Dewdrop, Tranquille

The other day we went for a hike in the Dewdrop, Tranquille are. The ground was still soft after winter and the grass was just starting to grow.

view of the Thompson river from the Red Lake Road

big horn sheep near Tranquille

view of Kamloops lake from the top of the bluff near the train tunnel while doing Mollie's Reach cache

                                                      Mollie's Reach 

Last Sunday of January

We had a fun weekend of caching. Rick had Friday off, so we went to the western part of town out by the airport to do some fun puzzle caching. There was not much snow at that time, but the day was too gray for pictures. We were pleased with our selves to figure out the Head's Up Cache  Head's Up . It involved figuring out a hidden code to find the coordinates.

                                                      
It snowed about 6" on Saturday night and then turned cold and clear. Sunday the temperature didn't get above -10C. We spent Sunday afternoon driving through the grassland taking pictures and finding caches.
We are now up to 601.

Edith Lake Road

Caching in Nov.

Near the end of November, we went on a beautiful winter walk above Rosehill to finish off a puzzle cache that we had started. It was snowy, but sunny and it turned out to be a great walk. The puzzle cache was amazing and our favourite of all that we have done this year. It turned out to be almost our 500th find.

Rick at the final stage of  "4 Elements"

Colours of August

peaches,gala apples, tomatoes, flowers from our garden

We are finally having a beautiful, sunny day with no smoke in the valley. The forest fires in the Cariboo have been so bad this month, that we've had very smoky days and a lot of air quality advisories.

Our garden and fruit trees have been doing super well with out much attention from us.

We've been driving back and forth to Penticton a lot this summer, trying to get my 85 yr old father settled in a care home and then an assisted living facility.  So far this week things are going well in Penticton and we are at home getting ready to go on vacation for 3 weeks.

The Kamloops area has had enough moisture this summer to keep the grasslands a bit green and to keep us from having bad forest fires in the immediate area. The grass is starting to turn golden now at the end of Aug. and the river level is starting to drop.

hills from Barnhartvale, looking north

Thompson river at dusk

golden grass on an evening walk

moon, sunset Aug 22

Go to  lifeloomslarge  to see more colours of August from around the world.

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.

Colours of July

July has been very hot and much dryer than normal. The grasslands around Kamloops have quickly become golden.

Thompson River looking west towards Kamloops

 

Our yard is a little oasis in the desert.

Unfortunately, we are getting into wildfire season around here with the dry conditions.

This was the view from the top of our driveway this morning looking towards Kamloops. A 55 hectare fire broke out in the sagebrush covered hills near the area that we live in.

There are a lot of dead pine trees in the area.  The air tankers were on the job first thing this morning and the fire was 80% controlled by afternoon.

visit Sue's blog at Life Looms Large to see more Colours of July from around the world.

Lac du Bois on a holiday Monday

The weather was sunny and cool on Monday, after a rainy weekend. We spent the whole day geocaching in the Lac du Bois grasslands. They were pretty this time of year, but didn't have nearly as much growth as other areas to the east.  Still, it was nice to see them while they are still green.

It wasn't in the tree!

Lac du Bois itself.                                     The Ballsam Root is still in bloom.

Chocolate Lily

The dogs are helping.

This is an old cabin at Griffin Lake

We drove to Pass Lake and then over to Isobel Lake where we walked all the way around on the interpretive trail. We drove home on the long Lake Road through the Eastern side of the grasslands.

Sunday trip to Chase area

On Sunday we drove out towards Chase, on the other side of the river, to do some Geo caching and to find some rocks for our pond. The day was lovely, one of the first warm, almost summer like days we've had this year.

These pictures are from a cache in the hills above Pritchard on the north side of the river.  Martin Mountain is still snow covered in the background. The grasslands are really green right now and a lot of the flowers are over. The Balsam Root that normally covers these hills didn't do very well this year and is a lot smaller than normal.

The South Thompson river from the bridge at Pritchard. The river has come up a lot in the last few weeks, but still has a long way to go.

A view of Niskonlith lake near Chase, looking east. Some of the dead trees from the fire in 2003 can be seen in this picture.

My 20 minute sketch of the same view while Rick was looking at plants

An early bunch of Paintbrush flowers blooming in the shade and a single late Arnica flower. We also saw Penstemon, Lupine and Larkspur blooming.