April 2019,

It was a chilly but mainly dry spring day; perfect for an afternoon spent exploring at Rolley lake in Mission, BC. I had always wanted to check out Rolley lake and to my surprise there was also a beautiful waterfall appropriately named: “Rolley Falls”.

I had downloaded the “AllTrails” map of the trail around the lake and the trail leading to the falls. I thought it looked like a pretty easy and straight forward trail to accomplish.

The trail around Rolley Lake was very easy to follow but we encountered some difficulties when it came to accessing Rolley Falls. We followed our GPS map until we got to this Rolley Falls sign.

Even though we had our map, we were a bit confused. This was because of a couple of reasons. First, the trail our map was taking us to was one with a bunch of fallen trees. Secondly, there were other trails branching off that looked a lot more suitable for hiking. May I add that there were a lot of angry bees heading down the trail with all of the fallen trees? We followed our intuition instead of our map and we were wrong.

One of many large trees fallen on the trail

We ended up taking an extra hike on another trail that led out to a forest service road. Thankfully we were able to figure out how to access Rolley falls from this forest service road by using the “AllTrails” map again. When we came back up the trail we should have originally taken, it was definitely not fun getting through but thankfully it was just a short stretch of poor trail conditions.

I would imagine that they will eventually clear up the path and make it easier to access but if you are accessing this trail anytime within this post make sure you have a good GPS map available! Who knew such an “easy” hike would end up so complicated. Haha! My friend and I had fun anyway. We had 2 german shepherds with us and of course the 10 essentials of hiking, so we were not too concerned.

We had this beautiful waterfall all to ourselves and decided to have lunch right on the viewing platform. How perfect!

Rolley Falls

Cheers to hot soup enjoyed by a waterfall

A smaller waterfall we saw on our way back. Bonus!

According to AllTrails “Rolley Falls and Lake Trail” this hike is 4.7km return with 160m elevation gain. The elevation gain is mainly on the Rolley falls part of the trail. I am skeptical that it is 160m elevation gain because it felt like less. The hike around the lake is flat and easy.

Typically the trail around the lake and to the falls would only take 2 hours or less. We spent 3 hours here, due to getting lost and stopping for lunch.

Check it out! It is a nice spot and there are a ton of other cool spots nearby to check out as well.