British Columbia is big. Just the one province of Canada is four time the size of UK, or bigger than France and Germany combined. It’s full of amazing scenery and we’ve done many, many miles exploring the never-ending network of dirt-trails leading to spectacular view-points and remote camp-spots. In the Kootenays we’ve had a phenomenal heat-wave, thunderous lightning storms and freaky forest fires popping up at random spots all over the province. Oh… and posh mushrooms, we had a load of those too!
Kootenays
‘The Kootenays’? Ever heard of them? Errrm… maybe a folk band warbling their way around the pubs of south-west England? Or a rare breed of bantam chicken? Nope. Try again. It’s the fabulously scenic region of south-east BC where we found ourselves exploring for the last few weeks.
Unlike our previous haunts in the beautiful Okanagan Valley, the Kootenays mark the western start of the Rockies… proper mountains, with jagged snow-capped peaks ‘n all that typical Rockies-type cool scenery. They’ve got glaciers up there and some of the rivers are the spectacular sapphire-blue melt-waters that dazzle in tourist brochures.
The stunning Kootenays
We have many fave-spots in the Kootenays, but our Top Tip for the region is the route that starts with the Bull River Valley. In fact, it’s one of our Top Tips for the whole of BC. Not only is it beautiful, but it seems to be little visited and grossly underrated. If you’re heading this way, we can highly recommend joining the valley at the south end in the (appropriately named) village of Bull River near Cranbrook, then follow the trail all the way north. Continue past the astonishingly blue Munroe Lake, past Whiteswan Lake and up the Palliser FSR to Highway 93 near Radium Hot Springs.
The whole trail is one of the best in BC: around 180km of reasonable dirt road and sooper-dooper scenery with some cool riverside rec sites like Sulphur Creek, 40 Mile Camp, Fenwick Creek, Palliser-Albert and Horseshoe Rapids. In the Kootenays we saw bears, moose, assorted deer and lots of other critters. This is what Canada is all about for us 😊
Too mushroom
There aren’t many trucks around like our Cuthbert. He’s distinctive and gets his fair share of recognition. When we were parked-up in a Kootenay forest clearing, a nice guy came down the trail and stopped to say hi. He recognised Cuthbert from a car-park in Oliver over 300 km away some 6 weeks before! He was in the area picking wild mushrooms in the forest and kindly offered us some. After producing a large fungi-filled brown paper bag, he waved and disappeared off with a smile.
We weren’t really sure what they were, so thought it wise to do a bit of Googling before munching. Turns out, they were morel mushrooms and we had a small fortune’s worth of fungi on our hands! Checking the price, it seems that commercially (no doubt in a city cheffy-gourmet store) the weight of morels in the bag would have fetched around $200!!! Of course, we had to eat them all before they went off, so for three days we had piles of posh garlic-sauteed morels stacked into sausage sandwiches (yes, we’re classy eaters) and bowls of pasta.
Fires and Storms
A notable feature of life in western Canada recently has been heat. It’s hot, damn hot. Historic temperature records have been broken day after day.
Now… we’re no strangers to heat. We lived for years in one of the hottest places on earth: Doha, Qatar. But here’s the thing: the Middle East is set up for daily temperatures of 45C. Canada, not so much. The small town of Lytton, BC made news around the world as it reached a bonkers 49.6C!!
Living in a truck, we cope with heat here in the same way as we coped with it in other more tropical zones of our travels: we try to move to a cooler place. Typically, we skidaddle to higher ground and find a shady place by a stream, river or a lake. But many people are stuck in sweltering, airless valley-towns and the first tragedy of this heatwave is that hundreds of people, particularly the elderly and the homeless, died due to the effects of the heat.
Parking up by cooling rivers… the way to go in a heat-wave 😎
Another tragedy that comes with the heatwave is fire. The hot, dry conditions are optimum for forest fires to take hold and spread quickly. Sometimes these are caused by idiots not extinguishing their campfires properly (we actually stopped a couple of times to douse some embers that some plonkers had left smoking in the forest). But another cause is the meteorological conditions generating phenomenal electrical storms. These bring spine-shuddering booms of thunder and spectacular cracks of lightning, but no rain. Lightning hits the ground and spark fires in the tinder-dry forests. As I write this there are currently hundreds of forest fires burning in BC.
Many fires are remote and either burn themselves out or the fire-fighters can get them under control. But some come scarily close to dwellings. Tragically, the small town of Lytton (yes, the same place that hit the headlines with the record temperatures) was destroyed by fire a couple of weeks ago. Reports in the media of flames tearing through the community at between 10 and 20 kilometres per hour, people abandoning their homes and escaping with nothing but their lives. Some sadly didn’t even manage that.
We had just seen all this awful stuff on the news when we spotted fire smoke drifting down the valley towards where we were parked-up on a wooded hillside. Eeek! Checking the BC fire website we saw that a large fire was spreading near Castlegar around 22km away. It was designated ‘out of control’ and there was an emergency evacuation order for the immediate area. In the end it didn’t come anywhere near close enough to threaten us, but many people were displaced for a few days and it again brought home to us the risk in these parts. BC has no rain forecast for at least the next six weeks, so the risk isn’t over yet.
Gearbox Work
It was just in the middle of all this fire stuff going on that DHL delivered to us an order of vehicle parts for some gearbox work to be done on Cuthbert. Some O-ring seals and the synchromesh needed replacing. Marcus can do this himself, but it’s a big job. Dropping the 60kg gearbox from underneath Cuthbert, dismantling it, replacing the parts, reassembling and re-fitting to the vehicle might normally take a few days. But Marcus is never comfortable having Cuthbert in bits overnight. Particularly now with forest fires randomly popping up like whack-a-mole across the region, and the government advising people in rural areas to have ‘go-bags’ packed and have evacuation plans in place, it seemed less than ideal to have our vehicle and home in an un-driveable state for any longer than necessary. He decided to do the work in a day. The question was… where?
Turns out, we had a bit of good fortune in the ‘where to work on Cuthbert’ dilemma. Via a mutual friend we were introduced to the nice guys at Redfish Vanz near Nelson. They fit out Mercedes Sprinter vans as very cool, high-quality overlanding rigs and totally understood our needs. Joe and Wren kindly allowed us to park-up at their beautiful pad in the Slocan Valley forest where Marcus could do the work. Great result for us and yet another example of the fabulous hospitality and kindness that we have found in Canada.
Eastwards
Just as Cuthbert is back in tip-top condition, we’re ready to hit the road again. The border to the US still isn’t open and there’s no real news as to when that is likely. The media are ranting about the injustice of it all, but Biden and Trudeau are keeping schtum. But actually, we don’t really care yet. There’s still so much of awesome Canada that we haven’t seen yet. The nice immigration people here have extended our visas again, so we’re in no hurry to leave.
We’ve been keeping an eye on the news across Canada regarding inter-provincial travel and it really seems to be opening up now. Several provinces have reached their vaccination targets ahead of schedule and bringing forward their next-steps in ‘new normal’. It’s time to head east!!! So it’s bye-bye to BC (again) for now.
We spent our last day on BC parked-up by the Kicking Horse River watching tv on our Starlink system: Sir Richard Branson going into space and then England v Italy in the Euro finals. It seems football isn’t coming home after all ☹, but this didn’t spoil our marvellous time in BC. You’ve been awesome BC and we hope we’ll be back sometime. In the meantime, watch this space for tales of blasting across Alberta, Saskatechewan and Manitoba as we make the most of the short Canadian summer 😎