Every August I make the annual pilgrimage to Hope, BC, to visit my parents at their home on Kawkawa Lake. I often get my runs in simply running into, and around the town of Hope.  For elevation training we would do laps on The Hope Hustle, or the Mount Hope Lookout. This year Michelle and I decided we wanted to do a little more exploring. 

Our prescribed run for the day was 60-90 minutes so I did a quick search on AllTrails looking for something close by, in that 10km range and with close to 100 meters per km of elevation so we could at least run the downhill without too much strain on the knees. 

We were both coming off the Canadian Death Race, so still very much easing back into training. Zopjuk Peak looked like it might do the trick. The first few km’s looked fairly minimal with respect to elevation gain and the trailhead was only 30 minutes up the Coquihalla Hwy.

Getting There

The Trailhead is a couple hundred meters to the West of the Zopkios Rest area on the North side of the Coquihalla Highway. It is about a 30 minute drive from Hope, BC. There is plenty of parking at the rest area itself and a smaller parking area right by the trailhead. You can find Google Map directions here.

The Trail

The first couple of KM’s are fairly low grade and depending on where you are at in your run journey strength wise, are fairly runnable. The grade starts to get a little steeper here but is still what I would call “Janelle Runnable” until about 3 km where you will start to climb. The next 1.7 km is forested, denser single track through some boulder field which was really pretty. 

The last 1.75km is a relatively steep hike up the ridge, though not a scramble at all. Hard core downhillers will be able to run this one down. It was steep but it certainly was no PowerLine like CDR. 

The Payoff

I have to be honest here and tell you I was really not expecting a whole lot from this run in terms of views. I am thrilled to tell you that I completely underestimated the views from the summit. As you can see from the photos the views were spectacular in all directions. 

Things to Consider

Once you reach the top of Zupjok you could easily carry on and run the ridge the the neighboring peaks. When we came back home we did a little more research to find that Llama Peak was another 2.4 km along the ridge and Alpaca Peak another  1.8 km after that. If you are looking for a little bit longer day these additional peaks would be well worth exploring. We will defitely be back to complete the whole route.