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FAIRVIEW–WHITE LAKE ROAD

28 km, all paved

This is one of the classic back-road routes in the Okanagan, linking Oliver to Penticton with a relatively quiet paved road.

START: Highway 97 traffic light in Oliver at 350th Avenue.

TURN WEST OFF the highway onto 350th Avenue and proceed across a bench of orchards. The road then climbs through a small, winding gully filled with water birch and chokecherry. Watch for a sign of a small colony of bank swallows—a cutbank filled with holes— on the left at the bottom of the hill. On summer mornings, you can also listen along the birch draw for the loud whistles of yellow-breasted chats. These large songbirds are considered endangered in British Columbia, since their deciduous thicket habitat has been largely converted to housing and orchards over the years. The males’ songs are a startling variety of loud whistles (like someone whistling for a lost dog), rattles, and squawks.

After a couple of tight corners, the road reaches a broad slope, the alluvial fan of Reed Creek, which drains the mountainside to the west then goes to ground in its own gravel. This slope was the site of Fairview, a once-thriving mining town that simply vanished a few years after the gold supply dried up. My grandfather worked here in the winter of 1907–08, cutting firewood for the steam-driven stamp mill that crushed the gold ore. When my father was born in Penticton in 1914, his birth was registered in Fairview, the main government office in the south Okanagan at that time. By 1920 all the buildings of Fairview had either burned or been moved down the hill to the new community of Oliver.

The gravel soils of Fairview were not considered good for orchards, so the land has largely reverted to its natural state— bunchgrasses and antelope brush. Near the top of the slope, turn right (north) at Fairview–White Lake Road. This road travels through open ponderosa pine woodlands, then hillsides covered in grass and shrubs such as saskatoon and mock orange. This was all thick ponderosa pine forest until 1970, when a major forest fire burned 4,000 hectares west of Oliver. The slow reestablishment of ponderosa pine here is testament to the hot, dry summers that inhibit tree germination. Very few trees have reseeded in the burn area, despite a series of moist summers in the mid-1980s. As summers become longer and hotter over the next century in the Okanagan Valley and fires become more common, more ponderosa pine forests will be converted to grasslands.

Another outcome of long, hot summers—and increasing development— is the lowering of local water tables. The small pond on the west side of the road about 2 kilometres north of the Fairview junction is often much larger—sometimes extending for several hundred metres—but lately it is usually only a small circle of water.

After passing a short series of small rural holdings, the road begins to follow a tiny stream that drains Burnell (Sawmill) Lake in the hills to the west. The birches along the creek are a good place to look for hummingbirds—the males often perch atop dead branches to watch for passing females. The two common species in this habitat are black-chinned hummingbirds (males have a solid black throat and green flanks) and calliope hummingbirds (males have a streaky spray of magenta feathers on the throat).

A green gate on the west side of the road marks the access track to the Susie Mine, a shaft dug to extract gold. Now abandoned and blocked with a grate, the shaft is well-known among local biologists as an important roost site for bats. The Okanagan Valley has the highest bat diversity in Canada, with fourteen species flying through the summer night skies. Just past the Susie Mine, you’ll pass the University of British Columbia Geology Camp, a collection of rustic buildings on the west side of the road. Each year, students spend a few weeks in May at a field school, sited here because of the tremendous diversity of geological formations in the south Okanagan.

North of the geology camp, the road follows Victoria Creek, a slightly bigger brook that drains another pair of lakes in the hills to the west, Madden and Ripley. Secrest Road branches off to the east, providing a shortcut back to Oliver via Highway 97. If you take that route in April, watch for a spectacular showing of yellow balsamroot flowers on the sandy bench.

Keeping left on the Fairview–White Lake Road, you pass through a remnant grove of old ponderosa pines spared by the 1970 fire. This habitat is favoured by western bluebirds, attracted by the nest boxes unobtrusively affixed to the pine trunks. The road then follows the west edge of a large flat covered by high grasses. This area, known as Meyers Flat, is formed from the deposits of four small creeks that filled this basin with sand and gravel; most of the water flow here is below the ground. The public land around Meyers Flat is part of the White Lake Grasslands Protected Area, set aside by the provincial government to protect the rare and diverse natural heritage in the hills between Okanagan Falls and White Lake.

