Okanagan Slow Road

WRITTEN BY BERNADETTE MCDONALD • IMAGES BY KAROLINA BORN-TSCHÜMPERLIN

View over Okanagan Lake, Penticton, and Skaha Lake from the Kettle Valley Railway track in Naramata

Contents

Introduction

1. How Big Is the Valley?

2. A Northern Desert

3. The Black Sage Bench

4. The Golden Mile and a Church

5. McIntyre Bluff Hike and Covert Farms

6. A Year in the Life of a Vineyard

7. Corkscrew Drive

8. Vaseux Lake: A Birder’s Paradise

9. Mahoney Lake Circuit

10. Kaleden’s Linden Gardens

11. Rock Climbing at the Skaha Bluffs

12. Mount Brent: An Alpine Mecca

13. Artisanal Middle Eastern Breads and Beer

14. Apple Plaza, La Cucina, and Buy the Sea

15. Eating Out in Penticton

16. Farmers’ Markets

17. Cycling the KVR and Three Blind Mice

18. Poplar Grove Wine and Cheese and Munson Mountain

19. Feast of Fields and Joy Road Catering

20. Naramata Bench Wine

21. Aikins Loop

22. Forest Green Man Lavender Farm

23. Naramata Village

24. Paddling in Okanagan Lake Provincial Park

25. Summerland Ornamental Gardens

26. 8th Generation and a Glass Full of Bubbles

27. Summerland Hills

28. Culinary Summerland

29. Summerland Sips

30. Peachland Bliss

31. Quails’ Gate Winery

32. The Mission on the Hill

33. Kelowna: The Big Apple

34. Kelowna Wine

35. Myra Canyon

36. Lake Country

37. Vernon’s German Heritage

38. Cosens Bay to Coldstream

39. Davison Orchards and Honey

40. Armstrong and the Far North

41. Snowy Conclusion

Appendix A: Recipes

Appendix B: Okanagan Valley Wineries

Appendix C: Okanagan Valley Farmers’ Markets

Endnotes

Sources

Index

Okanagan vineyard and lake

Introduction

I peered out the window of the Greyhound bus. The night air was thick with snow. Enormous flakes feathered down to form an undulating blanket that enveloped the landscape, softening every edge. It was 2:00 AM when the bus rolled into Vernon, silent and stealthy on the empty white highway, the end of a journey that had begun two provinces away at my Saskatchewan boarding school. There, idling on the side of the road, was an elongated mound of snow, two black inverted triangles where the windshield wipers strained to maintain some semblance of visibility. Steam curled upward from the exhaust pipe. Inside was my dad, hunkered down in the dark, waiting for the passenger he knew would soon alight, waiting to whisk me home for the Christmas holidays.

Home. It was the first time I could call this Okanagan Valley home. My family had moved to Vernon earlier that fall, and for me, this was a great adventure. I had never seen snow like this. Feathery light. Unthinkably soft. I was accustomed to snow drifts so wind-hardened you could ride a horse across them. Now I shuffled along up to my knees in the stuff with no effort at all.

After an Okanagan winter storm (photo courtesy of the McDonald collection)

As we entered the house, a familiar aroma wrapped its arms around me—fresh baking. My mother loves to bake above all else, and there on the counter were an apple pie and a nine-by-twelve-inch pan of Rice Krispies squares. I polished off a couple of gooey squares for the main course and a juicy wedge of pie for dessert. Now I was really home.

The next day we tested that fresh blanket of snow with our new ski equipment—wooden beauties with cable bindings and supple leather boots. We marched up a hillside pasture, fumbling with the skis that refused to stay perched on our shoulders. At the top of the slope, we clamped ourselves into the bear-trap bindings and then careened down, dodging the barbed-wire fence at the bottom. No sense of style or even control.

Next to our unofficial ski hill lay a gently sloping winter orchard. Ancient, wizened apple trees stood by for the winter pruning job that would smarten them up for the spring bloom. The occasional flash of red from a forgotten apple brightened the monochrome landscape.

The magic of those first few days in my Okanagan home remained with me. After that first homecoming in 1967, I came and went in all seasons, for all kinds of reasons: family, work, recreation, inspiration. Skiing with my family at the Sovereign Lake cross-country area, rock climbing at the Skaha Bluffs with friends, teaching music at Okanagan College, and, finally, settling onto a piece of land with my husband and planting a small vineyard on the Naramata Bench.

