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PENTICTON TO KEREMEOS

41 km, all paved highway

This route takes you from Penticton south to Kaleden on Highway 97, then through the Yellow Lake pass to Keremeos in the Similkameen Valley on Highway 3A.

START: Highway 97 at Skaha Lake, south Penticton; drive west and south on Highway 97.

YOU LEAVE PENTICTON along the natural sand beaches of Skaha Lake. The city of Penticton is built on the deltas of three creeks: Shingle Creek coming from the west, Ellis Creek from the east, and Penticton Creek from the northeast. The first two of these creeks enter the Okanagan River channel from opposite sides halfway between Okanagan and Skaha Lakes, and for millennia their sand has been deposited where the river empties into Skaha Lake. Penticton Creek empties into Okanagan Lake, so its sands contribute to the beaches on the north side of Penticton. Without these deltaic deposits, Skaha Lake would simply be the south end of Okanagan Lake, and Penticton would be deep underwater.

The highway turns south and climbs gently to start a long traverse of the steep hillsides west of Skaha Lake. It first travels through silts deposited by Glacial Lake Penticton at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch about 12,000 years ago. If you look carefully at some of these silt bluffs, you can see that they are made up of a series of horizontal layers, called varves. Each of these layers was laid down in a single year; they grew fastest in summer, when meltwaters carried silt into the lake. Some of the bluffs have clusters of small holes bored into them; these are the nest burrows of bank swallows. These small, brown swallows—with their distinctive brown breastbands—return each year from their wintering grounds in South America to feed on the abundant insect life over the lake and river.

If you pull into the viewpoint on the east side of the highway near the top of the hill, you might see a second species of swallow—the violet-green. These birds nest in rock crevices in the bluffs across the road; they are one of the earliest migrants to return in spring, probably because they travel only as far as California and Mexico for the winter.

The rocks here are largely volcanic, formed during the birth of the Okanagan Valley about 55 million years ago. On the other side of Skaha Lake, you can see the pale cliffs known widely among the climbing fraternity as the Skaha Bluffs. Those rocks are much older than the ones you are driving by on the west side. The Skaha Bluffs are metamorphic rock, gneiss, initially laid down as sedimentary rock on the continental shelf of North America, perhaps as long as 2 billion years ago. Then about 180 million years ago, an arc of large islands collided with the Pacific coast of North America, burying the shelf sediments under kilometres of rock. Under this tremendous pressure and heat, the shelf rocks melted and recrystallized as gneiss. They reappeared when the valley opened up many millennia later.

As the highway levels off, it begins to pass the orchards and fruit stands of Kaleden on the east side of the road and rangeland on the west side. This rangeland is severely overgrazed by wild horses—the contrast between the ungrazed grass on the highway side of the fence and the stubble on the west side is quite striking. In spring, bright yellow balsamroot flowers beam from the less-grazed areas. As you approach the junction with Highway 3A, the habitat changes to an open ponderosa pine forest with antelope brush growing beneath. These shrubs, members of the rose family, are covered with pale yellow blossoms in late April and early May.

Turn west at the junction to follow Highway 3A. The road curves through the birch-and-alder-filled gully of the Marron River (rather ostentatiously named, as it is less than a metre wide), then winds up a steep hill known locally as Roadhouse Hill. The hill is not named after a historical roadhouse on an old stagecoach route but after the Roadhouse family, who once lived in a house at the bottom of the hill. From the top of the hill you can look north to broad slopes covered with sagebrush grasslands; this is the northernmost extensive area of sagebrush in the Okanagan Valley, and similarly the northern limit to sagebrush-dependent species such as the Brewer’s sparrow. The hillside on the south side of the highway is Mount Parker; it was formerly cloaked in a dense Douglas-fir forest, but most of this burned in a large forest fire in 1984. The layered cliffs of Mount Parker, easily visible a few kilometres farther on, are more of the volcanic formations mentioned earlier, lava flows that filled the basin several thousand metres deep.

At the top of Roadhouse Hill, you enter the broader section of the Marron Valley, once part of the important Hudson’s Bay Brigade Trail route. Fur traders travelled north from Osoyoos to Oliver, then through the White Lake Basin to Twin Lakes and the Marron Valley, continuing north via Shingle Creek to Summerland. The road climbs another slope, skirting the south shore of Trout Lake, then passing the junction with the Twin Lakes Road. The golf course here is probably the only one in existence that takes the yellow-bellied marmot as its mascot. These large “groundhogs” are very common in the rocky grasslands, and the golfers undertook an unsuccessful battle against them when the course was first set up. The victorious marmots now symbolize the course and even appear on the clubhouse menu as the “famous Marmot Burger” (presumably not marmot in origin). Marmots are large members of the squirrel family and are true hibernators, sleeping in their underground burrows from late summer through the winter and emerging with the first shoots of green grass in the spring.

