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 […]
Chikamin Pish
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 […]
Strike Out!
Ah, sometimes you bite into an apple and get a mouthful of delicious irony. Here, for instance, is a BC Tree Fruits radio spot ad about marketing local apples, presumably from the […]
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 […]
Where are the Birds?
Used to be that the waxwings, crows, and robins would pretty well pick the land clean down to its bones. And now? The Birds are Gone What is a poor elderberry bush […]
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 […]
