Our rocks here aren’t like other rocks. For one thing, like the rocks of most of British Columbia west of the Albertan mountains, it is light, volcanic rock that erupted to form […]
A Chain of Islands
Chikamin Pish
It’s steelhead season. These famed ocean-going trout, the greatest sport fish of the Pacific Northwest, come back every year to spawn. Unlike their cousins, the salmon, they then turn around and go […]
A River Lives On
Wonderful news from Wenatchee, Washington: The proposed Loomis Dam is off. I repeat: the proposed dam on the Similkameen, that would have cost $1 billion to build and flooded the river right […]
The Dirt on Dirt
The Okanagan is full of dirt, but most of it didn’t come from here. It was brought by water. Here’s what I mean: Silt bluffs by Penticton At the end of the […]
Wild Harvest
The fruit that this rich land produces is dependent upon mining the water resources that used to flow down from the hills. As a result of the corresponding loss of spawning channels […]
Choke
When I was a boy in the Similkameen, we were told that choke cherries would, well, choke you. Fruit that grew wild on the land was, we were told, poisonous. Sigh. Such words are […]
Water, Water, Water
In a near-desert landscape, no claim to the land is worth anything if it isn’t also a claim to the water. It’s a truism about First Nations Land Claims. It’s the same […]
The Mystery of the Birds Deepens
On Saturday, I pointed out that the birds and bears are absent from the north end of Okanagan Lake. About a hundred miles to the south, it is a different story: Elderberries […]
Golf
Driving and a golf ball around eighteen holes is a complex kind of mathematics. It takes so much time to get around the course, measured in so and so many strokes at […]
Wild Apples
The American natural philosopher Henry David Thoreau died of tuberculosis in May, 1862. He lived to see the apples bloom that year and begin to swell into fruit, but not to mature […]
Okanagan Okanogan 