Time for the Basstravaganza to head E.
Whatever the mystique is that fascinates bass fishermen, suffice to to say that bass are the only fish I know of that have been transplanted over huge new areas not because they are good to eat - although they are - but because they are challenging to catch on rod & reel. They adapt easily to new lakes and rivers. Here is a map showing the original distribution of SM bass (green) vs areas where they have been introduced (yellow).
In 1901 the federal Canadian Dominion of Fisheries decided to introduce the wily bass to the waters of BC, far from its home range. They caught smallmouth bass from the Bay of Quinte, Lake Ontario, within the province of Ontario, and loaded them into specially rigged tank cars, and sent the W. On the way across the Boundary region of BC some of the fish were let loose in Christina Lake. The rest continued on to Vancouver, and then across by ferry to Van Isle, where they were released into Langford and Florence Lakes. The fish were juveniles and it is hard for even fisheries people to tell baby SMs from other varieties of the sunfish family. Unfortunately, every lake that got stocked with bass also got stocked with pumpkinseed sunfish, which also thrived along with the bass.
Later, both smallmouth and largemouth bass that had been planted in the US swam up the Okanagan R and got into Osoyoos lake, and Vaseaux Lake immediately upstream. The BC government introduced SMs into Skaha Lake further up the OK River, and there are reports that SMs have migrated even further upstream into Okanagan Lake at the top of the river. Another population of SMs has invaded BC from the US down the Pend Oreille R in the Kootenays. And LMs have moved down the Kootenay R system into the Creston area, and are rumored to be found in giant Kootenay Lake itself. The enquiring basser’s mind needs to know.
So I set out one evening with only the pontoon – leaving the Bullship parked. It is getting really expensive to take that Bullship back and forth on the ferry – like $150 round trip. Plus my old Volvox has developed an annoying bad habit after so many thousands of miles of basstravaganza. At odd moments, for no apparent reason, the motor stops running. This is a pain in the A at the best of times, but it is really nerve wracking when you are towing a boat & trailer in the fast lane, or halfway across a busy intersection.
Usually this just happens for a second, or 2, or 5. But sometimes I just have to coast to the side or the road and wait 5 minutes before the car will start again. It always does. Or 10 minutes. Once in April I spent 30 minutes dead in the road, on the Island Hwy freeway, sitting directly on top of the Englishman R bridge, for 20 minutes, before I could coax the Volvo back to life. Lucky it was 3 AM, and I could flash my lites when the odd vehicle came by. I have tried everything to fix this, but I cannot find the source of the problem.
Most people would not venture onto Hwy 3 – one of the steepest twistiest mountain hwys in the world – with a car that was prone to sputtering dead in the road at random. But these feebs would probably not catch many bass. I will compromise by leaving the Bullship behind – less stuff to tow if need be. So I am off!
Fortune favors the bold
Hernan de Cortes
If I take the 8:30 PM ferry I will get to Tsawassen on the mainland around 10:30, so I can drive thru the Vancouver metro area when there is little traffic. The ferry terminal is on the spit formed by the mouth of Nanaimo R, just across the bay from where I live. Looking down the spit you can see the pulp mill and sawmills processing Van Isle trees for the export market.
Business is booming nowadays. During the infighting of the Not-So-Free Trade agreements in the 90s, US tarrifs caused BC to lose most of its traditional market in the south of the border. Many people, including me, lost their jobs. Now BC has turned to more stable wood markets in Asia, and the US has gone bankrupt and stopped building houses. There are big freighters loading at every dock, and business is so good they can’t load fast enough, and there are more freighters anchored in Nanaimo harbor – waiting for a chance to slide in, fill up with lumber, plywood, pulp, paper, chips or raw logs. I have never seen the harbor this stacked up with freighters before.
I sleep up in Manning Park and head on at dawn. Hard to keep focused on driving when the new crop of cherries is coming in. I stop at a fruit stand in Keremeos, then lounge by the Similkameen R and stuff myself. I get to the Okanagan late next morn. Osoyoos Lake is a sheet of glass. I should go out and fish right away, but I drive around the wetlands, and drive up to check on Vaseaux Lake, before heading back to Osoyoos Lake. Windy now. It is hard to fish this big lake with an electric motor at the best of times. I catch a few small bass in the afternoon on yum worms and then head back out in the evening, throwing a big spook plug around the N end where the river comes in. I get only 1 hit – a 19" tyrant, raging bull bucking bronc. I have never had a fish fight like this one, never had a bass jump this many times. A true Oso Lake giant, C&R, fare the well.
The 4 lakes in the Okanagan chain – Okanagan/Skaha/Vaseaux/Osoyoos in order N>S – are natural features, remnants of the days when huge glaciers filled this narrow valley. This verdant, low gradient grassland was the natural highway from the Columbia R and the US up into BC. Now that the glaciers are away on vacation, this valley is the warmest, sunniest spot in all of Canada. And perhaps the best place to grow crops or retire. The valley is very constricted, and very pricey, and a tough place for an itinerant economy bass fisherman to find a place to park overnite. I have heard about a lake nearby, that may have a campground, so next day I drive up to check it out.
