They have a love for their country and they don’t mind shouting, or more accurately, singing it from the mountaintops.
Close to 800 Canada Day revelers climbed Mount Seymour overnight July 1 to watch the sunrise and sing O Canada.
“It was pretty loud. It was something else. I wouldn’t be surprised if you could hear it down on the North Shore,” said Julian DeSchutter, spokesman for Chasing Sunrise, the group that organized the event.
The headlamp-sporting patriotic hikers marshalled at the Mount Seymour parking lot at 2:30 a.m. before starting the one-and-a-half-hour hike to the first peak. Now in its second year, Chasing Sunrise more than doubled the turnout it had in 2015, something DeSchutter attributed word spreading quickly on social media.
The plan was for hikers to use the new “in all of us command” lyrics, although with almost 800 voices, it’s hard to discern how many preferred the anthem they grew up with.
“We ended up singing it, I think, five times that day and there was only one that we planned on doing but someone just starts singing it and someone else picks up and before you know it, you have the whole group breaking into it, which is really cool,” he said.
Watching the sun come up and clouds part with a chorus of 800 singing the national anthem behind you puts you in a “state of awe,” DeSchutter.
“It really kind of messes with your brain in the right way,” he said.
The event, and others like it put on by Chasing Sunrise, is meant to bridge the gap between the idyllic images the typical person sees passed around on social and what they actually do in their own lives.
“Simply, people want to live. I think that’s really what it comes down to. We live in this world where social media taunts us (and puts) life in front of us all day long but rarely are we actually given opportunities to go out and get those experiences,” DeSchutter said. “It costs nothing. It’s really easy and accessible to get up to. The hike isn’t too crazy so you can get a lot people. It’s generally safe and at the end you’re sitting on top of what is a world class mountain, overlooking a world class city, watching the sunrise, which is pretty high on everyone’s bucket list,” he said.
And, he added, people don’t need to wait for an organized event to invest the time and energy needed to watch a sunrise from a mountaintop.
“The sun rises on Mount Seymour seven days a week. With the right planning and the right knowledge, people can go do this any time they want,” he said. “It’s just a Saturday morning but it can be a hell of a lot more than a Saturday morning when you look back on it – if you do the right things.”
Before participating, attendees, the majority of whom had never been to Mount Seymour, had to sign waivers and demonstrate they understood what was ahead of them during a hike in the dark. The team’s leaders went up Tuesday and spent 12 hours doing trail maintenance, making sure it was “good to go” for so many people.
“As far as we know, we had no injury reports on our end. We needed no first aid for anybody we had there and North Shore Rescue said nobody got lost on the mountain,” he said.
