning Park area and often combined when walking along the Skyline II trail. I had hiked up Lone Goat Mountain over 4 years ago with a group of friends and long before I was really aiming for summits. That was the first time I saw Hozomeen as well and I remember being awestruck with the area. Fast-forward to 2024 and I found myself with a different group of friends hiking down from the nearby Red Mountain. Logically, there’s only one good way to re-connect with the skyline trail and that was to hike up and over Lone Goat Mountain. I rarely revisit summits, but my hand was forced and in any event it would be cool to re-live some old memories from a time long past.
The ascent would be from the other side this time and mostly up steep grass. From Red Mountain we had a long section of side hilling and then came the steep grunt up Lone Goat. There’s no major difficulties here and before we knew it we had reached the top. This earned us one more break and then it was time to get going home.
On the way down, I started to struggle with knee pain while the others sped off. I slowed down and took my time and that seemed to alleviate things. Once back on the flat trail my knee started to behaved again and I caught up with the group. We parted ways with Steven and Erica who still wanted to do Snow Camp Mountain. The rest of us had already been there years before and without a necessary return up and over it, there’s no way I was going to add it on. So with that, we headed down the trail and made a reasonable pace back to the car.
As always, this area is stunning and I can’t complain about immaculately maintained trails.