Vancouver, BC to Nelson, BC

Day 29: Tue 19 Aug: Another day, another half dozen ecosystems.

Mario made a delicious breakfast to send me on my way. I'm sad that I couldn't stay longer, but look forward to my return. This trip has been more about breadth than depth, but I've now got a pretty good list of places I'd like to spend more extended time in.

Mario gave me a route out of town that would avoid late rush hour traffic. Remember what I said about there not being any freeways in Vancouver? I imagine it diversifies the routes people take to get to and from their work, since many different paths are mostly the same. His instructions worked great, and I didn't hit any traffic on my way out. I did have an incident when I shifted into the second rightmost lane on a bridge in preparation for getting off in two exits, only to discover that the right two lanes were exit-only. The taxi driver who I cut off (twice) seemed remarkably forgiving.

As Brian's brother and sister-in-law put it: "Canada: a kinder, gentler, United States."

I made my way down CA-1 along the Fraser Valley to Hope. It says something about the mountains I was coming upon that there was a huge, electronic, sign detailing which of the four major routes through the mountains were open.

It was cloudy and drizzly most of the way, which seemed odd, since the landscape looked very Californian: conifers and dead (oops, I mean golden) grass. It's not supposed to rain in August in California. Or Oregon. Or Washington (outside of the coastal rain forest). Or, as it turns out, central British Columbia. Everyone said it was weird.

The mountains here are steep. I mean, really steep. Like, just pushed up from the ocean floor and not enough time has passed for any significant erosion steep. Landslide steep. And indeed, I drove by a memorial for the Hope Slide. Let's just say that the road I drove on was 30 meters higher than the road I would have driven on before January 9, 1965. The picture to the left is of some of the rockfall from that slide.

As I would later learn from Brian, avalanches and landslides occur with amazingly lethal regularity. The highways I would drive on for the next several days all contained gates at irregular intervals to block traffic during avalanche remediation. It's very weird to be driving on a high-speed (although not divided) highway and pass through a railroad gate-arm with no railroad crossing.

I drove along a long stretch of the Similkameen River, which is the irrigation source for acres and acres of orchards. Cherries, peaches, apples, grapes, berries, you name it. Some of the twons I drove through were non-stop fruit-stand strip-malls. The picture to the right is of the mountain above Keremeos, one of these orchard towns.

Gas prices in Canada have not gone up as much as in the US, and with the exchange rate the way it is, Canadian gasoline really isn't that much more expensive than that in the US.

I eventually made it to Nelson, to Brian's house. Nelson is a pretty crunchy, hippie, outdoorsy, town. It's very beautiful. It is on the south shore of the long, thin, west branch of Kootenay Lake. It seems like every town here has its own hydropower dam, advertised when you get into each town. Nelson as well. The mountainsides are steep, and although Nelson is laid out on a grid, that grid has some weirdnesses due to the steepness of the hill streets.

Brian's housemate Lauren (Loren?) let me in. Ollie (Brian's dog) remembered me (and probably will never forget the snowy night he managed to score a roast off of our grill). I quickly met a couple Shambala-ian drop-bys, including a guy from Montpelier, VT (one of several Montpelierites I would meet in Nelson) who runs The Vermont Hemp Trade Initiative. He's been traveling across Canada picking up hemp products to sell in California, and since I was coming from where he was going, and vice versa, we talked a bit about the must-sees and the can-skips.

The Shambalians eventually moved on. Another house guest (name forgotten) arrived from climbing in the Bugaboos. He's connected to everyone else at the house through NOLS, and had been doing some serious (to me) climbing. Brian eventually arrived home and we all had a delicious, vegan, rice-bowl dinner with great conversation.

It had been a long day, and bed was very welcome.