A little ways up the side of the valley out of Oliver there is a historical marker: Fairview Gold. Turns out there used to be a city here, that burned down in 1901. There was patch of dirt on the hillside that held gold, and an instant city sprang up in the late 1890s. One of a number of gold camps that lay claim to having been "The biggest city N of San Francisco". But not for long. The gold was gone after a few years, and there is not a single building or other visible sign to indicate that there was ever anything else here besides the grassy ranchland it is now. Such is often the fate of mining towns.
I am looking for Sawmill Lake, and I get lost. I have seen it in Google Earth, so I have a general idea of where I am going, I drive around for 10 minutes and finally ask some locals, who tell me the way. I turn off on a tiny dirt track, over a cattleguard and thru an unlocked gate, and past a sign saying that I am entering private grazing land, please do not drive off the road, throw trash around, and please use flies only and release any trout you catch. Another 20 minutes crawling the Volvo over steep boulder studded ruts brings me over a little crest right to the banks of a small lake, or big pond. I park right next to the water and look out at a placid scene. It is a summer weekend and there are campers all around, and lots of boats tied up, but the at 10"30 AM there is not a boat on the lake. Whatsamatta? No fish in this lake? A huge trout swirls 50 ft in front of my car. Holy smokes.
As I watch big fish are rolling steadily. Huge RBs, 5 lbs, 8 lbs, 10 lbs?
I seldom see trout rises like this.
And beautiful free campsites with picnic tables and steel ringed fire pits with barbq grill tops, 10 feet from the water. I pick a spot, make a fire, cook up some beaners and weans, and watch the big trout rise. Later I launch the pontoon, along with a few other people. Soon there are a dozen boats on the lake, but the big rise is long over. Missed it. I troll a couple rods with leech flies around the lake. No bites. A guy in a float tube catches a nice one fishing deep with a chironomid.
This kind of fishing is very productive, but way too boring for me. I am hooked on huge bass busting surface plugs.
On the way back down the hill you look out over the hillside to the OK valley below. It is a late wet spring, and the wild flowers are going bonkers.
You can see why people like to live here.
I stop at a pasture where there are lots of butterflies flittering.
This is a mourning cloak. Always the first butterfly to appear in spring, and the last to disappear in fall, but quite common here at altitude even in summer. When the fold their wings they look like a scaly old dead leaf.
But when they spread their wings out…
and show off …
they can really flash some color.
I load the pontoon back on the Volvo and head back down into the valley. During the defeat of the last ice age as huge torrents of melting icewater were pouring down, ginormous jams of ice and rubble would plug off the bottom of the narrow, steep-walled Okanagan valley. The narrowest point of constriction is McIntyre Bluff, where the entire OK valley is only 1,000 ft wide. This was the location of repeated ice jams, which would flood the OK valley for 100 miles to the N, and then collapse to release enormous surges of rock and ice and water. The bluff itself is a nearly vertical wall of solid rock, scoured flat by flood debris as if with a giant belt sander, or as if god took a giant meat cleaver to the side of the mountain.
(image borrowed from internet)
I am always impressed by trees that can survive for long periods in tough conditions. Like vegetable Volvos. This pine is growing out of a crack in the rockface, with no visible soil anywhere.
Vaseaux Lake is a derpression immediately upstream from the bluff. Maybe a pit created by the enormous weight of all the glacier stuff plugged up behind the bluff before it blew out. Flooded now by the Okanagan R. No motors allowed here – only oars. Out on the lake today there is a fisherman at the end of the rainbow.
Looking S, you can see the steep, scoured hillsides on the left, and the vertical sheer of McIntyre Bluff on the right.
Must have been some crazy whitewater when that let go, but the lake is placid today. I drive on and park right beside the bluff. The rockface itself, and the river that runs under it, are fenced off here.
The floor of the Okanagan valley is the hottest driest environment in all of Canada. It is the true end of the N extension of the great Sonoran desert, usually associated with Arizona/NM. In its natural state it was a land of spring wildflowers, rolling dry grassland, and even some scrubby cactus mixed in. The Okanagan River wound a shallow, winding and marshy path thru the bottom of the valley. Salmon swam up every year from the Columbia and the ocean. Life was pretty sweet for the people there, who harvested and preserved the salmon into permanent food stores, and occasionally make summer hike over the Rockies to hunt bison.
The first immigrants of Euro origin, from E Canada and the US, realized that a tiny influx of manpower and technology could change this valley forever. Irrigation – something seldom needed in Ontario or Illinois, but critical to the development of the West. McIntyre Bluff is the natural constriction point that controls water distribution to the entire 20 miles of valley bottom between Vaseaux and the US border. In 1914 a dam was built at the foot of the bluff, and a ditch was begun to divert the river water out into the hot rolling grasslands on either side of the river. The dam has been rebuilt now, and canal widened, strengthened, and lined with concrete, but the location remains the same. In this image borrowed from Okanagan Nation Alliance website you can see the 2,000 ft vertical wall of the bluff on the left. Vaseaux Lake in the background, and McIntyre Dam in the foreground, along with the irrigation diversion channel that runs out from the dam, under the hwy, and then out across what used to be desert to feed precious liquid to literally hundreds of millions of dollars worth of farmland. It is this ditch, and other like it, that created the spectacular boom in orchards and vineyards in the OV valley over the past century.
