Crossing Home Ground: A Grassland Odyssey through Southern Interior British Columbia

Crossing Home Ground

Crossing Home Ground

A Grassland Odyssey through Southern Interior British Columbia

David Pitt-Brooke

Copyright © 2016 David Pitt-Brooke

1 2 3 4 5 — 20 19 18 17 16

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, www.accesscopyright.ca, 1-800-893-5777, [email protected].

Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.

P.O. Box 219, Madeira Park, BC, V0N 2H0

www.harbourpublishing.com

Edited by Cheryl Cohen

Indexed by Sarah Corsie

Dust jacket design by Anna Comfort O’Keeffe

Text design by Mary White

Map by Roger Handling

Photographs by David Pitt-Brooke

Previous page photo: Junction Sheep Range Provincial Park

Printed and bound in Canada

Harbour Publishing acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. We also gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and from the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Pitt-Brooke, David, author

          Crossing home ground : a grassland odyssey through southern interior

British Columbia / David Pitt-Brooke.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-55017-774-9 (hardback).--ISBN 978-1-55017-775-6 (html)

          1. Pitt-Brooke, David--Travel--British Columbia.  2. Naturalists--

Travel--British Columbia.  3. Hiking--British Columbia.  4. Natural

history--British Columbia.  5. Human ecology--British Columbia.

6. Grasslands--British Columbia.  7. British Columbia--Description and

travel.  I. Title.

FC3817.5.P58 2016                        917.11’5045                      C2016-904712-1

                                                                                                    C2016-904713-X

To all who have stood in defence of wild country, beauty and grace, the beloved home places.

Also to Scott Steedman and Michelle Benjamin, who got me started.

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, unremembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river

The voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree

—T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.

—John Muir, John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, ed. L.M. Wolfe

Preface

Something there had been, something delicate, wild and far away. But it was shut out behind the doors of yesterday, lost beyond the hills.

—Robin Hyde (Iris Guiver Wilkinson), The Godwits Fly

In autumn 2004, my editor at the time, Scott Steedman, treated me to a celebratory lunch, long promised. That spring Raincoast Books had published my first book, a collection of observations and reflections on a series of seasonal experiences in the wild and beautiful country along the west coast of Vancouver Island. Chasing Clayoquot: A Wilderness Almanac, as the book was titled, had done well. It had collected some nice reviews and readers seemed to enjoy it.

When we’d finished our meal, Scott paused, looked me in the eye and asked the inevitable question: What now?

I was still living in Tofino, still enjoying life on the west coast, but starting to feel the need of a change, fresh horizons, new adventures (plus a chance to dry out, perhaps, and maybe catch a little more sunshine than one might reasonably hope for on the wet coast).

Also, much as I loved Vancouver Island it wasn’t home ground. I’d grown up in the valleys of British Columbia’s southern interior and that warm, dry, open country—big lakes and rivers, ponderosa pine and bunchgrass meadows—was still, for me, the home of the heart, my place in the world, and I still felt the attraction.

Even before Scott asked his question, I’d begun to wonder if I might approach and appreciate that home ground in much the same way as I’d approached my adopted home on the west coast of the island, with an intense, consciously planned, systematic campaign of exploration, venturing out, month by month, to witness the particular events and attractions of each season. I would think and I would read and then I would write about what I’d seen, partly to bear witness to the beauty and grace of the countryside and partly to share my experiences, especially with readers who might not in their lives have the opportunity to see things as I’d seen them.

Ironically, I’d never taken time to pay that kind of close attention to the countryside I grew up in. Now, it seemed, I might have a chance to make up the deficit. The result would be a companion to Chasing Clayoquot, a testament to beloved home places and a homecoming as well.

It was going to be a challenge. I knew that from the first. The valleys of southern interior British Columbia are a very different sort of environment, more populated, not as wild and tumultuous as the coast, not as magnificent, not nearly as renowned. It’s a place of more modest beauty, though certainly with its own quiet charm: open, sunny, welcoming.

And very much in need of a little loving attention and testimony, as it turned out.

When I was a child, the Okanagan was still blessed with one of the world’s truly beautiful landscapes: leafy little towns, hardly more than villages, clustered along the shores of Okanagan Lake. And beyond the little towns, a countryside of fields and orchards. And beyond the fields, swelling hillsides of bunchgrass, groves of trembling aspen, open parklands of ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir climbing to forested uplands of spruce and fir. From that height, turning around, one could look down across the great bowl of the valley, the hills and the orchards, the fields and the little towns, to the glittering waters of the lake beyond. Space and light everywhere. It was something else.

