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WEST SIDE ROAD

65 km, all paved

This narrow, winding road provides a quiet alternative for travellers going from Westbank to Vernon (or on to Kamloops); it avoids the urban desolation and traffic of Kelowna and features some of the least-known views of the valley.

START: Junction of Highway 97 and Westside Road in Kelowna, about 1.5 km west of the Okanagan Lake bridge.

WESTSIDE ROAD LEAVES HIGHWAY 97 and descends to Keefe Creek, a small brook lined by brown-barked water birch and white-barked aspen trees. Cattails flourish where the flow is sluggish, making this a rich area for many wildlife species. Above you to the west are layered lava flows of the Lambly Creek basalts, which were formed only 760,000 years ago. As the road turns north and gains a little altitude, you get good views of Kelowna across the lake. The sprawling ridge on the north end of town is Knox Mountain; to the right of that is the bump of Dilworth Mountain, and in the background is the dark shoulder of Black Knight Mountain. All these features are remnants of intense volcanic activity about 55 million years ago, as the Okanagan Valley split open.

Some of these volcanic rocks were used by local Native people to sharpen their arrowheads; the hard, black rocks provided the name that the Syilx people gave to the Kelowna area: Nor-kwa-stin. Early French–Canadian fur traders called it l’Anse-au-sable (Sandy Cove). The name Kelowna comes from the story of August Gillard, a pioneer in the area. Local Natives called Gillard Kimach Touche, meaning “brown bear,” because of his large, hairy appearance. When an official name was needed for the new townsite, Kimach Touche was suggested, but the word kelowna, meaning “grizzly bear,” was used instead. Gillard’s real name is commemorated in Gillard Creek, one of the main watersheds on the south side of Kelowna.

The road winds north along the hillside; as it turns east, you can see the arching shape of the R.B. Bennett Bridge. This structure, completed in 2008, floats on huge pontoons for much of its length. Behind the bridge the skyline is dominated by Okanagan Mountain, where large, pale, open areas are testament to the firestorm that swept north to Kelowna in August 2003. The fire destroyed 239 homes on the south edge of the city and 250 square kilometres of forest.

As you approach the Bear Creek delta, the road descends to lake level, traversing steep, rocky slopes that have a history of collapsing into the lake. You can see the serious engineering works that are meant to hold the slope in place. On the lake are log booms destined for the Tolko sawmill across the lake in downtown Kelowna. The trees are cut on the plateau to the west, then trucked down to the lake at the delta; several bays in the area are used for log storage.

Much of the Bear Creek delta is part of Bear Creek Provincial Park, a popular beach campground in the summer. Perhaps the most interesting part of the park is on the west side of the road, where Bear Creek (officially called Lambly Creek) flows through a spectacular canyon. A 2.5-kilometre trail circles the canyon and is well worth the walk. This is one of the northernmost places in the world where canyon wrens are regularly found; their cascading whistles echo off the rocks as white-throated swifts streak by. Both these birds are found south to southern Mexico and reach their northern limits in the dry valleys of southern British Columbia. The depths of the canyon, where Douglas maples and cottonwoods thrive in the moist shade, is a world apart from the hot, dry slopes above.

As you round a series of corners about 3 kilometres north of the creek, watch for bighorn sheep on the roadside. About ten sheep moved into this area in 2006, having walked about 20 kilometres south from Shorts Creek. Just north of these corners, the view north up the lake opens into an impressive vista. At places like this, it’s interesting to try to imagine what the valley looked like 20,000 years ago, filled with a huge ice sheet flowing south to melt on the plateaus of eastern Washington. The rounded features of the surrounding hills owe their soft contours to that ice.

The forest understory on these steep, open slopes is mainly bluebunch wheatgrass, the classic bunchgrass of the West. Grey rabbitbrush clings to the hillsides, providing a glorious yellow show of blooms in late summer and early fall. Large ponderosa pines dominate the forest in places, easy to recognize with their orange bark and long needles. The other common conifer along this route is the Douglas-fir; both it and the ponderosa pine are well adapted to an ecosystem that experiences ground fires on a regular basis. Their bark is thick, corrugated, and corky, blackening in a quick fire but protecting the cambium beneath from fatal heating. Indeed, ponderosa pines deposit a thick layer of needles beneath the trees; these needles are full of flammable compounds and are very slow to break down. Many ecologists believe that this adaptation encourages ground fires that eliminate smaller trees and shrubs, which would compete with the trees for scarce water supplies.

