Christina Valley
Day 35

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Keremeos to Christina Lake in Kootenay/Boundry Co..
Link to Christina photo album

This part of the trip is all on BC-3. After leaving Keremeos there were a couple of places where I wanted to get pictures of the valley. It looked like a storybook, all laid out neatly and very green. Unfortunately I couldn't find a place to get off the road. Maybe next time.

After a few hours in the mountains, I dropped down into Osoyoos, a town and lake by the same name in a deep valley (see photo album). The town is built across the lake! This valley is advertised as the BC desert or “vest pocket desert” and one of their crops are grapes. Very pretty town, next time I'll schedule a 2-3 day stop. The south end of the lake is Oroville , Washington .

After climbing out of the Osoyoos valley I was on the Okanagan Highlands for awhile (which is still pretty mountainous) and then into the Monashee Mountains, followed by the Christina Range and Christina Lake itself. This is another village and lake with the same name.

Once again I stopped for lunch alongside a babbling creek, even with the occasional traffic going by, it was very peaceful.


Road Report: Highway is good to excellent and passing lanes are frequent. Traffic has been really light. There are a few scenic view pull-outs but be careful, I saw a couple that were dead ends and weren't big enough for a rig with a toad to turn around. My new rule, don't pull in unless you can see a way out! Rest stops are wide spots in the road with a trash can.

RV Park Report: Christina Pines is about 3 blocks off of the highway, at the south end of the lake. It's a fairly large park with lots of trees, gravel pads, grass, a picnic table and full hook-ups. The people are very friendly and there is normally a communal bonfire at least twice a week and a potluck on the weekends. It has all the usual stuff, including an outdoor, in-ground pool, camp kitchen, laundry etc. The public picnic area at the south end of the lake is about 3 blocks away and there is grocery shopping within walking/biking distance.

They were taking the outdoor pool out of winter lay-up when I arrived. However, they couldn't get the pool heater to work. I volunteered to check it out. It took me about 5 minutes to find and fix the problem. I found that the protective flow switch was wired backwards; it was turning the heater on when there wasn't any flow and turning it off when there was. They had been working on it all day and had to have it working the following day because the local school uses the pool for swim classes the last couple of weeks before summer vacation. An interesting note, this is one of the school districts that has gone to a 4 day school week with longer days. They say it has worked out great.

I found a little café that had WiFi and very good food. They had an outdoor veranda that was covered with grape vines and really comfortable. The WiFi connection cost $8/hr but its configured wrong. The internet modem is behind the firewall so, even though I could get on the internet, and download my mail, I couldn't send mail. So I switched to Web mail, which works fine, except I can't see jpg or other visuals.

I'm scheduled to be here for a week, I'm hoping that will be enough time to get my prescription refills sent to me. I'll pretty much have to stay until they arrive because I'll be out of my diabetes meds in a week. That was another surprise, when I had inquired while back in the State about shipping to Canada , I was told that it wouldn't be a problem. When I called to order my refills I was told that the only overseas shipments ( Canada is “overseas” to them) they could make was to APO or FPO addresses. So I had to have my refills shipped to my PMB and had them FedEx them to me. The people at Kingston Mail & Print had to open the boxes, make out a form listing all the meds and the prescribing doctor, reseal the boxes and attached the form, along with a value deceleration, to the outside of the boxes. I can't believe that I'm the only retiree on Tricare that is traveling outside the U.S. for extended periods. I'm going to have to pass this on to AARP & MOAA and see what we can do about it.

As it worked out, I had to extend my stay for a week because Express Scripts shipped part of my refills via the postal service, normal delivery. It took about 5 days to get to Kingston . I was out of Glucovance for about 4 days but had no problems with my sugar levels. I've still got some refills due to me but they're ones that I still have pleanty of. I told Mail & Print to just sit on them until I found a place where I could recieve them, probably "Head-Smashed-In".

Christina Lake area is a good place for hiking, I even saw a couple of wild turkeys on one of my hikes. They just stopped and watched me for awhile but by the time I got my camera out they were gone. I now keep my camera around my neck instead of in the backpack. I was even able to get in some nude hiking up on Castle Mountain .

The lake and the rivers have trout and other fish in them but the rivers (and the north end of the lake) were still closed while I was there. I tried my hand at lake fishing but didn't have much luck. I guess you have to know where to fish.

The river flowing out of the valley and into Washington State is one branch of the Kettle River . A local told me the story of how some Canadian hippies were growing BC Bud in the mountains above the valley and floating the crop down the river at night, across the border where it was fished out of the river by accomplices on the U.S side. Apparently this worked a couple of times but the border guards caught on and started intercepting the floating pot. They never caught the growers but the floating marijuana stopped. I was extremely careful during my hikes to stay away anything that even remotely looked like a grow operation, and I did see a couple of clearings that were kind of suspicious.

I had a fluorescent light in my bedroom fry a transformer so I had to make a quick run farther east to Castlegar to get a replacement. The town of Grand Forks back to the west doesn't have an RV store and neither one of the 2 hardware stores there carried 12 VDC light fixtures. Although does have the only RV park that I've seen so far with WiFi. It's called the Riveria RV Park (I think the spelling is supposed to be a play on words because the park is on the bank of a river). So anyway, Castlegar is on BC-3 but I am going to be taking BC-3B when I continue on, which leaves 3 before Castlegar. So I got to see some landscape that wasn't on my intended route.

Weather Report: Weather was good, in the 18-22° C range, with just a couple of days of thunderstorms.

Next stop; Cranbrook in the East Kootenay's.