That countryside had yet to feel anything like the full weight of humanity. I could bicycle in a morning to places where groves of ancient Douglas-firs still stood, huge and windswept. I could walk pristine meadows of native bunchgrass. I remember meadowlarks singing in the spring and killdeers calling around little ponds in the heat of summer. The scent of wild roses in June and the pungent fragrance of big sage on warm September days. Snowy winters, the hillsides gleaming white at noon, blushing gold at sunset, fading to indigo after dusk. The cold wind hissing through bare stalks of bunchgrass. Beauty and grace in all seasons.

But time has not been kind.

It’s an oft-repeated story nowadays. Rapid population growth. An explosion of urban and industrial development. The disappearance of beautiful places, one after another, to be replaced by a rising tide of ugliness, ruin and clutter. The old Douglas-firs are long gone to fatten somebody’s bank account. The bunchgrass has turned to hobby farms and subdivisions and highways. A time traveller, extracted from the towns of sixty or seventy or eighty years ago, would hardly recognize those places as they are today and would not, I think, find the new any sort of improvement on the old.

Even more grievous, perhaps, those developments have engendered a creeping alienation or estrangement from the natural world, a fracturing of the sustaining bond between the human beings who live here and the landscapes they inhabit, so that the once-beloved places have dwindled to mere scenery, real estate, a supply of resources, an afternoon’s adventure playground, a remote backdrop to the more immediate events of everyday life. The countryside has ceased to be a home for the heart and has become mere commodity.

All rather depressing.

But what to do? How to keep from sinking into despondency? And how to compass such an enormous area, such a variety of country, such ecological and biological diversity? I soon realized the month-by-month approach that had served so well in Chasing Clayoquot wasn’t going to work here. Much of what is interesting and vivid (at least biologically) in this warm, dry environment is crammed into the three or four months of spring and early summer when moisture is adequate for plant growth. For the rest of the year, the living world is mostly marking time, waiting for spring to roll around again.

For a time I was stumped.

Then I had an inspired thought.

I’ve always loved the idea of the young John Muir (who would, of course, become America’s pre-eminent wilderness advocate of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) stepping out of some doorway in Jeffersonville, Indiana, in September 1867 and walking all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, a thousand miles away, seeking out, as he later wrote, the wildest, leafiest, and least trodden way I could find.

So there you had it. I would take myself out for a walk. A long walk. After all, that was part of the essence of this countryside, the characteristic openness that positively invites you to step out, makes you feel you could walk practically anywhere, follow any course you chose, very different from the salal thickets and dense forests of Vancouver Island.

The route I plotted would carry me a thousand kilometres or more through the network of deep valleys (Okanagan, Nicola, Thompson and Fraser) that furrow the highlands of southern interior British Columbia from the forty-ninth parallel of latitude at the Canada–US border to the fifty-second parallel at Williams Lake on the edge of the Cariboo and Chilcotin plateaus.

I covered that whole distance on foot (believe me, you never really know a country until you’ve measured it out, pace by pace), ­seventy-five days of walking, divided into two- to fourteen-day stretches, depending, carrying all the necessities on my back, across great mountain ranges and wild rivers, blown by all the winds that pass and wet with all the showers. It took me over a year, from summer to summer and into the next fall, to finish the project.

It was my very own quest, a secular pilgrimage. I progressed, as pilgrims do, from one piece of sanctified ground—the little green patches on the map—to the next, testifying along the way to what had been lost, certainly, the harm that had been done, but also celebrating whatever bits of grace and beauty still remained.

I went in search of special places and special moments, surviving fragments of indigenous ecosystems, little opportunities for reflection, enduring sparks of loveliness that had managed to survive, amazingly enough, despite all. And not just loveliness, but wildness too. That secret life that endures outside human regulation or control.

And then I came home to write.

This book, Crossing Home Ground: A Grassland Odyssey through Southern Interior British Columbia, is the result.

It’s been a long haul, much more time and effort than I could have imagined when I started out, back in the autumn of 2004. The world has changed. Raincoast Books has ceased publishing; Scott Steedman is doing other things. Happily, Howard White at Harbour Publishing has stepped up to see the book through into print.

A pilgrimage should be shared. I wish we could have done this journey together.

But at least, through these pages, you can get a taste of the thing.

Drop what you’re doing, lace up your walking shoes and we’ll step out to see what can be seen.

We’ll be taking our chances, of course, luck of the journey. I make no promises. Indeed, I’m pretty sure, especially at the beginning of our walk, through the more populated southern sections of the route, we’ll be hard-pressed to find much in the way of natural beauty and grace. But I intend to persevere, and I think the farther north and west we go, the more likely it is we’ll find something to please us.