Throughout the 20th century the Columbia was dammed, and most of the salmon disappeared. During the initial Sleazy Credit era of Wacky Bennett in BC there was a frenzy of dam building on both sides of the border, which resulted in the Columbia River Treaty between the 2 countries, which resulted in an agreement to demolish the Okanagan R.
Now the original river had been designed by and old, white haired hippie named god. This god character was a real romantic. Paid WAY too much attention to detail. Loved to embroider his designs with pretty flowers and enchanting bird calls. His river was slow and winding, and dumped a siltload of sludge over the floodplain every year. Seemed he just could not focus on the task of getting water from point A to point B. Most important, in all the years his design was in operation (nobody could even remember how long) it had never once turned a profit. In any case, all the other arguments were irrelevant when he was found out to be a fraud. He never even had an engineering degree, so his design was not certified.
Under the Columbia R Treaty the engineers decided to get together and see what they could do to straighten out this mess – literally. They would turn the river into a ditch. They were very good at straight lines, so they drew a straight line down the middle of the valley, and ordered the river to move over to where it was told, and STAY THERE! In order to show the river who was boss they dug a huge ditch right down the middle of the valley and forced the wandering waters onto their new reservation. And this is where the river lives to this day. In aerial view you can see the irrigation channel (red) splitting off from the river at the dam under McIntyre Bluff. The canal crosses the hwy, runs thru Gallagher Lake, and then out over what was once desert, now become cropland that produces hundreds of millions of dollars worth of fruit and grapes.
The first phase of the gold rush passed thru the OK rather quickly. The real gold rush is now - converting these rich bottom lands into first agriculture, and then suburbia. In many places all remnants of the original OK River channel have been obliterated, as you can see in the lower half of the next pic. In the top half of the image you can see the new "river", really a canal, on the R. On the L are the original relic channels, winding in convoluted oxbows, the way they were laid out by the romantic but troubled original designer of this project, god. In the lower half of the pic all these artistic but unprofitable frills have been removed.
If you drive around among the farmland you sometimes cross these old channels, stagnant and weary, like wrinkled Oglala Sioux warriors hiding out in the Black Hills after the tribe had been marched off to live on a reserve.
The river runs straight as an arrow now, never deviating from its mission of feeding the thirsty ag land all around it. But solving one problem often creates others – the eternal dilemma of the engineer. Water flowing down under the influence of gravity generates enormous power. Look at the face of McIntyre Bluff if you want to argue that one. Under god’s old design the power of the river was absorbed by scouring cutbanks, washing thru rootwads of big trees, and pushing rocks and silt all over the lowlands. If you take all the curves out of a river, or hwy, the speed limit goes way up. So the engineers designed speed zones to slow the river. Called "drop structures" around here, there is a simpler word that is just as accurate: dam.
In the 1950s the entire river was dug up and re-routed into a canal, which has now assumed the name of "Okanagan River". Between Osoyoos Lake at the US border and Skaha Lake there are 13 drop structures. 13 dams built across what was once a bountiful salmon river, all built without including and fish passage in the design. The drop structures are 1 m high (at low flows). Simple concrete walls that cross the ditch, with a walkway on top.
Under this design, all the current energy that previously went into scouring out highly productive instream and riparian habitat for fish and other wildlife was now concentrated into a single point, where it was focused on blowing out a big hole and washing out the dam that caused it. So the engineers designed in a solution. They paved the river bottom with concrete downstream from the dam, and poured reinforced concrete baffles off the floor, angled 45% upstream against the current. Here is my cartoon of how it works.
This arrangement generates enormous backwash turbulence immediately downstream from the dam. You can see that here, looking down from a dam.
As river levels drop in mid summer fish are said to jump the dams, and a struggling remnant population of sockeye still survives here. They must swim up past every dam on the Columbia R below Grand Coulee, every dam on the Okanagon R (they spell it different in the US) in Washington state, and all the drop structures in the OK valley when they get up past Ososyoos Lake. I have seen big SMs taken by fishermen at these drop structures, and I have often fantasized about floating a section of the canal some hot summer day.
Well, things have changed in recent years. Must have been a death or 2, and a lawsuit. I remember watching people in jet skis come racing up from Osoyoos Lake full blast and jumping the lowest drop structure. But now the irrigation owners have put up a long high chain link fence around each dam. And the BC Min of Environment, recreated as an entity again after being shattered into a thousand pieces by the Gord Campbell regime in BC, has put up a sign warning about the danger of getting into the backwash. They call it "The Drowning Machine".