View across Okanagan Lake

I have struggled to pinpoint what makes this valley so special, and I’ve listened to the responses of others, both visitors and locals. Finally, I decided to try to articulate the unique qualities of the Okanagan Valley, a process that led me to other experiences in other valleys in other parts of the world, places where slow is a word that holds great value.

Slow travel: a state of mind in which the pleasure of the journey outweighs the arrival. One of the defining elements of slow travel is becoming a part of local life and connecting to a place: to its smells and tastes, to its sounds and rhythms, and, ultimately, to its people. Or as Leroy Little Bear, a Blood Indian and Harvard academic, says, Connecting to all our relations: the people, the grass, the rocks, the animals. Slow travel builds on the Slow Food movement, which emphasizes traditional and regional cuisine. The movement is global in scope, yet rooted in individual communities and places.

This book is a languid journey through one of those places—the bucolic Okanagan Valley of south-central British Columbia. Defined by its massive lakes, the Okanagan Valley is blessed with a climate that nurtures all that lives and grows within it: from rare songbirds to Sonoran Desert antelope brush; from crisp Ambrosia apples to luscious, dripping peaches; from tart and refreshing Sauvignon Blancs to grand and complex Syrahs; from wild asparagus to mouth-watering trout. The aroma of lavender, the warm caress of the setting sun, the cool breeze off a lake, the delight of skimming through light powder snow, the melancholy call of the loon—all of these can be found in the nooks and crannies of this meandering valley. You simply need to know where to look.

This is a book that guides gently. There is no timetable. There are no GPS points. There is no tick list. There are simply experiences and images and characters, rooted in a sense of place, offered for the taking.

You don’t have to be an expert to savour this valley. I am neither a food critic nor a sommelier. Neither an ornithologist nor a botanist. My partner on this journey, Karolina Born-Tschümperlin, and I admit to being unabashed amateurs, perhaps with slightly rose-tinted glasses, searching for the bewitching corners of the valley. Some of those corners are best found on a bike or in a canoe. Many are in winery tasting rooms or very special restaurants. Bakeries are a favourite, as are farmers’ markets. Hiking and rock climbing are two activities that you will read a lot about. Sometimes the goal is simply to discover a perfectly formed lily or a rare woodpecker. To assist you in your search, basic directions or street addresses can be found at the end of each chapter.

Gala apples on ice (photo courtesy of Doug Mathias)

Take your time. Slow down. Taste. Smell. Listen. My hope is that the stories in this book, some of which are my own experiences, while many others come from the myriad interesting characters who live here, will inspire you to take your own voyage of discovery.

1. How Big Is the Valley?

According to Summerland author Don Gayton, the Okanagan Valley is part urban city, part rural orchard and ranch, and part wild ponderosa pine and rock bluff.1 That, and much more. In fact, the miracle of this expansive piece of arid real estate is water.

The valley bottom is full of it. Enormous lakes moderate the temperatures in both winter and summer, and a simple glimpse of those vast bodies of blue evokes a certain peace of mind.

The Okanagan Valley occupies a deep trench between the high, gently rolling Thompson Plateau in the west and the snowy, and more precipitous, Monashee Mountains in the east. Thirty to sixty kilometres wide and one hundred and seventy kilometres long, the valley stretches from Osoyoos in the south to Armstrong in the north. When the valley began to form, sedimentary rocks rose to the surface after millions of years of melting and hardening. Now metamorphic in nature, this gneiss is famous around the world for the high-quality rock climbing it offers. There was volcanic activity too, of which there are vivid examples throughout the valley: Munson Mountain in Penticton, Giant’s Head in Summerland, Mount Boucherie near Westbank, and Knox, Dilworth, and Layer Cake Mountains in Kelowna.

View from the Summerland Agricultural Research Centre

It’s hard to imagine a glacier filling this massive basin, but it once did that—and more. As the ice meandered south approximately two million years ago, it grew to a depth of two kilometres and finally overflowed the edges of the valley. One of the remnants of this ice sheet was instrumental in creating the lakes that now fill the valley floor. In the South Okanagan, the looming cliffs above Vaseux Lake form the narrowest part of the valley. It was here that a titanic chunk of glacier created a solid, icy plug. Behind the plug, the Okanagan River, which was by that time flowing freely from the north, got backed up and formed a lake that filled the valley all the way to Enderby, one hundred and seventy kilo­metres away. For a time, the river changed direction, flowing north out of this new body of water, which was called Lake Penticton. But eventually the glacial plug melted and the river resumed its southerly course.