By the time we’re finished, we’ll have acquainted ourselves, at least in passing, with much of what is characteristic and memorable in the landscape: the special places, the seasonal events and the notable species of plants and animals. Also the human element, part of the essential mix in these valleys for many thousands of years.

With a little luck, you’ll come away with a vivid sense of having been there, in person, to experience this remarkable and engaging piece of countryside for yourself.

Time will tell, I suppose.

Forth, pilgrim, forth.

—David Pitt-Brooke

Hat Creek, British Columbia

The spectacle of nature is in the heart of a man; to see it, he must feel it.

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, ou De l’education

Of the gladest [sic] moments in human life methinks is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands.

—Sir Richard Francis Burton (journal entry)

Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill,

Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass.

—Rupert Brooke, The Hill

1

Hot as Hades—Summer in the Similkameen

Bunchgrass campsite above the Similkameen River

Day One

Thursday, August 2: Crater Mountain

Got to make this quick.

It’s been a long day. I’m dog-tired and cold enough to be shivering, which is ironic, considering how close I came to heatstroke earlier this afternoon on the long climb out of the Ashnola River valley, southwest of the village of Keremeos. I’m wearing every scrap of clothing I packed up the mountain, including the down sweater I was sure I’d never use, but nothing seems to help. My fingers are clumsy and numb, white as marble. It’s all I can do to hold this pencil. Putting up the tent is going to be a challenge.

Part of the problem, doubtless, is that I’ve had no proper meal since lunchtime. It’s now almost nine o’clock in the evening and getting quite dark. Only six weeks past the solstice but already the days are closing in. The sunset is long gone. The western sky has faded to a pale aquamarine. Glowing twilight still bathes the summit but the night-tide is rising from the east, pooling in deep gorges far below. The meadows around me have taken on that luminous, numinous quality that dusk always imparts to ordinary beauty. In such clear air, the first stars seem very close. As I watch, a meteor blazes across the sky from northeast to southwest, bonus, no extra charge. A night under heaven, the first of many, or so I hope.

The southern interior of the province of British Columbia is mostly a great expanse of rolling forested upland between 1,200 and 1,500 metres in elevation, rising to modest summits of 1,800 to 2,200 metres.

But those forested uplands are deeply scored by a scattered, irregular network of narrow, relatively dry valleys, originating in the faults and weaknesses of a complex bedrock, further excavated and shaped by that dynamic duo of landscape architecture: glacial ice and running water.

The difference in elevation between forested uplands and the deeper valleys can be quite dramatic. Crater Mountain summits out at 2,293 metres. Keremeos, on the floor of the Similkameen River valley, practically in the shadow of the mountain, lies at an elevation of only 365 metres, a difference of almost 2,000 metres.

That difference in elevation yields a substantial difference in climate.

Winters on the high plateau are long and cold. Snow cover persists into May or June. Where native forests survive—mostly Engelmann spruce (Picea engelmannii), white spruce (Picea glauca) and subalpine fir (Abies lasiocarpa)—the climate is relatively cool and moist, even in summer.

Valley winters, on the other hand, are relatively brief and not nearly so cold as those in the high country. Temperatures are further moderated by the thermal mass of large lakes or rivers. Snow cover is limited and soon gone in the spring. Summers are hot and dry, despite the lakes and rivers. It is a landscape of open grassy meadows and forested parkland.

Two very different environments, then, upland and valley, sharing the same geographical space, coexisting, interlocking, inextricably intermeshed, but supporting radically different communities of plants and animals. An archipelago of semi-arid islands surrounded by the forested ocean of high plateau.

Takes me forever to fall asleep; I can’t seem to get warm. And I’ve only just managed to drop off at last before I’m suddenly wide awake again, swimming out of dreams, to find the tent bright with light. Panicky, half dazed, I fumble with sleeping bag, tent, rain-fly, all those zippers. When I do finally get my head outside, I’m relieved to find that it’s only the moon, nearly full, rising above the ridge behind my campsite, lovely image, another unexpected and unplanned bonus for my first night out. All around the tent and far into the dim distance the meadows are illuminated by the otherworldly, not-quite-daylight of moonshine. At such times I can almost fancy a presence in the landscape that goes beyond the ordinary, day-to-day fact of the thing, a shadowy awareness of the unseen world.

Back in the sleeping bag I realize, suddenly, that the chill is gone. I’m warm, at last, thank goodness, the bedtime snack having finally kicked in. I even shed a layer or two of insulation before drifting back into exhausted sleep.