Now these fences probably do good work in keeping really dumb people from killing themselves. In an era when most people are really stupid, and have no experience in dealing with real problems and real threats after a lifetime of playing video games and 9/11, I suppose you need these signs to deter the 1/100 of 1% of people who are suicidally stupid. I think of David Thompson, the first "white man" to navigate many of the rivers in southern BC. Carried birch bark with him over the Rockies from Alberta (which did not exist yet), and headed downstream. Did they have signs like this for him?
WARNING! Do not go where there is boiling white water, stationary waves, and huge whirlpools spinning backwards against the current.
The river/ditch is flowing way too high and cold and fast now to allow for fishing, so I head down the valley. Looking from the benchland on the E side across the valley, you can see where the drab gray natural grasslands intersect with the lush lowlands fed by gravity-feed irrigation from McIntyre Dam.
The irrigated bottom land is worth a fortune in peaches, apples, cherries, grapes, tomatoes or just about anything that will grow from a planted seed. The dry grassland above is a great spot for a trophy ranch and home.
Most if the irrigation is underground now. Pressurized and piped, dripped or sprayed with elaborate timing. Here is an irrigation feeder coming up out of the ground, to a pump and distribution system feeding a vineyard.
It is June now. In Sept it will be very hot and very dry here. And these vines will be watered with laboratory precision, and loaded with luscious grapes.
And the end result? YUM YUM YUM! The first 2012 OK cherries are just getting ripe, and I have hit the fruit stands already. The cherries alone are worth the trip out here.
While I am standing by the road taking pics I get a reminder of what things used to be like here. Now I used to live my life in running shoes, or "sneakers". A whole book could be written about the fad crazes and conspicuous consumption of running shoes. Nike and Air Jordan, and the exponential evolution of expensive absolutely useless trendy junk footwear in the past 20 years. I always bought cheap runners, and they rotted out quickly, although maybe not so quickly as the expensive ones. They rot out from getting wet, which happens in BC. I used to go thru a few pairs every year, and I always had a collection of half-retted out, use-em-if-you-need-em runners hanging in limbo between storage and landfill.
In 2009, at the start of my original Basstravaganza, I started wearing a pair of black flip-flops. Now it is almost 2013, and I am still wearing the same shoes. Everywhere – except if I absolutely have to wear gum boots. These shoes have walked over the rocky beaches of BC, the concrete streets of Chicago, the jagged lava flows of Oregon, embedded with razor sharp obsidian chunks, and up and down rivers and creeks from California to Van Isle to Wisconsin to Georgia. They work just as well now as ever.
I am sure that flip-flops must be a mistake. A kind of Byron the Bulb in shoeland. The scientist who invented the formula for the rubber is probably long gone, victim of a mysterious suicide, blasted himself in the head with a shotgun. Twice. Very sad. Like the rubber in the first batch of black Yum worms that hit the market, it was eternal. Can’t allow that on the market.
Anyway, I am wearing these old flip-flops, shooting a pic, when I feel a shooting pain in my foot. I look down, and find that I am apparently standing in native grassland, which includes an number of plants other than grasses, one of which is … OUCH!
Prickly pear cactus.
Tiny here in BC, at the very N limit of its range. Nothing like their giant cousins in Arizona and Mexico, where they can grow taller than a man. Here they are measured in inches, not feet. Centimeters actually, cuz this is Canada. But very pretty no matter how you measure them.
What is certain is that ever since the wily bass invaded this part of the world (both LM and SM) they have enjoyed the Vaseaux Lagoons as a kind of love nest. Every spring the biggest bass in Vaseaux Lake would move into the lagoons, pick out a spot along shore and spawn. Local bass fishermen clued into this, and for many years this was the go-to spot for big bass in the OK. This is the place where the(one of many, undocumented) legendary 10 lb LM was caught years ago. Then the province of BC put a spring fishing closure on the lagoons. For most of my life in BC no one was allowed to fish in the lagoons, ever, if I recall. Once maybe 20 years ago, I snuck down in there with my canoe, explored, caught 1 LM where I was not supposed to fish, and got out. And I have never been back.
Rowing only allowed here. Like last year the spring is late and wet, and the whole watershed is inundated with snowmelt from the high ground all around. There are pilings from an old long gone bridge at the lake outlet, and the outflow is hissing around them, moving fast. Easy to go down, hope I will be able to row back up against this current. Just down from the lake outlet the entire shore is smothered with yellow flag iris, as are the shores of both lagoons.
This beautiful plant is one of the most vigorous aquatic invasives in the world. Native to Europe, it has spread all over N America, including Van Isle. I once picked up a little clump that was floating loose on Quennel Lake, and took it out to my property in Clayoquat Sound, and tossed it into a bathtub on the porch that was fed by a small hose from the creek. It lived quite happily there with my pet bass Arnold, and flowered every year with no more sustenance than water for years. Needless to say I killed it dead before I left Clayoquat.
The problem comes when you let it loose in a lake or sluggish stream, where it colonizes the entire shoreline and converts it into a monoculture of tules with swordlike leaves 9 ft tall.
