Tag Archives: vernon

One for the Porcupine

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So, you think you’re going to build a trail system across the porcupine’s trail to an orchard’s compost pile, eh, and water some trees along it to protect the people on the trail from spray drift from the orchard. Yeah, sure. You just go try that.

Trickle Irrigation Hose, Gnawed

Good thing the water was turned off to this system a few years back, due to lack of funds to maintain what was started. When a development goes bankrupt, all environmental promises are annulled.

The farmer continues to use the compost pile. The farm has been in the family for generations. I’m sure they know the score. All that was achieved, really, was a bunch of dead trees and a continually irritated porcupine.

Just to be clear: this is not a wild porcupine, but a relationship between a farm and a hill, with prickly bits and hose-cutting teeth.

The Centre of the Earth

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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 cinder cone that anchored the ridge coming into the center of the image from the right. The high points on that ridge are broken chunks of old seabed, lifted in tilted slabs into the sky by a thrust of hot, or even molten, rock coming in from the direction of Terrace Mountain in the distance. The deep Okanagan Fault, and today’s Okanagan Lake, runs through the centre of the image, in front of the blue ridges. Crazy geology! Folds upon folds of the land are here, and in their centre, the volcano around which they pivoted. There, all this pressure of collision was released into energy, expressed as clinker and ash, which the glaciers took away. Want to stand in the middle of the earth? It’s an easy climb.

It’s right there. Up you go. Oh, but first, remember, this earth has many centres. The one below is only five kilometres away, and part of the Turtle Mountain story.

As you move from centre to centre, you are still there. That is one of the lessons the earth teaches.

 

In Praise of Scotch Thistles

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B.C. Hydro, our provincial power provider, is a responsible citizen, and poisoned these invasive thistles last year.

 

It’s the regulation. One wants to protect cattle range from inedible weeds. The thistles responded by coming back tenfold.

They are doing well.

Very well.

Perhaps we should all just accept that the glory days of ranching are over in these parts, which they are…

Slim Pickings

…and provide a home for the last remaining insects of the rich syilx grasslands (here on one of the few surviving native thistles) …

…that were here before the cattle ate everything else down to nothing. This looks like a good start, don’t you think?

We should do this out of respect.

And love.

Big Yellow Bear in the Sagebrush

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Up the hill we go.

Butterflies in the mock orange. How nice!

CRASH! CRACK! BANG! A scurry of activity. One second later:

Then everyone is calm again. Now it’s time to hunker down and wait for Harold to go.

Lots of waiting.

Lots and lots of waiting. Sigh.

But the time to move on eventually comes. Yeah, OK, motorcycle on the road to the golf course up above. People, use a muffler, hey, if you don’t mind.

Harold moves on, too. Well, sorta. His spirit is still there.

What a beautiful morning.

Every day is a great day to meet a grassland bear. This is my fifth. Two were in the dark. I don’t do that anymore!

Such a handsome one, especially!

Thank you, Bear.