TLDR, my family and I drove 4 hours to go on a hike, then drove 4 hours back home on the same day. The hike was nice even though the drive was long. Check out the pictures below the wall of text.
This is going to be the last adventure that I will post before Christmas, so I would like to first wish everyone a Merry Christmas! Thank you for reading, zapping, and commenting my post(s). Although it's only been 4 weeks, it had been fun writing and sharing these hiking memories and photos. This week, I was originally going to share another one of our winter/snow hikes, but decided to leave that for next week. I opted for some sunshine and blue skies, because it had been raining for most of the week here where I live. So here goes...
I don't know where my wife found this trail, but she managed to find a hike that is four hours drive away from where we live. Located near Kamloops, BC, Canada, Battle Bluffs Trail is a moderate/easy out and back trail that is 4.5km long with about 260m elevation gain. It can usually be completed within 1 hour 30 minutes to 2 hours, but would take us over 8 hours to drive there and back; so the drive is the hard part. But, like any other occasion, when the wife says we go, we go; and so we went.
This trail is located within the Lac du Bois Grasslands Protected Area. Because it is located futher inland away from the coast, the large difference in landscape and vegetation compared to our usual coastal hikes was immediately noticeable. There were no high mountains, but only hills here and there. We also don't see any dense forests or huge evergreen trees. Instead, there were grasslands, a lot more shrubs, and smaller, more spaced out trees.
We started down a mud path in the grasslands and eventually entered a thin forest where the trail started to ascend slightly. The trail was obvious and clear, so we had no trouble following it. After about 30 minutes of hiking from the trailhead, we reached the first location where we could catch a glimpse of the views of Kamloops Lake. We continued ascending on trail after taking a short break and eventually reached the final view point where we could see Kamloops Lake to the west and Thompson River plus the outskirts of Kamloops to the east. The view up top was spectacular and I was very glad that my wife got us to hike this trail. We had our lunch while admiring the views, took some photos at the view point, and started heading back. Because it was going to be another 4 hours of driving to get home, we did not linger and hurried back to our car to start our journey home.