Just north of Lake Okanagan Resort, you can see the typical structure of ponderosa pine forests today: large trees with a dense growth of young Douglas-fir beneath. This is a transition forest, where the pioneer species, ponderosa pine, germinates after a catastrophic fire clears away all the trees. The summer climate is too hot and dry to allow Douglas-fir seedlings to survive, but the young pines quickly send down long taproots to maintain an adequate supply of water through the summer. As the pines grow, their shade allows Douglas-firs to germinate underneath. Before we started suppressing all fires, many of these young trees would be eliminated by frequent ground fire, but now they grow thickly, changing the open character of the forest. While the Douglas-firs are relatively small, they increase the chance of catastrophic fire, since they provide a conduit for ground fires to spread into the pine canopy, killing the large pines. But if fire is averted for a century or more, this forest will gradually change to a climax forest of large Douglas-firs with a few old ponderosa pine veterans dotting the landscape.

From the sudden scar of the La Casa development, you can see the delta of Shorts Creek at Fintry below you to the north. Shorts Creek is named after Captain Thomas Shorts, who lived here in the 1880s, making his livelihood by rowing passengers and freight up and down the length of Okanagan Lake. The point was eventually bought by James Dun-Waters, a Scotsman who renamed the point Fintry and developed it into a successful farming enterprise. Much of the delta is now a provincial park, including a trail beside the Shorts Creek canyon to a spectacular waterfall.

In the early part of the 1900s, the Shorts Creek valley was home to about eighty bighorn sheep, but forest ingrowth degraded the grassland habitat to such an extent that only three of these animals were left by the year 2000. A 523-hectare protected area was established in 2003, and in 2004 provincial government biologists brought eighteen new bighorn sheep into Shorts Creek and began a program of habitat enhancement. Several of the sheep moved south to Bear Creek in 2006, and the rugged terrain around Shorts Creek makes it difficult to monitor the number of those that remain.

After the road crosses Shorts Creek, it winds back up to a ridge burned in a forest fire in 1998. Much of the shrubby growth in the burn is red-stemmed ceanothus, a species whose seeds need the heat of a fire to germinate. Ceanothus is an important food source for mule deer. From the open ridge you can look northeast up an arm of Okanagan Lake to Okanagan Landing, now a suburb of Vernon.

The road eventually descends to the broad delta of Whiteman Creek, entering the Okanagan Indian Reserve just before Parker Cove. An even larger delta lies just to the north, where two creeks—Nashwito and Equesis—enter the lake only 1.5 kilometres apart. A rich cattail marsh lies at the south end of this delta, and healthy stands of large cottonwoods mark the areas where the water table lies close to the surface, feeding plant growth in this dry valley. Beyond the creeks you can see large, grassy hillsides on both sides of the lake, maintained by hot summer sun on the south-facing slopes.

As you near the north end of the lake, you cross Neehoot, also known as Newport Creek. The east side of the lake here has a rich fringe of bulrush marsh, home to one of only three colonies of western grebes in British Columbia. These elegant water birds, grey above and white below, with long, slender necks, can be seen on the calm waters for some distance, but are more easily detected by their far-carrying cree-creeek! calls.

The open fields at the north end of Okanagan Lake are a good place to look for long-billed curlews in spring, and the small kettle pond on the east side of the road is always alive with ducks as long as it is ice free. Westside Road ends at Highway 97, where you can turn left to go to Kamloops or turn right to travel to Salmon Arm or Vernon. St. Anne Road is only about 500 metres east of the junction (see section 21).

focus Pine Beetles

The big agent of change spreading through British Columbia as I write this book is pine beetle. In 2008 many patches of newly killed ponderosa pines lie scattered along the Westside Road route. Only time will tell if this is the beginning of a major push into the valley that will eliminate most of the mature ponderosa pines, similar to the devastation caused in the Thompson Valley in 2006. Two species of pine beetles affect ponderosa pines: the notorious mountain pine beetle, which has killed most of the lodgepole pines in the province; and the western pine beetle, which specializes more on the ponderosa pine. Under normal conditions, both species usually kill only small patches of ponderosa pines, leaving the vast majority of the forest healthy. But the unprecedented size of the present outbreak is breaking all the rules, and large areas of climax ponderosa pine forest have been killed northwest of the Okanagan Valley.