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MCKINNEY ROAD TO MOUNT BALDY

40 km, 12 on pavement, the rest on a good gravel road

This route takes you east out of Oliver on a gradual climb to the plateau, eventually reaching Mount Baldy, one of the few points in the Okanagan above tree line.

START: 350th Avenue and Highway 97, Oliver.

FROM HIGHWAY 97, turn east at the stoplight in Oliver—350th Avenue— and continue across the Okanagan River channel bridge. Immediately after the bridge, keep right and follow 362nd Avenue up past the hospital and on to the Osoyoos Indian Reserve. You are on McKinney Road, named after Camp McKinney, a mining site high on the plateau to the east that was important in the late 1800s. Black Sage Road (section 5) exits right (south) off McKinney Road at this point, but keep going straight east for this route. You will be travelling through the Osoyoos Indian Reservation for the next 10 kilometres; please don’t trespass off the road along this stretch.

The road crosses the South Okanagan Land Project canal, which comes out of the Okanagan River at McIntyre Bluff about 8 kilometres north of here and terminates just south of McKinney Road. Built in 1919, the canal is still used today as a water source by many of the orchards and vineyards along its length. After the canal, the road winds into a small valley formed by the waters of Wolfcub Creek. Sandy bluffs on the left (north) side of the road are honeycombed with the nesting burrows of bank swallows. These birds nest in large colonies, digging burrows about a metre deep into sandy surfaces. The males dig the new burrows with their bills, feet, and wings; the burrows protect well against potential nest predators such as hawks and snakes. Being insectivorous, the swallows migrate south in the fall, spending the winter in the warmer climes of South America and returning north in April.

The road climbs out of the creek valley and on to a large, flat terrace. This is Manuel’s Flats, one of the terraces built during the final stages of the glacial period, when sand and gravel were carried out of the mountains and into the valley. The flats built up against the huge glacier that melted in place in the valley bottom. Today they are covered by bunchgrass and sagebrush; they can look desolate on a hot summer afternoon or cold winter day but are alive with song and activity early on a spring morning. Meadowlarks sing from all sides, Brewer’s sparrows belt out their buzzy, canary-like songs, and long-billed curlews give their mournful, whistled calls. Other animals are more secretive, especially the many insects restricted to these dry grasslands. One of them is the ground mantis, Canada’s only native mantis. These insects look like small sage twigs; their cryptic coloration makes them very difficult to find. The females are wingless, so they never fly and give away their position as the larger praying mantises— introduced from Europe—often do.

At the end of the flats, the road climbs gradually through the lower tree line into ponderosa pine woodlands. This is the preferred habitat of the western bluebird, so watch for the flashes of indigo as the birds fly to nest boxes on the fence posts and trees near the road. Near the kilometre 7 point (logging truck drivers use the kilometre signs on the trees to radio their position to their coworkers), the road crosses Wolfcub Creek. Although a relatively small stream, Wolfcub Creek is important to a host of wildlife species, since it provides water throughout the summer in this arid environment. At about kilometre 10, you leave the Indian reserve and enter a mix of public and private lands. A stop at the first cattle guard past the kilometre 10 sign will give you a good taste—or at least smell—of ponderosa pine woodland. Stick your nose into the orange bark and enjoy the aroma of fresh vanilla—the chemical in the bark is the same one used to make artificial vanilla.

I stopped at this point in May 1986 and heard a grey flycatcher calling—chelep chelep, chelep sweep!—the first time this species had been found breeding in Canada. These quintessentially drab birds were traditionally known only from the Great Basin deserts of the American West, but in the late 1960s they began moving north from central Oregon, reaching southern Washington in the early 1970s. They have spread a short distance in the last twenty years and are now found throughout the south Okanagan Valley in open pine forests.

After you pass kilometre 11, watch out on the left for a larger-than-life-sized wooden woodpecker nailed to a tree. This marks “Woodie’s Landing,” a famous spot in the birding lore of British Columbia where a family of white-headed woodpeckers foraged regularly from 2001 through 2004. The rare birds were attracted to this actual spot not by the pines—though ponderosa pine is an essential part of their habitat in the northern half of their range— but by the concentration of mullein in the clearing at the roadside. These spear-like plants are considered an introduced weed, but their seed heads are very attractive to small woodpeckers and chickadees.

