We recently stopped in Canmore, Alberta to visit a dear friend. Canmore is a winter and summer sports community adjacent to the Rocky Mountains and has marvellous, breathtaking views of them.
Our friend’s house has a rooftop deck from where the mountain vistas are truly amazing.
Still lots of snow on those peaks. Three Sisters peaks.
It was great to see our friend again after almost a year. He certainly lives in a beautiful community and gets to see these views every day.
The northern end of the Okanagan Valley has many lakes in a beautiful string all along the valley bottom. They are much smaller than Okanagan Lake. but all of them are long, narrow fjord lakes.
Kalamalka Lake is one such.
These lakes provide both recreation and agricultural irrigation …
We are heading out on Saturday for a big road trip to Toronto and back which will be closely followed by another one around Iceland. Since at the moment we’re so busy getting ready, I’m closing comments here but I’ll still be visiting your blogs and keeping up with your posts.
If you’re in the northern hemisphere, I hope that spring has sprung for you or that you’re getting close. Happy Thursday. 🌺
We live near the Penticton Creek and I love to walk along its length. The trees, birds and sound of the water are all definitely very relaxing.
The creek is beginning to run quite high at the moment and all the nearby trees and bushes have leafed out or turned green, so it’s beautiful to walk there in the sunlight.
This last section of creek before it empties into Okanagan Lake is lined with cement from the early 1950s when the city leadership thought this approach would help to control flooding. That notion certainly didn’t pan out; all it did was cause a serious problem for our landlocked salmon – kokanee – to swim upstream to spawn.
Most of the creek has now been revitalised and returned to its natural state with the rest to be completed in the next couple of years. With ladders in that last bit of unrestored creek, the kokanee are beginning to return home. The picture above from last autumn shows them on their way to mountain lakes. Unfortunately, not all of them make it as you can see, but that’s how it is in the natural world.
We took a long-way-around drive in the countryside to visit a favourite winery.
We tried a new production year of a wine we have repeatedly enjoyed and also admired the view from the huge floor-to-ceiling windows of their very comfortable tasting room.
Many of their vines suffered in the unexpected January cold snap and they have been severely pruned back so that the plants’ energy can be diverted into root recovery rather than spent on fruit growth.
This particular winery will get past this difficulty because it has stored juice from previous years and they have survived hard times before by creating (and succeeding hugely with) unique blends. Unfortunately, many others, especially the small ones, don’t have that kind of fallback. I understand that the government will be allowing wineries to buy juice from Ontario (and will also subsidise costs) until this hurdle has been cleared.
On the way home we stopped in several places to take a walk and enjoy the views and although we had a couple of sun showers we didn’t see that as a negative.