[Disclaimer: There's always a risk of ludicrous error when, after passing through a place where other people live their whole lives, for 2 days, you make confident statements about that place. I apologize for any inaccurate characterizations of the locations in these blog posts!]
I woke up at 5:15 a.m., and ambled out into the parking lot in the dim morning light. A trace of sulphur (I won't say brimstone) hung in the air.
When my brothers were ready, we strolled off into Lumby's centre. On a triangular lawn beside the thoroughfare, children had coloured fish shapes, and the fish were arranged to cavort in waves along the fence.
An ambulance service building is located beside the park. Behind it we found a public library. Beyond that, a village museum.
A teenage Lumbyite stepped out of one of the family homes to walk the dog.
He looked over at us, keeping a grip on his pet, and started up a conversation, hollering across the street in a friendly fashion. 'I have a little bit of German in me too,' he said when my brothers explained our European provenance, 'but I only speak a few words.'
He recommended, after a moment's thought, that we visit the co-op in town. We were amused that he seemed to be trying to drive in business for the owner (maybe a relative or a family friend?) with an air that was half guilty and wholly devious.
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| Lumby museum, September 12, 2024. All rights reserved. |
The village museum was not yet open, but we wandered through the yard.
The weatherboarded buildings were decorated with hanging pink, white, and purple petunias, like the rest of the village. Murals on the outer walls depicted the local history of forestry and agriculture. A John Deere tractor from the 1940s stood in the yard, as well as more enigmatic machinery (a combine?). It intrigued me to think that my paternal grandfather may have driven that exact model of tractor when he farmed in the 1950s and 60s.
In a trim, peak-roofed shed, a bright red fire engine appeared to be from the 1950s. It now had a vintage vehicle license plate.
Then we walked along the empty streets. There were more murals, like a tribute to World War I veterans on the Royal Canadian Legion building. A blue plastic cupboard at the sidewalk held free newspapers, likely The Vernon Morning Star.
While Lumby doesn't look like a hippie commune, it is not immune to another sea change that has also occurred since we visited Canada in 2018 (the year of federal cannabis legalization): it had at least one marijuana shop.
*
In general the impression in Lumby was of a pleasant, hearty civic culture. Public art, community information boards full of up-to-date events, and people who knew each other well when they crossed paths in the streets and shops.
The Salmon Trail complex is ideal for walking a dog, for example, and it winds along industrial territory at the edge of the village. In a cedar wood gazebo near the co-op shop, signs explained the First Nations history of present-day Lumby, as well as the French-Canadian fur trappers who had settled here in the 1800s and the subsequent lumber industry that dominated the town into the 1990s. The different trail sections borrow names from salmon species: Chinook, for example, or Kokanee.
We loved the Salmon Trail. We walked along a creek half-buried in large old willows, other leafy trees, and saskatoon berry bushes, which one could imagine looking the same in the late 1800s. It was like a scene from a Laura Ingalls Wilder book. A few trees less close to the creek were apparently recovering from the droughts of the summer, berries half-drooping.
A wall of felled tree trunks was piled beside the trail at a bend, glowing red as fresh wood does after rain or dew. Looking at the trunks' cross-sections, however, I thought they were often so small that I couldn't imagine that the trees had been felled for profit. Passing by again later, we saw the clue: black scorch marks. The logs must have been salvage from a forest fire. I wondered if they'd be used for pulp, or mulch, or left to disintegrate entirely.
Eventually we emerged back out on the highway, returning to our motel.
We hadn't seen any salmon per se. Although they had been fished near Lumby since time immemorial, also by First Nations (specifically, Chinook salmon, by the Secwépemc). Or, for that matter, coyotes, which are still celebrated by the Splatsin band.
After Uncle Pu was up, we walked to the dollar store in search of tour guidebooks for our Sugar Mountain hike. They didn't have any guidebooks. But I bought half a litre of water and the lady there kindly gave me two free newspapers from behind her counter: one from nearby Vernon and one from Lumby itself.
We ate breakfast at a café across the street. A group of plaid-shirted regulars in their late forties or fifties sat at the entrance, and one of them made a joke that we'd best avoid the café's food ... which didn't seem to land 100% well with the waitress/co-owner. In a plaid shirt herself, she greeted us in an ANZAC accent. We sat down at a table near the shelves of pie and other baked goods, and soon the menus were before us.
I ordered a Denver omelette with green bell peppers, ham, Monterey Jack cheese, and spring onions. It came with toast and hash browns, which were cubed instead of grated. The others ordered pancakes and hamburgers. We finished it all, and when the brothers were done they ordered a second round. The waitress's eyebrows may have lifted slightly! But since we were going to go hiking we wanted to eat heartily, and we finished it all. She was cook as well as waitress, and did the cooking, chopping and frying on the other side of a long counter as people passed in and out the café door.
Like the last day's breakfast in Princeton, the food was enjoyable, and neither tasted or looked like an industrial product. I put jam on my toast, as well as cream in my coffee: so soon we gathered an army of little plastic tubs in the centre of the table. I thought the waitress listened in on our witty(?) banter about bears and hiking. At any rate I felt that she thawed toward us in the course of our breakfast, even before we ordered the second round of food.
I was getting nervous about the late time. But there wasn't much help for it, because the Tourism Information Centre opened at 11 a.m. While we waited, Uncle Pu and Gi. also roamed the grocery chain store ("Open 7 Days A Week", "Back To School Sale! All Stationery 15% Off", "Free Coffee 8-5 In Bakery/Deli Area") to look for bear spray, but bear spray wasn't in stock. That said, a local man had a tale to tell about having met an elderly bear ambling around Saddle Mountain recently: it was a good anecdote of course, but a little unsettling.