View of Okanagan Lake from above Naramata

Despite the predominance of large bodies of water, the Okanagan Valley is much more than lakes. A river also claims the valley’s name. The Okanagan River rises in the northern end of the valley, near the town of Armstrong, and completes its scenic three-hundred-kilometre journey in another country, when it joins the Columbia River at Brewster, in the state of Washington. But for the most part, the Canadian portion of the Okanagan River manifests itself as a series of lakes, Kalamalka, Wood, Okanagan, Skaha, Vaseux, and Osoyoos, all linked by short stretches of the original river. The entire valley varies only slightly in elevation, from around five hundred and sixty metres above sea level at Vernon, in the northern end of the valley, to three hundred at Osoyoos, in the deep south.

Each of the six major Okanagan lakes has a unique character. Kalamalka—Lake of Many Colours—is precisely that: a glorious kaleidoscope of hues, ranging from a deep cerulean blue to a striking aquamarine green. Wood Lake, located between Vernon and Kelowna, is a fine place to fish, particularly for kokanee salmon. Skaha Lake has a restless, choppy character, as it provides a direct funnel for the north-south blows so common in the southern part of the valley. But it’s also a lake of spectacular beaches. The beach at its southern end occupies one entire boundary of the town of Okanagan Falls, and an even larger beach at its northern end forms the southern boundary of Penticton, a community that calls itself the City of Peaches and Beaches. Vaseux is a birder’s lake, and the quietest of the bunch, since no motorboats are allowed. Osoyoos is a lake of the south, which has the feel of a desert. But of all the lakes that grace this pastoral valley, Okanagan is the queen. One hundred and thirty-five kilometres long, with depths that reach two hundred and thirty metres, it stretches all the way from Penticton to Vernon. It dominates and defines the valley and is perhaps its greatest resource.

Okanagan Lake on a winter’s day

The region boasts four distinct ecosystems: narrow ribbons of dry grassland on the benchlands on either side of the valley bottom; coniferous forests that stretch to the mountaintops; islands of alpine tundra that cap the highest peaks; and lakes, rivers, marshes, and other water-rich habitats.

Because of its unique climate, the Okanagan Valley is bursting with riches and claims an impressive diversity of plants and animals, many of which are not found anywhere else in Canada. More than two hundred bird species nest in the many distinct valley zones: alpine birds, coastal birds, desert birds, and forest birds. Considered the most northerly extension of the great Sonoran Desert, which begins thousands of kilometres farther south in Northwest Mexico, the Okanagan Valley has places where desert sands blow in the hot afternoon winds and rattlesnakes slither among the rocky cliffs and grasslands. Merely a few kilometres away, with a rise in altitude, meadows lie smothered in alpine flowers and stunted trees cling to the ridgelines, braced against the ceaseless cold winds.

Apple blossom time

Because the valley lies in the rain shadow of the Cascades and the Coast Mountains to the west, where most of the storms originate, there is very little precipitation. The South Okanagan is the driest part of the valley, receiving only about thirty centimetres of precipitation each year. At the valley’s northern limit at Armstrong, the annual precipitation rises to forty-five centimetres and the vegetation responds accordingly: Armstrong is a greener shade of green.

Okanagan Lake and Munson Mountain on a stormy summer’s evening (photo courtesy of the McDonald collection)

The annual parade of the seasons is a miracle in all regions of the country, but it marches to a slightly different rhythm in the Okanagan. Spring arrives early, with the first sagebrush buttercups and yellow bells and the migrating birds that move up from the southern states in late February. By late March the orchards begin to bloom. Acres upon acres of white and pink and peach blossoms fill the valley with a froth of pastels. The warm days are gentle and the cool nights refresh. By the end of June, however, the hot, arid winds are flowing up from the Great Basin Desert in the south, saturating the valley with the heat required to ripen all those peaches and grapes. Autumn is a welcome reprieve from the summer heat and brings cooler nights, golden aspens, and another flood of birds, this time winging south. Winter seeps in slowly, usually accompanied by a maddening valley fog that obscures the blue skies overhead. When snow does fall, it’s up on the mountaintops where, high above the fog, the sun dazzles and the skiing is superb!

The Okanagan climate is actually rather harsh, but not because of the winters. It’s the summers that tax the natural world to its very limit. Spring is the season of growth, but when the hot summer winds scour the valley, the ponderosa pines, shrubs, and grasses retreat into a kind of holding pattern, guarding what little