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NARAMATA ROAD

23 km, all paved

Naramata Road winds north on orchard-and vineyard-covered benches from Penticton to the village of Naramata.

START: Intersection of Main Street and Front Street in Penticton.

DRIVING NORTHEAST ON FRONT STREET, you quickly cross Penticton Creek on a small bridge. This is one of the three main creeks that filled Okanagan Lake with deltaic sands and gravels to form Penticton. It is now largely confined to concrete walls within the city to prevent erosion and flooding, but it does maintain a small spawning run of kokanee. These landlocked sockeye salmon enter the creek in September to spawn in the gravels well above the bridge. The salmon fry drift down to Okanagan Lake and live their entire lives there, eating freshwater shrimp and other invertebrates; in their fourth year they return to the creek they were born in, spawn, and die.

Front Street ends at a roundabout; go straight through and up the hill on Vancouver Avenue. If you have time, a walk along the old Kettle Valley Rail Trail is a good scenic diversion; you’ll find it at the end of Vancouver Place on the north side of Vancouver Avenue. The trail traverses the tops of magnificent silt bluffs cloaked in sagebrush, then swings inland. From the top of Vancouver Hill, the route to Naramata winds through orchards to the base of Munson Mountain, a small, rocky hill west of the road. This is the core of a volcano that was active about 55 million years ago during the birth of the Okanagan Valley. A short road and trail to the top of the hill provide wonderful views of Penticton and the entire valley.

The road swings east across the benches to the start of Naramata Road (make sure you make the last left turn to the east instead of continuing south on Upper Bench Road). On the hill to the northeast, you can see the wall of fill at the regional landfill, often easily spotted by the cloud of gulls and ravens circling overhead. Occasionally bald or golden eagles join the feeding frenzy at the landfill, so watch for big birds in the flock.

A large propeller on a tower overlooks a sizable apricot orchard on the west side of the road; the former is an air mover or wind machine. This is used on frosty nights in early April, when the tender apricot blossoms might be damaged by the cold air pooling just above the ground. The air mover blows the cold air away, bringing warmer air down from above.

A few hundred metres past the Red Rooster Winery, the road goes through shallow rock cuts that expose banded gneiss of the Shuswap metamorphic group. These are some of the oldest rocks in British Columbia, first laid down about 2 billion years ago as sediments on the continental shelf of North America. They were subsequently deeply buried by a small continent that collided with the west coast of North America about 180 million years ago, melting and recrystallizing in the depths of the earth, then exposed once again when the Okanagan Valley opened up.

Just before Hillside Estate Winery, the Kettle Valley Rail Trail crosses the road, angling up the slope behind the winery. If you fancy a walk along the trail in either direction, there is a small parking lot on the west side of the road at the intersection. Patches of native vegetation can be seen on rocky sites along the road; at Sutherland Road, saskatoon and elderberry bushes dot the hillside.

There are many good views across the lake to Summerland. Trout Creek drains most of the hills and plateaus on that side of the valley, and its delta spreads broadly into the lake. Drainage on the Naramata side of the lake is patterned much differently, with many small creeks spilling down the hillsides instead of one large one. The large bluff just north of Trout Creek is Giant’s Head; like Munson Mountain, it is a remnant of the volcanic activity during the birth of the Okanagan Valley. Its long, sloping north side and vertical southern bluffs are typical of what geologists call a roche moutonnée (literally “sheep rock”), formed by the scouring action of the big valley glacier as it flowed south for millennia during the Pleistocene Epoch.

You officially enter Naramata at a sharp corner on the road about 9 kilometres from downtown Penticton. About 4 kilometres farther on, you pass Arawana Road, then the heavily treed gully of Arawana Creek. Like many of the small creeks on this side of the valley, Arawana Creek is very seasonal, flowing strongly only in spring and early summer, but that water allows the growth of dense shrubbery and large trees, important habitat to local wildlife. Great horned owls and turkey vultures roost in the high trees, and bears use the gullies to walk unseen back from their nights raiding peach and apple orchards on the bench; raccoons sleep in the big, hollow cottonwoods, and veeries sing their glorious fluted songs, spiralling down the scale.

Just past Arawana Creek you reach the somewhat larger valley of Naramata Creek. A small park on the east side of the road (inventively named Creek Park) is well worth a stop and a short walk along a trail through the shady woodland beside a rocky stream. Here, traffic to Naramata village goes down the hill on Robinson Road; we will continue along North Naramata Road. A half-kilometre farther on, you pass Smethurst Road on the east; this road offers access to the Kettle Valley Rail Trail, now high above you. If you look north here, you can see where the railroad passed through the Little Tunnel at a prominent rock bluff.

At Languedoc Road the route passes over Robinson Creek, then Trust Creek a few hundred metres farther on. Here the orchards and vineyards end, and the road travels through a more natural landscape, with scattered large ponderosa pines on the hillsides and a dense growth of big sagebrush on the benches. A half-kilometre from Trust Creek, a large boulder overlooks the road; its face is patterned with red-ochre pictographs.

The road makes a sharp right turn into a heavily treed gully, then continues north over a cattle guard with the water birches marking Gilser Brook on the west side of the road. At the top of the hill, the brook has been dammed to form a small reservoir surrounded by large trees. This pond is a favourite with local ducks, such as mallards and Barrow’s goldeneyes, in spring and summer. Just past the pond, Chute Lake Road angles off to the northeast, and North Naramata Road begins a long, gentle descent towards the lake. Chute Lake Road provides an alternate, but rather bumpy, route to Kelowna in summer, partly on logging roads and partly on the Kettle Valley Rail grade. To the north you can see the fire-scarred forests of Okanagan Mountain, burned in the long, hot summer of 2003. This fire burned about 250 square kilometres of forest and destroyed 239 homes in Kelowna on the north side of the mountain. Fortunately, a hastily constructed firebreak and well-timed back burn halted the fire’s southward advance on Naramata.

Chute Creek roars beneath the road, spilling out of a narrow, rocky gorge. Here the hillsides are dotted with antelope brush—this is one of the northernmost outposts of this plant, a characteristic species of dry pine forests and intermontane grasslands throughout the West. At the entrance to Paradise Ranch, the main road turns left down the hill, passing spectacular silt bluffs on its way to the lake.

western kingbird

focus Kingbirds

As you drive along Naramata Road from late April through early August, watch for western kingbirds along the power lines. These members of the flycatcher family, with their yellow bellies and black tails, are easy to spot as they perch upright on the wires. The natural habitat of the western kingbird is the open plains and ponderosa pine woodlands of the West, and the birds used to nest exclusively on the wide branches of lone pines or other trees that had gained a foothold in the grasslands. They quickly recognized the power and telephone lines that snaked across the West as a new source of nesting habitat. Look closely at each pole and you’ll see a number of their untidy grass nests stuck on to insulators or tucked in behind transformers. Kingbirds aggressively defend their nests and will readily dive on any cat that happens to wander innocently by, chattering loudly to warn all other birds of the approaching danger. Western kingbirds have white outer tail feathers to frame their black tails; the similar eastern kingbird (also common in the Okanagan) has a white belly and a white tip on its black tail. Eastern kingbirds prefer deciduous woodlands for nesting habitat and are common in older orchards; they occasionally nest on power poles but usually make their homes in large trees or shrubs.