In case fishing is slow I have brought with me today a copy of the Oliver Chronicle, one of the world’s greatest newspapers. I say this not because I really care much about what passes for newz in the mainstream media, but because this is the only newspaper I know of in Canada that has as its logo – a BASS!
The current, which is usually almost nill here in summer, is running fast down the channel, and I slip into the calm water of the first lagoon. Well, the spawn is over now. If you look close along shore you can see thousands of little black wiggly dots. These are baby bass, days old, hatched off the spawning beds that their parents scoured in the shallows, which are still very visible also.
And even tho the bass are no longer on their beds, there are still adult bass in here as well. This lagoon drops off steeply from shore, and the bottom is cobbly gravel. Perfect for SMs, and that is what is in here. Over the hour and a half I catch about 20 on black Yum worms. On the W side of the river is the bed of the old RR that used to run down from Kelowna, now converted into a hiking/biking path. A family has hiked in from somewhere, and I get them to take a pic of me with a nice SM. This is about the biggest one I caught in here.
Back out into the main channel now, drifting down to the 2nd lagoon, too close to shore when I get tangled in a shrub hanging over from the bank. If I give one big yank with the oar I will push loose and spin into the 2nd lagoon, but as I pull on the oar something awful happens – the oarlock breaks instead.
Now there is an old adage about "being up Shit Creek without a paddle". This is supposed to be a bad situation. But I have been there many times, and let me tell you it is not that bad. You can always float back on the current. Being a half mile DOWN the OK River without only 1 paddle, in a pontoon boat, during high water, is worse. Pontoons are designed to be rowed, and they are almost unmanageable with a paddle. I am barely able to pull myself into the lower lagoon before I get swept by. I spend another hour paddling around the still water of the lagoon, fishing, pondering my fate, trying to figure a way to get back upriver to my car.
This lagoon has much shallower sloping shores, with more mud and weed and downed trees. Looks much more like LM water, and it is. I catch a dozen on so LMs. Nothing big. This was probably the biggest.
In Lagoon #2 I catch only a single SM, a nice one about 2 lb. This LM suffered a huge wound, probably from an eagle or osprey attack. Nearly severed its backbone, and yet it healed over and the fish appears to be fine. This illustrates why bass are such a perfect species for catch & release fishing. They can take a shitkickting and keep on ticking, unlike trout or salmon.
The species that makes up most of the biomass of freshwater fish in the OK watershed is another introduced species – carp. The European or German carp were introduced to N America in the 1800s, and probably migrated up the OK River along with the bass. Like bass they are great leapers, but unlike they bass they are not aggressive predators, so the multimillion dollar "sport" fishery for bass does not exist for carp. In Europe carp are said to be a delicacy, but in N America almost no one eats them. There are millions of tons of carp swimming around our lakes and rivers, taking away valuable space and resources from native species, and there are millions of people on food stamps in the US eating cheap plastic crap that imitates food. But almost no effort made to convert all that carp protein into nourishment for humans or livestock.
The entire OK lake chain if full of carp. Many of them are grandgrandaddies, over 20 lbs. These are big fish, and you can see them cruising all around the clear waters of the lagoon.
Sometimes they swim right under my pontoon.
I have been whining to myself about my fate – adrift in paradise with only 1 paddle, when I come up with a brilliant idea. I think back to my trip to Cuba, to Cienfuegos, where the local fishermen make boats out of whatever is available, like pieces of Styrofoam washed in on shore. And they make their oarlocks by tying their oars (made of tree branches) around Y-shaped pieces of wood (the oarlocks) with strips of old rags. I quickly lash the an oar onto the broken oarlock with some 1/4" poly, and presto – I have 2 working oars again.
As I get ready to head back out of the lagoon I meet another fisherman coming in, a local. He tells me the fishing was much better here a couple weeks ago. And in a few more weeks he will not be fishing in the lake any more, cuz he says that the big SMs all head upstream and spend the summer hanging out in the canal, where the water is flowing more oxygenated. I have long suspected this, but I have never found a way in to this part of the river. He tells me that you can launch below the lowest drop structure and float down to the lake, then motor back up. He also says that the last time he was in the lagoon he was catching "kokanee" (he called them) 3-5 lbs, on bass plugs. I suspect that these fish are not kokanee (landlocked freshwater sockeye) but real migrant sockeye returning from the N Pacific.
I bid him farewell, and start rowing back upriver. My jerry rigged oarlock works well, but I come to one spot where the current is ripping so hard around a point that I cannot row fast enough to make any, headway, even if I risk giving myself a heart attack. Lucky for me I am in a boat I can pick up and carry few minutes upstream, which is not a problem except for dodging all the prickly pear in my flip-flops.
Back in the car now, I will head up to look at the spot in the canal that the guy just told me about. I drive up to OK Falls. Just as McIntyre Bluff forms a natural obstruction to water flow, with a lake about it, so did a bluff in this area form ledge of bedrock, that created a waterfall and acted as an outlet control for the lake above – in this case the much bigger Skaha Lake. And like at McIntyre Bluff the irrigation and "reclamation" people have been at work here too. There is a dam across the spot. This is the highest of the 13 drop structures that control water flow down the OK valley in BC. Above this dam you are pass thru 8 miles of Shaka Lake and then another 2 miles of river (canal) and then you are into the gigantic Okanagan Lake.