The north end of Meyers Flat is taken up by the rural community of Willowbrook. As you pass it on the west, you come to the junction of Green Lake Road on the right. This is an interesting route to Okanagan Falls (section 7). For now, keep going straight north, and note the alfalfa fields on the west side of the road. The road enters a small draw, with open ponderosa pine forests on the east side and dense Douglas-fir forests on the west.

After winding through the upper part of the draw, the road reemerges into the main valley, with a small creek, Park Rill, hugging the west side of the road. This route was part of the famous Hudson’s Bay Company Brigade Trail, along which fur traders carried goods between Fort Kamloops to the north and Fort Okanogan, on the Columbia River, to the south. Many of these traders were French–Canadians, and Park Rill got its name from the French parc, meaning “corral”—after an encampment along the stream west of White Lake. The road then leaves Park Rill and winds up a hill, eventually emerging into the large White Lake Basin, a natural bowl of sagebrush and grass about 2 kilometres across. This is one of the most well-known natural areas in the valley and the site of intensive conservation work over the past few decades.

The cliffs along the east side of the basin are composed almost entirely of volcanic rock. About 55 million years ago, when the Okanagan Valley was forming, this area was a very active volcanic site, and the White Lake Basin was filled with layers of lava and sediments about 3,000 metres thick. The basin has no outlet; all spring meltwaters find their way into White Lake, an alkaline pond in the southeast quadrant of the bowl. There they gradually evaporate in the increasing heat of the spring days, and by summer—sometimes even as early as late April or May—there is nothing left but an expanse of greyish-white salt.

For a brief period in spring, the lake is a frenzy of life. The water quickly fills with brine shrimp, the small crustaceans popularly known as “sea monkeys.” These animals mature rapidly, mate, and produce eggs that can withstand the prolonged dry period each year. The shrimp are fed upon by Wilson’s phalaropes, attractive little sandpipers that spin in the water to stir the animals up, then pick them up with long, pointed bills. Phalaropes are unusual in the bird world in that the females are larger and more brightly coloured than the males. The females display to attract the males, mate with them, then leave them—a true reversal of roles. The males then incubate the eggs and raise the young by themselves. Flocks of ducks use the lake as a migration stopover on their way to breeding grounds in central British Columbia, the Yukon, and Alaska. In wet years, a few pairs of ducks or grebes may even stop to nest at White Lake, but the lake usually empties quickly as the waters disappear into the hot summer air.

The spring waters also bring in two amphibians of the dry grasslands. Great Basin spadefoot toads gather along the shores of White Lake in late April, the males croaking loudly to call in females. Spadefoot eggs hatch quickly, and the tadpoles develop within a month in a race to become air-breathing adults before the water dries up. Tiger salamanders also come here to mate and lay eggs, but the lake produces adult salamanders only in years when the waters are deep and the spring is cool and wet, so that the lake remains full well into summer. Both these species spend their adult lives in the dry grasslands of the basin, hunting insects and other small prey by night. They also share the habit of burrowing deep beneath the ground to escape the scorching heat of summer and the frosts of winter. They are both considered species at risk because of habitat loss in the British Columbia grasslands.

A green metal gate at the southern entrance to the basin points the way to a dirt track that leads down to the lake and beyond. An interpretive sign explains the conservation efforts that are underway around White Lake; the Nature Trust of British Columbia owns a ranch on the west side of the basin and controls grazing on the rest of it. The organization’s goal is to maintain grazing on the land in such a way that it does not degrade the biodiversity of the area, a common problem when there are too many cows and too little grass.

The big attraction at White Lake for naturalists is its healthy cover of big sagebrush. While sagebrush is also found in abundance north of the Okanagan in the Thompson and Fraser valleys, White Lake is the northern limit for a number of animals that are dependent on this plant for survival. A few pairs of sage thrashers nest here in most years, and you can usually hear good numbers of Brewer’s sparrows giving their long, trilling songs. The common birds in the grasslands are western meadowlarks, which fill the spring air with loud, musical song, and the less conspicuous vesper sparrows, flashing white outer tail feathers as they fly away through the shrubs. If you walk through the sagebrush, you can usually see the tunnelling runways of montane voles cut through thicker areas of grass. These greyish, short-tailed mice are related to lemmings and have similar population cycles; when vole populations are up, the mouse-hunting birds stop to nest, and you might be lucky enough to see a northern harrier coursing over the grass or a pair of short-eared owls hunting in the late evening.