If you turn south at the Twin Lakes junction, you will end up at White Lake (section 4), but we will continue on the highway, which enters a narrow, rocky valley before reaching Yellow Lake. This lake has no natural fish population, since its waters normally contain insufficient oxygen for fish to survive the winter, when a thick layer of ice covers the lake’s surface. An aerator was installed in 1977 to alleviate the problem, and after a few initial adjustments, the introduction of rainbow and brook trout has been successful, at least from a sportfishing perspective. At first the aerator was set too deep in the water, and it brought anoxic water and poisonous hydrogen sulphide to the surface, killing the introduced fish. It was also initially operated in the winter, in order to provide oxygen below the ice. However, the biologists found that aeration in the fall and early winter was sufficient, since it served to turn the upper water layers over, bringing surface oxygen to the deeper waters. The lake is now one of the most popular fishing lakes in the province, particularly in winter, when its surface is dotted with keen ice fishers. But ecosystem changes like this always also create losers; the introduction of fish eliminated a large population of tiger salamanders—now an endangered species—from the lake.

Yellow Lake is at 760 metres elevation, and its narrow valley provides a good example of the effect of aspect on vegetation. The hillsides south of the lake, shaded for much of the day, are cloaked in a cool Douglas-fir forest, while the sunny slopes to the north are open grasslands dotted with sagebrush. At Yellow Lake you leave the Okanagan Valley as the road drops steeply into the Keremeos Creek drainage, part of the Similkameen system. Keremeos Creek comes out of a very narrow valley on the northwest side of the highway, marked by a line of large, veteran cottonwood trees, then winds across hay fields to the east.

Just north of the hamlet of Olalla (named after the Chinook jargon word for “berry”—olallie—because of the prevalence of saskatoon berries in this area), watch for mountain goats on the rocky cliffs west of the highway. Their white fur stands out (in summer, at least) against the rocks. Also watch the gravel road cuts on the west side of the road for a distinct layer of white soil. This is ash from the eruption of Mount Mazama in Oregon. This huge volcano blew up about 7,000 years ago, creating what is now known as Crater Lake. The ash spread over much of western North America, and geologists and archaeologists everywhere use it to date rocks or artifacts found just above or below it.

You leave Olalla almost as quickly as you enter it and are now on the northern outskirts of Keremeos. In the southern distance, you can see the talus slopes forming a huge letter “K,” the symbol of the town. From Keremeos you can turn west to follow Highway 3 to Vancouver, or turn east and south to follow the same highway to Osoyoos.

focus Barrow’s Goldeneye

You can almost always see a few ducks on Yellow Lake; the commonest species is the Barrow’s goldeneye. These ducks winter on the Pacific coast, where they feed largely on mussels. In April they fly inland to nest on lakes scattered throughout the mountains and plateaus of British Columbia—the province hosts more than half the world’s population. The handsome males are boldly patterned in black and white and marked with a distinctive white crescent on the face. The females have grey bodies and brown heads but sport a bright yellow-orange bill in breeding season.

Goldeneyes are diving ducks, and in summer they feed on aquatic insects, shrimp, and other invertebrates. Like all varieties of duck, the goldeneye male leaves all nesting and brood-rearing tasks to the female. She chooses a large cavity in a tree for her nest, usually one excavated by a pileated woodpecker. If she can’t find a tree nest, she may opt for a hole in a cliff; one local goldeneye even nested in an unused marmot burrow. The black-and-white fluffball young jump out of the cavity within a day of hatching, sometimes falling as far as 20 metres to the ground, where they bounce and quickly run to the water with their mother. Like most ducks, goldeneye pairs were once thought to be faithful for only a single season, since the males leave the females as soon as they have finished laying the full clutch of eggs. But a detailed study in British Columbia using marked birds showed that many couples found each other again on the wintering grounds and nested together the following spring.

focus Western Screech-Owl

The western screech-owl is one of many species in the Okanagan Valley that are restricted to riparian ecosystems and have declined significantly because of the loss of that habitat. This small owl, about 20 centimetres long and weighing about 200 grams, is considered endangered in the British Columbia Interior and is declining rapidly on the southern coast of the province as well. Recent surveys suggest that between one and two hundred pairs live in the Interior, resident along well-treed stretches of rivers and creeks in the Okanagan and Kootenay valleys.

Screech-owls are generalist predators, eating everything from mice and small birds to beetles, slugs, worms, frogs, and fish. One of the reasons they like mature riparian woodlands is the abundance of cavities in cottonwoods, birches, and aspen, trees favoured by woodpeckers because they quickly form soft, somewhat rotten cores. The owls nest and roost in these cavities, although they also roost in thickly leaved trees such as western redcedar. Western screech-owls are highly nocturnal and are usually detected only by their distinctive calls. One of these calls is a descending series of hollow whistles that speeds up towards the end, patterned like the taps of a bouncing ball. Another common call is a two-parted trill that a pair uses to keep in touch with each other. Like most owls, the female has a higher-pitched voice than the male, even though her body is significantly larger than his.