Late afternoon in the grasslands. November. Light’s almost gone. Cloud everywhere. Nothing much to look at here. Zzzz. Or, maybe there is. Have a look just down the trail. The guys building […]
The Power of Names and Stories
Take this (no name, please)… See that rock in back there? That’s this (below, centre of image, again no name, please.): Now, look at the name it is unofficially known by (Sorry. […]
Practical Ways to Re-Indigenize the Grasslands. Really.
Two days ago, I suggested that the former grassland hillsides of the Okanagan Valley (now large, private expanses of unproductive and water-wasting weeds), an area at least equal to the 100s of […]
The Salt-Loving Bees of the Okanagan’s Glacial Rivers
When glaciers lay in the valley, rivers ran along the side of the ice, high up, 170 metres above today’s shore. They tell a tale still of eddies, currents, and washed-out and […]
How The Sun Makes Rich Soil
It’s simply beautiful how it is done. First, water sorts out the finest grains of silt, and deposits them on the surface of low points in the earth, filling them in. Then […]
The Centre of the Earth
The cinder cone is gone, but the bones of the land remain. This is my city, Vernon, viewed from its northeast rim. In the center left of the image is the old […]
The Beautiful Angles of the Grassland, or Baby, We Love You for More than Your Curves
Those of us who talk about grasslands, talk about their rounded curves a lot. Hey, Glaciers, thanks for that. This is a land held in tension against wind and light, using opposition […]
The Troll’s Toad
I was writing a week ago how the stone in the Basalt Sea where I live breaks apart along fracture lines that reveal, over and over again, faces. For some reason, stone […]
A Canadian Education
Canada is a big country. Here’s a tiny piece of it in the west. What you’re looking at is a bit of a collision between a volcano and a seabed off the […]
The Snake and Turtle Trail
There is an ancient trail that comes in from spaxmən (Douglas Lake), crosses kɬúsx̌nítkw (Okanagan Lake) below, on the lower left … … and enters a tongue of land called “The Commonage”. The trail […]
Okanagan Okanogan 