There is a sign here about efforts by the native bands to re-establish sockeye runs, and stating that there is to be no retention of sockeye from the river by non-natives. If you look closely you can see a native guy fishing off the dam, trying to snag sockeye. He did not have any bites while I was there.
As mentioned, these dams were not designed to allow for fish passage. But fish are able to jump the drop structures at certain flow levels, Right now there is a heckuva lotta water comin down the rio, and it would be hard for anything to jump the velocity barrier between the headgates.
Looking at that pic also reminds me of why it was so hard to row upstream in the pontoon. That is a lot of water moving.
If you drive down the opposite side of the canal from the hwy you pass 2 more drop structures, and there is an access and parking lot beneath the lowest one. I must come back here again later in summer, when the flows are down …
I get another box of cherries next morn. I have not had a job since I left City of Ashland, and I have been toying with the idea of picking fruit in the OK for part time employment. These cherries do it for me. They are just too too luscious. I ask the people at the fruitstand, and they tell me to go across to the fruitstand on the other side of the hwy, owned by the cousin who owns both stands, and next thing I know … I am hired! Show up Saturday morn!
This is great news – I think. But there is a drawback. The old Volvo is up to its old trix again. Sputtering dead in the road at random times for no apparent reason. I am at my wits end, but every time I think I have it fixed it happens again. It is Thursday, and I have a day and half to get my act together, and I want to do some basin before I start cherry picking. So I decide to head up over the mountain to Christina Lake, mother of all bass lakes in the interior. It is a beautiful morn, but the car is in a bad mood, which makes me uptite. Losing power on a busy steep 2 lane mountain hwy with big roaring loaded B-train semis on my tail makes me uptite for some reason.
Hwy 3 is busier this year. Over the past few years the giant sawmill complex outside of Midway has been mothballed, but this year I see it is back in operation.
The logs are second growth now, zillions of little peckerpoles. Sign of the times. There used to be many mills, and the logs were much bigger. Now the logs are small, the there is one huge mill.
The car dies again, this time on a curve, with a big loaded lumber truck coming up behind. No shoulders on the hwy here. This guy is going to be pissed if I just roll gradually to a stop in front of him, where there is no passing lane. But just as he catches up the motor catches again, and I pull away. This is getting nerve-wracking. Then it happens again, but this time the engine will not restart. I am rolling down a straightaway, no apron here, only 1 chance, so I roll to a stop crosswise into the only driveway, a couple miles outside of the historic mining town of Greenwood. The car will not restart. I will not get to Christina Lake this morn.
All the many previous times this fuel problem – if that is what it is – has plagued me the car has restarted aftera few minutes, or at most a half hour. But today it is an hour already. It is very hot out. The lady in the house above drives down, on her way into town. There is barely room for her to get by me onto the hwy. I tell her about my problem, and promise that the old Volvo always starts in the end. But as a last resort I get permission to use her phone to call a tow truck. Every 15 minutes or so I try starting the car again. Too hot to sit in the car, so I go across and sit next to Boundary Creek. Trying to read a book, but I am too nervous. My mind keeps revolving into trying to estimate the cost of a tow truck from Greenwood to Anywhere. Probably less than the budget of a small third world country. After an hour I the lady comes back from Greenwood, but I am still there. Finally, after 2 ½ hours sitting in the hot sun, the old Volvox sputters to life … and dies. Little by little I nurse it back to idling, but as soon as I touch the throttle it dies. Finally it runs long enough for me to turn around in the driveway. Progress!
The Christina Lake Plan is long forgotten. Even Cortes turned back when faced with truly overwhelming odds. And only a fool would drive this car further into the mountains. I get back out on the road, heading back to the OK, but the car dies after a couple miles, and coast in to spend another 15 minutes in another driveway. If I can just get to Rock Creek there is a garage. I fill with gas at Rick Creek, and start up the long switchback onto Anarchist Mountain. The car seems to be running better now, but suddenly it dies. Oh no. I am going up a steep grade on a 2 lane hwy, with a big semi coming up from behind, and another semi coming down in the oncoming lane. There is no shoulder on the road, nowhere to pull off. I am slowing down, and I have no power. Up ahead there is a concrete barrier along the other side of the road to keep you from going over the cliff. Just at the end of the barrier is a small pad a cement, a little bigger than a Volvo. No time the think about it. Fortune favors the bold. I swerve the Volvo across the road directly across the path of the big rig barreling downhill, and jerk to a stop before going over the edge. The 2 semis pass, wondering what the H? After 30 seconds the car runs fine, and I continue on to Osoyoos.
Well, fortune might favor the bold, but not the totally stupid. I am a nervous wreck on the road, always looking ahead for a place to pull over if the motor dies. Can’t go on like this. Cannot afford to pay to have my car towed back to Van Isle. I’m gonna have to bail out on my fruitpicking job. Can’t have a job if you can’t guarantee getting to work on time. Thie basstravaganza is over.