The road meanders up through small patches of older ponderosa pine forest, then into a forest dominated by young Douglas-fir. At kilometre 17 it drops into the Baldy Creek valley, which has a nice stand of spruce mixed with western larch. This remnant patch of old-growth forest is home to a number of interesting birds, including a pair of barred owls that nest in one of the large veteran trees.

As you climb out of the Baldy Creek valley, you enter public forest lands, and the dominant landscape is one of clearcuts regenerating to thick, young pine forests. These areas provide a good lesson in forest succession. When they were cut in the 1980s, they closely mimicked the grasslands in the valley bottom, and an array of grassland birds—mountain bluebirds, vesper sparrows, western meadowlark—moved in. Within a few years, the willows, alders, and young aspen had taken over in places, giving moose and elk a good source of winter browse and shrub-nesting birds such as dusky flycatchers a place to breed. The dense stands of lodgepole pine that are there now don’t attract much in the way of birds or mammals, except for widespread generalists such as dark-eyed juncos and yellow-rumped warblers. It will be two hundred years before a climax forest of Engelmann spruce and subalpine fir will become established, boosting the diversity of the region with a long list of species tied to that ecosystem. Unfortunately, forest harvest policies will likely short-circuit the natural progression, returning the site to a thick, young pine forest before the spruce can mature.

At about kilometre 22, you pass a series of wetlands called Coteay Meadows. These are typical plateau sedge marshes, often enhanced by the work of beavers or human engineers with the aim of retaining spring meltwaters throughout the year. You can often see moose feeding in the shallow water, and common yellowthroats, northern waterthrushes, and Lincoln’s sparrows call from the sedges. Before the forests around the ponds were cut, a small colony of great blue herons nested there.

The road goes over a small ridge at kilometre 27, marked by a microwave tower on the south side of the road. The tower is surrounded by a remnant patch of veteran western larch and Engelmann spruce—a great place to look for rarer woodpeckers such as Williamson’s sapsucker and the American three-toed woodpecker.

Coming up from Highway 3 just past kilometre 33, you meet Mount Baldy Road; turn left and you’ll reach the ski village in about 6 kilometres. You are now in pure subalpine forests dominated by subalpine fir and Engelmann spruce. Winter wrens bubble in the thickets, and fox sparrows sing their beautiful whistled songs from the dense brush. Mount Baldy, of course, gets its name from the treeless tundra at its peak; the Native name is Pak-kum-kin, meaning “white top.” A trail to the top of the mountain makes for a pleasant hike on a hot summer day—watch for alpine specialties such as American pipit and white-tailed ptarmigan if you get above tree line.

You can return to Oliver the way you came or take a longer loop back to Highway 3 near Rock Creek (section 1).

focus Western Rattlesnake

Few animals are as widely feared and as poorly understood as the rattlesnake. These reptiles are fairly common but rarely seen in the dry grasslands of the British Columbia Interior and probably reach their highest Canadian population density in the lowlands of the Okanagan Valley from Oliver south to Osoyoos. The western rattlesnake has a line of brownish ovals down its back, somewhat different from the dark brown, distinctly rectangular patches on the back of the gopher snake. If you see the tail, the interlocking scales on the end that form the rattle are distinctive, especially if they are buzzing like a maraca.

Rattlesnakes are largely nocturnal, especially on warm summer nights, tracking their small mammal prey with special heat-sensitive pits near their nostrils. They have long front fangs that fold back when the mouth is closed but open and lock in place to deliver a dose of poison when the snake attacks. Rattlesnakes rarely bite humans; they usually slither quietly away without even so much as a warning rattle. The venom is rarely fatal to humans; its main effect is to start the digestion process, breaking down muscle, arteries, and veins and making the bitten leg or arm blacken and swell. If you encounter a rattlesnake on a trail and it stands its ground, simply back away and detour around it.

Rattlesnakes are long-lived reptiles, and each female gives birth to about five live young only every third year. Because of this slow reproductive capacity, rattlesnake populations are very sensitive to losses from willful killing and roadkill. Be careful when driving back roads in the south Okanagan at night; drive slowly so that you can avoid snakes that are crossing or basking on the warm road surface.