The road comes to a T-junction as it reaches the north side of the basin. A left turn will take you to Twin Lakes and then out to Highway 3A, where you could continue on to Keremeos and Vancouver. We will turn right to return to Highway 97 just south of Penticton.

At the northeast end of the basin you can’t help but notice a huge array of poles and wire and several large parabolic antennas pointed at the sky. This is the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory, a National Research Council project that probes the most distant parts of the universe. It was sited here because the natural bowl at White Lake shields the observatory from most radio interference from the outside world. The pole-and-wire array was used to map various sources of long-wave radio emissions in the Milky Way as well as more distant galaxies. These long waves can only penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere during periods of very low sunspot activity, so they were primarily monitored during a sunspot minimum in the 1960s. The parabolic antennas are designed to detect radio signals from hydrogen atoms in order to map matter in the Milky Way. The observatory grounds and visitors’ centre are open year-round; check signs at the parking area for times. Visitors must walk 400 metres into the site, because car engines interfere with the sensitive instruments in the observatory.

About a kilometre north of the observatory entrance, you’ll notice a series of low rock cuts on the east side of the road. Most of the rock is sandy-coloured, but it has distinct blackish veins. The black is essentially coal—the White Lake Basin once had a number of small coal mines in the early 1900s. Unfortunately for the miners, the coal seams were generally small, and the coal contained too much sulphur to command a decent price; the last shipment was made in 1933. But the present attraction of these black veins is the number of fossils they produce. These rocks were laid down as mud and sand along slow-moving rivers or lakeshores in the Eocene Period, when the White Lake area was in the midst of its volcanic activity. The forests at that time were dominated by dawn redwood, a relative of modern sequoias and redwoods that survives in the wild today only in one part of China. Dawn redwoods are deciduous conifers, so the branchlets of needles they shed each fall accumulate on the forest floor and are extremely common in the fossils found in these rock cuts.

The road continues north through ponderosa pine forests and residential acreages, then winds down to meet Highway 97 along a small stream known officially as the Marron River, though it is only a brook flowing in the ditch along the road. Marron is a French word meaning “a tame animal that has gone wild”; this river’s name refers to the wild horses common in the area. At the highway junction you can turn north to Penticton or south to Okanagan Falls and Oliver.

focus Big Sagebrush

Sagebrush is one of the iconic plants of the West. Its soft grey foliage and distinctive aroma define many of the valleys and high plains from New Mexico to central British Columbia, where it reaches its northern limit along the Fraser River west of Williams Lake. Even though they are usually only a metre or so high, the plants provide shade and cover for all of the wildlife species found in the grasslands they inhabit, and many of those species are so closely tied to sagebrush that they are rarely found away from it. Three birds are even named after it—the sage grouse, the sage thrasher, and the sage sparrow; there are also the sagebrush buttercup, the sagebrush mariposa lily, and the sagebrush vole.

Sagebrush is superficially similar to two other common grassland shrubs in the Okanagan; its three-toothed leaves distinguish it from the common rabbitbrush, which has narrow, linear leaves, and the soft, grey look to its foliage separates it from the larger, ganglier antelope brush. If you have any doubt, just gently crush some leaves in your fingers; the sharp smell of sage should be immediately obvious.

Like cedar bark, sagebrush bark is fibrous, aromatic, and easily stripped off the larger stems. It likely has insect repellent properties similar to those of cedar as well. Sage thrashers strip the bark off the stems to line their sage-twig nests. The bark was also used by local Native people to weave fabric for clothing.

Although sagebrush is still widespread, about 70 per cent of its former range in western North America has been converted to agriculture or burned and replaced by introduced grasses such as crested wheat-grass and cheatgrass. Many of the animals reliant on it are considered species of concern in both Canada and the United States.