Smoke in Aug.

This is what the Nicola valley looked like at 8:30 in the morning on Tuesday when I was driving to Penticton. Our province has 400 wildfires burning this year and the smoke from the largest fires is filling up the valleys even a long distance away.

Pelicans come to fish on Stump lake in the summer but they don't breed here. There is only one lake in the province where they breed and it is currently surrounded by a forest fire.

High Counrty Pottery Sale

I'm a permanent invited guest each summer at the High Country Pottery Sale in Sorrento, BC. It's always a busy and fun sale to do. I didn't get any shots of the hall or the crowds because it was super busy all day. I sold lots of weaving, including my new puff poncho like the one I made Corrie and lots of cards and landscapes. Everyone always does really well and has a good time.

High Country Pottery

Sorrento

Great Shuswap Pottery Sale (with guests )

Here are a few pictures from the sale at the Shuswap this past weekend. It's always a great sale for me and this year was no different . I was so busy that I didn't have a chance to take pictures of the crowds.  I sold one of my new bigger landscapes, as well as lots of weaving and smaller landscapes.

the setting and the hall.

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the drive out to Celista

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

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.