I load up with a huge box of fresh delicious cherries and head home. On the way up out of the OK valley you go by Spotted Lake. This is a very shallow pit with no outlet. The winter rainwater raises the lake level, and then it evaporates all summer. Since it has no outlet the chemicals leached out by the rain in the lake’s little watershed build up in solution in the water, until they precipitate as salts that form strange geometric patterns.
I see that the lake has been fenced, and is under the ownership and protection of the Similkameen Band.
No Tresspassing
O well, this does not look like a good bass lake anyway.
Heading up the Similkameen R now, above Keremeos the farming and orchards stop. Just pasture along the river now, and steep bare sock mountains.
If you climbed up to the top of one of these slides you could wiggle a big boulder loose and it might crash all the way down to the valley floor. Way cool!
Since there are few trees here it is easy to see and "read" the rocks. There were a lot of mines around here, especially around the turn of the 20th century. One of the biggest and richest was the famous Nickel Plate mine above Hedley. I see a sign pointing up to the Hedley mine, so I start up thinking it will only be a couple miles. But I can see that the road switchbacks steeply way up the mountain. I don’t want to push the limping Volvo up this road, so I head on home.
I am up in Manning Park now, and the hiccups in the Volvo are less frequent. I stop at Rhodo Grove.
There rhodos are in full bloom right now.
That is why I stopped!
The red currant bushes are also in flower.
I always like to stop an cool the Volvo’s jets among the giant cedars in Sumallo Grove. You are over the crest now, all downhill to Vancouver from here.
In BC the mountains run N>S, but the US border runs E>W. It is relatively easy to build roads running from the US into BC, and vice versa. But damned hard to build a road over and across all the mountain chains between the ocean and Alberta. That road is Hwy 3, which closely follows the path of the first white man’s road across BC, the Dewdney Trail.
The Dewdney Trail
In the mid-1800s an odd political process kept repeating itself, as large chunks of N America were transferred from Euro colonial owners to the growing US empire. The process was always the same. US citizens would emigrate into an area. Most cared little about the interests of their colonial overlords – Spanish or British - and even less about the interests of the native people, who they subjected to pillage and genocide. Eventually there would be reprisals - however feeble - from the aboriginals, and attempts by authorities to bring the "Americans" under some kind of control. The US immigrants then cried foul, and called for support from the US military to protect them from bloodthirsty savages and bureaucrats who were infringing on the right to Free Enterprise. When the troops got in there, the rest was only a matter of time. The area became annexed to the Unites States of America. This happened first in Texas, and next in California. At that time the remainder of the W coast up to Alaska was claimed by Britain, but it was not a colony. It was the preserve of a private business entity, the Hudson’s Bay Company.
Unlike the concept of a banana republic, in which the US assassinates legitimate leaders and replaces them with carefully trained puppets who will front for the interests of the leading multinational, there was no false front of democracy involved here. No make-believe elections. Great Britain owned the land, and HBC administered it as a business for profit. HBC had only one interest: furs. HBC relied on native people to harvest the furs, so they stayed on good terms with them to facilitate trade. They had no interest in colonizing their lands, so their presence consisted of just a few ‘factors" at widely scattered "factories" (trading houses) which only grew enough crops to support themselves. These factories or forts extended all the way from Hudson’s Bay across what is now W Ontairo, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, BC, W Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. By area, HBC was the biggest company in the world.
HBC saw the powerful expanding Colossus to the South as a threat to its corporate empire. There was a lot of sentiment in the US for something called "Manifest Destiny", which is somewhat similar to the philosophies of Genghis Khan and Adolf Hitler. HBC felt the pressure from the S, and decided to turn the new border zone into an economic wasteland. In those days the only resource of value (so HBC thought) was fur, so they tried to turn the Oregon Territory into a fur desert. Instead of trying to harvest furs on s somewhat sustainable basis as across the rest of their holdings, they tried to trap all the beavers out of Oregon. If there are no furs nobody will want to come here, they reasoned.
It did not work. In the 1840s US immigrants began traveling overland on what became the Oregon Trail. The first couple years, those that survived the tough journey across the continent arrived late in fall or early winter, starving and broke, at Fort Vancouver. This was the HBC factory at the junction of the Columbia and Willamette Rs, gateway to the lush Willamette Valley. HBC chief factor John McLaughlin did not really want a bunch of foreigners arriving on his turf, but out of kindness and common human decency he fed them, got them back on their feet, and eventually sold them tracts of land on which to farm. This generosity was soon repaid in reverse. Within a few years there was a surge of US immigrants, who often fought with and murdered the natives, who fought back. The US immigrant population now greatly outnumbered the HBC staff, so they kicked HBC out, confiscated their properties (sawmills, grain mills, property, etc), and left McLaughlin a broken and dejected man. The US military came in to "preserve the peace" and soon the USA had 2 more stars on its flag, for Oregon and Washington.
