Description

If you're looking to cover some ground in the Alice Lake trail system, including some stiff climbing and high-speed descending, check out this ride combination with Mad Hatter as the focal point. Mad Hatter is located way out in the northwestern corner of Alice Lake Provincial Park, further up the mountain from the now-famous Miki's Magic and Slippery Salmon.

The route mapped here also includes a wide selection of fantastic trails at Alice Lake, including Miki's Magic, Man Boobs, and Leave of Absence.

While it's possible to reach Mad Hatter more quickly than this route shows, you might as well ride the rest of these iconic trails along the way! To get there, begin by grinding your way to the top via 50 Shades of Green, some gravel access roads, the Upstream trail, and more.

After over 1,500 vertical feet of climbing, you'll arrive at the main attraction. Mad Hatter is the easiest of the trails on this section of the mountainside, in contrast to the difficult black diamond jump trail of Hot Tuna.

When you drop in, you'll enjoy a long, fast, flowy singletrack descent.

This fast downhill unravels all that climbing that you just did in a hurry.

You won't find any real jumps on Mad Hatter, so instead, just settle into the rhythm and jive with the swooping and flowing track as it rolls through the forest.

Be sure to note the difference between the clear cut that the trail rolls through and then the deep forest that follows it. After Mad Hatter, you can choose either Miki's Magic or Slippery Salmon, but the route shown here opts for Slippery Salmon. While Slippery Salmon could be called a flow trail, it's more accurately labeled a jump line.

It's sometimes difficult to parse the difference between the two, but where some flow trails feature plenty of jumps interspersed with high-speed singletrack in between, on Slippery Salmon, you're either taking off, landing, or whipping through a berm to set up for the next take off.

There's no time to waste between hits! Even so, all of the jumps can be rolled over if you're not feeling them or if you want to scope the line on your first run through.

On some of the tables, you'll find two lip options, creating small and medium-sized hits.

Nothing on this trail is massive. Man Boobs, aka "Mannequin Boobs," has puns for days! This long-time classic Squamish trail is still a local favorite.

It's a fairly flowy intermediate trail with some ups and downs along the way.

When you drop in, you'll find some swoopy descents punctuated by rocks, roots, and a few blown-out holes from the near-constant trail traffic. Unlike many of the popular flow trails in Squamish, Man Boobs consists of classic singletrack that offers a mixed bag of technical challenge, flowy trail, and deep, dark forest. Next, this ride heads to Leave of Absence.

Leave of Absence is one of the less technical options for finishing this ride in order to keep the technical challenge of the route to merely "Difficult." It's possible to finish on several much more challenging trail segments...

that's up to you. Nevertheless, Leave of Absence might be more difficult than anything else on the ride up to this point, with some embedded rock slab riding, wooden bridges, roots, and narrow singletrack.

However, none of the rock slabs are all that steep or all that chunky, and the trail rolls along quite predictably. If you want an even easier finish than Leave of Absence, simply skip it by following Mashiter to Rollercoaster to finish out the ride. Sources: [Zesty Life, Youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YSr9nxsoZ8&ab_channel=ZestyLife)