Day Two

Friday, August 3: Crater Mountain to Ashnola River

When I wake again, it’s broad daylight.

The top of Crater Mountain is mostly open ground, little tarns and heather meadows, with a modest summit ridge. There doesn’t seem to be an actual crater, but the north side of the mountain is hollowed out into a great empty cirque enclosed by steep basalt cliffs. The open grassy meadows on the southern slopes, more typical of lower elevations, climb here to almost 1,800 metres, blending directly into the alpine vegetation. (Grassland and alpine in this part of the world are usually separated by kilometres of forest and many hundreds of metres of elevation.)

The daylight view from the summit turns out to be every bit as spectacular as I might have hoped. Far to the west, the horizon outlines the jagged forested peaks of the Skagit Range of the Cascade Mountains, just one of innumerable mountain ranges that crowd along the Pacific coast of British Columbia. To the south, across the Ashnola River valley, is a different extension of the northern Cascades, the Okanagan Range, comparatively rounded summits, with the alpine meadows of Cathedral Lakes Provincial Park and Snowy Mountain Provincial Park in the middle distance.

The Ashnola River itself drains off a height of land to the southwest. It courses through a deep valley along the south side of Crater Mountain before turning abruptly northward to pass below the mountain’s eastern flank, tumbling toward the even more deeply excavated valley of the Similkameen River, north and east of my high perch.

Eastward beyond the Similkameen looms the extreme southern end of the South Thompson Highlands, Orofino Mountain and Mount Kobau. And somewhere out of sight beyond all that is the Okanagan Valley.

As always from the top of a mountain, I feel as if a few stout strides would take me to that far horizon. The long walk ahead seems practically accomplished. Nothing to it at all.

I love mountains and uplands, the world-striding view from the summit, but on this journey I’ll mostly be following that network of valleys, home of the heart, with their odd and unique climate: too warm and too dry for such a northerly latitude, mimicking conditions ordinarily found much farther south in Washington, Oregon and Idaho, a curious northward extension of the Columbia Basin climate, thanks mostly to a powerful adiabatic effect in the lee of the Coast Mountains.

Consider a mass of air crossing those ranges from west to east. As the air flows up the windward side of the mountains, it decompresses and cools. If the air cools to the dew point, some of its moisture will condense and perhaps precipitate as rain or snow. If that happens, the air flowing down this lee side of the mountains will be drier and, being drier, will warm more quickly as it compresses with the loss of altitude. If that happens, air on the lee side of the mountains will be both drier and warmer than the more humid air at the same altitude on the windward side.

This is the adiabatic effect. Here, in these interior valleys, that adiabatic flow is the norm, the prevailing wind being from the west, day after day, week after week, year after year, a constant drying flow of air.

It does rain, of course, especially in the spring months. And it snows, too, in the winter months, so the soil is usually adequately charged with moisture at the beginning of the growing season. This isn’t quite a desert. But the actual amount of precipitation is fairly modest. And through most of the summer and early autumn, moisture is lost from the soil more rapidly than it can be replenished by precipitation, a negative balance.

The whole living community is shaped and governed by that simple fact. Those species of plants and animals that can deal with the lopsided moisture regime—adequate moisture in the winter-spring, drought through the summer-fall—will survive and prosper. Those that can’t, don’t.

And here it is, the whole show, all nicely laid out for me, a living diorama.

Far away on the western horizon, the jagged peaks of the Skagit Range, crowned with puffy cloud caps. Beyond that, somewhere, rain forests, seashore, ocean, all moist and cool. On this side, blue skies, sunshine, grassy slopes. Down in the valley where the air is more compressed, a hot, dry climate, near-desert conditions. I can almost sense the countryside drying out as all that desiccated air flows off the mountains and down through the valleys toward me.

Late afternoon, now, and hot as hades. It’s remarkable how much difference a bit of elevation can make. The air at the summit was cool and pleasant, but with every step down the trail I feel the heat building, not just with the warmth of the sun on the rocks and vegetation around me, but also with my descent into denser, warmer air. The track toward the foot of the mountain is very steep, with tight switchbacks carved into the rock. The hillsides across the valley loom abruptly across a gulf of shimmering air.

I’m suffering the first stages of heatstroke, a slight but noticeable confusion and headache. I’ve read somewhere that body temperatures above 40°C can be life-threatening (one’s brain begins to poach inside one’s overheated skull), and I know it’s hotter than that here today on the rocky lower slopes of Crater Mountain.

