They started in the dark, over 800 people gathered in the parking lot at Mount Seymour.
By most people’s standards it was still the middle of the night – 2 a.m.
Over half of the people who gathered for the Canada Day sunrise hike to mark Canada’s 150th birthday had never been up Mount Seymour, before said Vancouver organizer Julian DeSchutter.
Most of them were young, but “there were definitely a couple of families there,” he said. “There was one dad who carried his four-year old son on his back the whole way up,” he said. The oldest in the group this year was 77.
“The common thread that unites them is a willingness to step out and go do something a little bit out of the norm and venture into that shared experience,” said DeSchutter.
While DeSchutter and his group Chasing Sunrise have organized Canada Day sunrise hikes for the past two years on Mount Seymour, “It’s pretty much spread through word of mouth,” he said. Official word of the event was only put out a day ahead of time this year.
As the group started hiking the trail in the early hours of July 1, “There’s a common energy that flows through the whole group and you feel it immediately,” said DeSchutter. “You’re in something bigger than just an individual thing.”
As the hikers started out, “you have this long snaking trail” of white headlamps and red glow sticks, winding in and out of the trees, said DeSchutter.
This year, there was snow on the ground most of the way up.
An hour into the hike, the first stirrings of dawn began to show in the sky. “It’s this pinkish purple colour looking over the mountains of Golden Ears and Belcarra,” he said.
They reached the first peak after about an hour and 40 minutes, said DeSchutter, and sat on rocks or stood in the snow, waiting for the day to break. When it did, they greeted the sunrise with the national anthem. “You have hundreds of people across the entire mountain belting out O Canada,” said DeSchutter.
“It was a really cool morning.”
It was scene that was repeated in 10 cities across Canada this year, starting with a group in St. John’s, and spreading to a hill in Halifax, through Ottawa and Montreal to an island in a Toronto park, Edmonton and Calgary to Vancouver and Victoria.
The Canada Day hike at dawn was started by DeSchutter and Gordon Swenson, who founded the group Chasing Sunrise in 2015 with the goal of encouraging people to seize the day.
Chasing Sunrise organizes events every Sunday in the Vancouver area – which DeSchutter dubs ‘Sunday school’ - usually focused on getting outside and grabbing life by the tail.
“We have all these lives that we want to live, “said DeSchutter. “We want to do these adventures and we want these experiences. Then we have the realities of the world. The work, the paying bills, the doing things you have to do to survive. So many of us get caught up and going, ‘I wish I could get out more.’”
Chasing Sunrise is about making that happen, he said.
While many people are intimidated by the idea of going for an hour hike early in the morning, “most people are more significantly capable than they think they are,” he said.
DeSchutter said the feeling of watching the sunrise from the top of the mountain while hundreds of people break into Canada’s national anthem makes the early get-up worth it.
“The only think I can kind of equate it to is the gold medal hockey game, “he said. “You looked around you and realized everyone had a lot more in common that they did (that was) different.”
“It’s about a whole bunch of people coming together around the values and beliefs that not only make us Canadian but make us human.”
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