Even tho the Canada/US border had been settled on as the 49th parallel from Lake Superior to the Pacific Ocean, many people in the US did not accept it. In a recent presidential election one candidate (the loser) ran on a "54 40 or Fight!" platform, meaning that the US would either get everything between Washington and Alaska by treaty with Britain, or simply invade and conquer it. HBC was on the defensive, and had already moved its headquarters from Fort Vancouver on the Columbia up to Victoria, on Vancouver Island. Then the unthinkable happened, and the fur trading empire of HBC was shattered forever. Gold was discovered on HBC lands, along the Fraser R.
HBC Chief Factor in Victoria, James Douglas, had worked for the company for many years at Fort Vancouver. He had seen the demise of the corporate empire, along with British hegemony, in the Oregon Territory. Texas, California, Oregon, Washington, like dominoes, one after another, all tipped and leaning with immense political pressure on the little man in the hastily built shanty town on Van Isle. He was a brilliant, if sometimes authoritarian, administrator. He knew that gold would bring increased "prosperity", and tax revenues. And hordes of rowdies with guns, coming up from the south. In 1858 he sent a shipment of gold panned from the Fraser down to the mint in San Francisco. The result was electric.
Every space on every ship N from SF was instantly bought up. Military men deserted, policemen and judges quit their jobs. Those who could not get a berth on a ship started hiking N overland. Within a month, the tiny HBC fort of Victoria with its few surrounding farms and houses was smothered with 30,000+ goldseekers, mostly men, mostly armed, and many of the most vociferous and highly armed newcomers were believers in the ideology of US Manifest Destiny. Douglas had at his disposal only a few local constables, and a couple British Naval ships, no revenue, and no presence at all on the mainland – where the gold was – other than a few remote factories. To shift the odds further, many of the gold seekers were from the southern US, and were pro-slavery. They had a special gripe about taking orders from James Douglas. He was a black man.
How is it then that the province of BC even came into existence? Given this balance of power in 1858, how could BC not have become the next US state? A lot of the reason has to do with the Dewdney Trail, and the genius of James Douglas.
Douglas immediately imposed a $5/ month mining license regulation. This generated revenue, with which he could hire a few constables and begin to hire a bureaucracy. Once the miners got their license and supplies in Victoria they would head over to the mainland, and up the Fraser R. The navy could monitor and patrol the mouth of the river, so HBC and the British maintained some degree of control over the first year of the rush. But in 1859, 2 US soldiers in Washington were chased N over the border by pursuing natives. At Rock Creek, where it joins the Kettle R, where I scared the hell out of 2 truck drivers, they happened to find gold. Suddenly there was another gold rush, but access was not up the Fraser. The easy way into the Kettle R country was up the Columbia R from Washington, and you could also get up to the Fraser rush from here. Douglas suddenly had hordes of gold hungry, 54 40 or Fight Yankees threatening to swarm across hundreds of miles of undefended, near wilderness national border. He had no troops to defend the border, and no way to get troops to the border anyway.
Douglas realized that the only way to prevent US annexation was to build a road across the Canadian side of the boarder. Instantly. A contract was let, and Douglas selected the offer from Edgar Dewdney. The original Dewd. Aka "His Dewdness" or "El Dewderino". In 1860 he hired crews and began slashing thru the rainforest from Fort Hope on the Fraser across the mountains toward Rock Creek and the Okanagan.
Near the W entrance to Manning Park there is a hysterical marker dedicated to the Dewd.
Now that there was gold, the British had a reason to invest in their far flung outpost, so the sent a group of Royal Engineers, or sappers, a branch of the British army. The sappers surveyed the route, and the Dewd’s men cleared it. In steep places they rolled rocks down from above to form a level path for horses and pedestrians.
After this first part of the trail was built it was upgraded by the Royal Engineers into a wagon road, which you can see here to the left of the hwy.
The original trail built by the sappers and the Dewd is now largely obliterated by the grading and pavement of modern Hwy 3.
But in places the new road diverges slightly, and the original route. If you hike up the hill for 5 minutes here you get to the old trail.
You can see how much rock they had roll to build this road.
In the depth of the rainforest, the old Dewdney Trail abides.
This part of Hwy 3 follows the Sumallo R, a trib of the Skagit. It runs right beside the road in many places, and it is a nice place to stop, slip into a pair of waders, and fish for trout. In the first pool I get a nice RB on a spinner.
And another in the second pool, and another in the thrid pool. I am driving down the road, fishing one pool at a time, catching 1 fish per pool. The next pool I fish is very long, and I get not a bite until I drag the spinner deep across the tailout, where I hook a bigger fish. And this one is not a planted RB.
This is Salvelinus confluentus, the Bull Trout. A new species for the basstravaganza. In fact, this is the first bull trout I have ever caught in my life. Native only to cold mountain waters, this extremely predatory fish is very vulnerable to habitat disruption and overfishing. Over much of their range in the US they are listed as an endangered species. I carefully release the fish back into the river.
At the next pool a monster thunderstorm erupts, and I run back to the car, soaked.
Time to head home.
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