In fact, the only thing keeping me alive is the river of sweat running over my face, neck and torso, cooling me by evaporation. There are strict physiological limits to that. Eventually my body will reach some ultimate point of dehydration and turn off the taps. Both water bottles are empty and the question is: Which am I going to run out of first? Moisture or mountain?

Mountain, happily.

I manage to reach the woods and the river at the bottom of the slope without exhausting my bodily fluids. Heatstroke is ordinarily treated by getting the patient out of the sun and cooling their over-heated body with a water bath. Rehydration is important. The Ashnola serves admirably on all accounts. It’s a lovely clear-water stream tumbling over great rounded boulders, hardly more than a big creek this far up the valley, with sun-dappled shade and birdsong as added benefits.

Certainly I feel much better after a dip in the river, a cool drink of water and a bite to eat. I take time to bandage my feet and change my socks. (I blistered both feet on yesterday’s climb, and the jolting hike back down the mountain has not done them any good.)

The shadows are already lengthening and the heat has begun to ease a little. In a while I’ll go looking for a place to set up my tent.

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.

—John Lubbock, The Use of Life

A pleasant little clearing beside the road just above the river. In the cooler air and growing darkness I can hear water splashing over rocks below. I can smell it, too, that slightly acrid scent of water in a dry land. Also I can smell the foliage around me as it begins to breathe again after a long hot day. Cottonwoods, alders, maples and willows along the stream. Pines and Douglas-fir on the slopes above. Water in a dry land. Today’s bit of grace.

Day Three

Saturday, August 4: Ashnola River to Fairview Road

With towering walls of stone rising steeply from both sides of the water, the first few miles through the Ashnola River canyon are the highlight of the day, though the road is rough going, dust and gravel. The riparian vegetation near the water, green and lush, contrasts beautifully with the pale, arid slopes above.

Some of the nicest bits of Crater Mountain’s natural habitat are on those steep east-facing slopes, protected by the formidable, relatively inaccessible terrain, too rugged for logging and livestock. The slopes are a pretty fair showcase for the whole mosaic of different habitat types so characteristic of these dry interior valleys, a living fabric that clothes the physical landscape, not a blanket so much as a quilt of vividly different patches: meadows of bluebunch wheatgrass (Pseudoroegneria spicata) or rough fescue (Festuca scabrella), maybe a few scattered Ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa). Little copses of trembling aspen (Populus tremuloides) with understories of herbs and shrubs: wild rose (Rosa sp.) or common snowberry (Symphoricarpos albus). Below the cliff faces above the road are great patches of tumbled stone, talus slopes wearing pendant necklaces of green shrubbery nourished by the reservoir of moisture accumulated under the rock. Higher on the slope, patches of open Douglas-fir forest (Pseudotsuga menziesii) carpeted by lawns of pinegrass (Calamagrostis rubescens). And down along the river, a riparian woodland of black cottonwood (Populus balsamifera tricarpus), mountain alder (Alnus incana), Douglas maple (Acer glabrum) and various willows (Salix spp).

If we had to choose one bit of habitat, one patch of that quilt, to represent the whole landscape, we’d almost certainly choose the bunchgrass meadows so characteristic of these dry interior valleys. It’s not uncommon to hear the valleys of southern interior British Columbia referred to as grasslands, though, of course, there’s much more to them, ecologically, than grass.

Certainly bunchgrass will be the holy grail of this pilgrimage. Whenever I come across a meadow of healthy native grass I’ll feel reassured that the whole surrounding landscape, the entire quilt, is also in relatively good condition. And, contrariwise, where the native grasses are shopworn and scanty (or gone altogether) I’ll know that something is terribly wrong.

A young woman with a small baby in a child’s car seat beside her pulls alongside to ask if I need a ride. The kindness of strangers always takes me by surprise. I decline the offer with thanks, trying, awkwardly, to explain in twenty words or less why it’s important for me to do this on foot. She smiles, nods and drives away. I doubt I did much of a job of expressing myself, but I go on with a lighter heart.

It’s evening and the road has just started to climb back out of the valley. Suddenly I’m conscious of great fatigue. I’m surrounded by this huge, fierce, gorgeous piece of scenery, the view back along the deep trench of the Similkameen valley, past Keremeos to where the Ashnola debouches from its canyon, and beyond that to where the Similkameen itself flows into view, from around a corner to the northwest, but I’m much too tired to enjoy it.

I positively ache for the end of the trail and my night’s rest. When the starting point for tomorrow’s hike up the north ridge of Mount Kobau comes into view, I am at first delighted. It seems the perfect wayside gypsy camping place, a nice little clearing with a stream flowing down through the woods, green and leafy, the whole bit.

But when I get closer