More Colours of June

Here are 2 more pictures of the beautiful green grasslands with mountains in the background. With this unusual spring the mountains still have snow at the end of June. We drove and hiked on Stoyoma on the 1st of July a couple of years ago. There's beautiful alpine scenery up there and a recreation site on a little lake. This year we wouldn't be able to get there.

a beautiful green valley near Hat Creek, BC

Stoyoma Mountain near Merritt

Colours of June

  Here are some pictures of a rainy June day in our yard.  We've had a lot of rain all month, the river and creeks are filled up and the drought fears have eased around our area.

raindrops on our pond

the peonies have been beautiful

The rainy June has meant that the grasslands are still a bright green and the wild flowers are putting on a show this year.

chocolate lilies

Here is a link to Life Looms Large with some more pictures of the Colours of June from around the world.

Life Looms Large

Allenby

map of our route

  

One day we drove over to Princeton and after looking around the museum we found a few more caches at an old mining town called Allenby. It was a few km outside of Princeton towards the south.

"Constructed in 1916, Allenby was the site of the 2,000 ton concentrator and mill plant used to process ore from Copper Mountain. Many concrete foundations remain in Allenby today, along with ruins of what once was a busy company town that had 68 homes and all the comforts required by a community."

from a web site

Now, very little remains of the town and mine. It's another place we never would have found without geocaching.

The Mine that used to be ..... Allenby     Rick at the cache site

old photo of Allenby

link to photos of Allenby    Allenby, Ghost Town

fossils on the walk down to another cache

part of the mine down by the Smilkameen River

This cache was at a very strange geological formation. No one seems to know why it's there. It looks man made, but it's not.

Standing Wall, Shrinking Shaft     cache

Hiking along the KVR

The old KVR (Kettle Valley Railroad line runs along the Tulameen River between Coalmont and Princeton. It has been fixed up as part of the trans Canada Trail and a lot of bikers and quadders use it in the summer. It goes through very rugged country and there is limited access to the trail from the road. There are a few caches placed along the KVR with direction to 4x4 roads to access points. We never would have experienced the trail or the river if it wasn't for the caches. We really enjoyed the trip and we saw no other people the whole day that we were down there.

views of the Tulameen River along the KVR at  Summer Sand  cache

views from  TCT Princeton "Twin as the Bridges"

on the way to Roaneys Station          a baby Harlequin duck walked down the trail in front of us

Coalmont, Blakeburn

old Coalmont hotel

We had a lot of fun geocaching and touring around Coalmont, Granite City and Blakeburn. Coalmont still has some buildings in use, but Granite City and Blakeburn are old ghost towns. There aren't many structures left, but the caches took us to some interesting spots we never would have know about otherwise.

some scenes from Coalmont

Coalmont web site

this is one of the only cabins remaining at Granite City, just up the road from Coalmont

"WELCOME TO GRANITE CITY

In 1885 a cowboy named Johnny CHANCE struck it rich!

He started a boom town that grew to a population of over two

thousand! Granite had two main streets, 'Government and Granite',

with two hundred buildings, thirteen of which were saloons!

But it was not to last, and by 1915 it was left to the deer and grass . . ."

this is a picture of a dredge on the Tulameen river in 1930. When Rick's mom was a little girl her family worked a dredge like this out of Princeton in around 1925.

an old cabin along the tram line near Blakeburn

one of the towers for the tram line almost gone now

the new strip mine above the old town of Blakeburn

all that's left of the Shaughnessy  division of Blakeburn

Meet Miss Mary McKay – of Shaughnessy Division

what we had to walk through to get to the old cabins!

old coal chute at Blakeburn      Blakeburn

a street in downtown  Blakeburn today

Blakeburn 1926

http://www.michaelkluckner.com/bciw2coalmont.html

old Blakeburn coal pit  Mullin Coal Mine by the Tulameen Turtles

view from the old town of Blakeburn

Muffy at the end of a long day

We found 9 caches , did a lot of walking and exploring and bushwhacking.