The co-op had opened, too. Community leaflets were hung up outside the door, and locals were shopping within. The brothers stocked up on organic fruit juice boxes, candied ginger, and other provisions. In the meantime I stared at yerba mate (which seems popular in British Columbia these days; I've never had it even though it's also common in Berlin) and bread, and felt impressed that 454g bags of regional apples were on sale at a mere $1.69. The cashier smiled as she checked out our groceries, asked if we were passing through, then advised us to watch out for elk.
Finally we had a map of the Sugar Mountain Lookout, and we drove off toward Cherryville again.
*
We left the fork in the road we'd seen the day before, ascending the Kate Creek Forest Service Road. The road had a kilometre number and strip of pink tape at regular distances attached to trees along the road. I'd say it was narrow. Travelling along it became fraught by the 5th kilometre.
At first, our car's white paint and the increasingly dire need for a car wash were our main concerns: like gardening in white leather riding boots that had looked pretty in a KaDeWe window. But the road also had potholes and ridges and dips. Besides our minivan was low-slung. Secondly, it had a lovely bouncy suspension: the car did not just fly up far, but it also dropped down far, especially when we hit an obstacle. After the first handful of kilometres, we flew down onto a rock embedded in the road, and it grated against our minivan's undercarriage.
Envisioning metal car entrails and transmission fluid scattered on the path behind us, we braked the car. Two of the brothers and Uncle Pu got out and stooped to take a look at the undercarriage. Fortunately all was well.
Uncle Pu wisely adjusted our speed to a slow crawl after that, and watched for other rocks. It was a little boring, but better than roadside repairs in the wilderness. We didn't meet any other car for a long time, just rolled past a pick-up truck parked in a roadside niche.
Instead we saw the wreckage left from a wildfire, I think the Sitkum Creek fire that was reported as largely under control by a Vernon website in late July: slender cedar trees that couldn't have been more than 15 years old, with blackened trunks and dead red needles, sometimes toppled into the road. Scorched undergrowth, just rock and soil instead of weeds and bushes and moss. Forest swathes looking red with black streaks, instead of dark green. More debris, like fresh wood chips, testified to the crews of workers who had diligently laboured to clear the road afterward.
I'd read a Nora Roberts novel about forest fires and smokejumpers (Chasing Fire?) a month or so before this holiday, which unfortunately supercharged my imagination now. So I was better informed than I wanted to be, and was pondering survival strategies if a wildfire broke out while we were driving along here. (Later it looked like the trees that had survived generally grew in the valleys of watercourses, especially in forks where several watercourses met. So our best bet might have been to look for the nearest ditch.)
We went up 23 kilometres or thereabouts. There was a large clearing, part forest fire and part salvage; bleached tree trunks that looked like another atmospheric Pacific Northwest Coast painting, fireweed and other weeds blanketing the destruction, black spiders crawling over rough, fading pebbles and decomposing wood. A kind of cleared dump was beside the road, leftover dead trees and charred wood littering the ground. The view over wooded slopes to the horizon was magnificent.
Another minivan, also mildly unsuited for the terrain, rolled down the hillside. The drivers were tourists looking for Rainbow Falls. If I recall my uncle's and brothers' reports correctly, the husband and wife had given up, and now their aim was to get home before their baby woke up.
We rolled back to around the 17th kilometre of the Forest Service Road, where we concluded the hiking trail was likely to be. Then we got out and started walking up the feeder road.
It was informally paved with loose rubble, pressed into topsoil by the weight of vehicles, stones perhaps at most the size of a fist. Going up was safe enough and none of us twisted an ankle. And of course it was impressive that someone had gone to the trouble to haul up the gravel so that nobody would get mired in mud. The stones were a dizzying array, and I lamented never going deeper into geology studies; I could barely tell apart sedimentary from igneous and metamorphic.
The wildlife was wonderful: the birds in the area seemed outright inquisitive, chirping away and hopping around the side of the trail to watch us. A creek rushed away, hidden, to our right. A slender ditch to the left, drained downslope occasionally by culverts hidden beneath the road, had a few flowers and greenery along it, and butterflies fluttered across the path. Young poplar trees were emerging. Chipmunks even ran along the forest floor and up the trees nearby. I won't say it was a scene out of a Disney film, but it was quite cheering.
While I also kept an eye out for paw prints and animal droppings on the path, and any scent of ripe bear in the air, I thought that the insouciant birdsong was a safe sign that there was no large predator nearby. Uncle Pu did spot what he thought were elk droppings: like a cow patty, but smaller.
J. was our travel guide, looking at his map, and rather maddeningly reporting that even when we reached large post-forest fire clearings, we were at best only 1/3rd of the way there. Our estimate was that the hike was 7 kilometres, but it turned out that this was 'as the crow flies': on this steep terrain, reaching our destination in an hour and a half was impossible.
We saw big boulders that had split apart in the heat, or as forest fire fighting water had been dumped on them, surrounded by large tree trunks. They looked like a giant's campsite in The Hobbit.
Finally we reached the end of the clearings, taking switchback turns and reaching a point where we no longer saw many all-terrain vehicle treadmarks. But we were nowhere near the summit of Sugar Mountain Lookout.
We decided to keep hiking until 4 p.m., then turn back. As always, the steep mountains around us meant that sunset would be earlier than it would be in the plains. We needed ample daylight to get back to our car and down the mountain.
At the opening to the forest, a plain bridge of four or five logs was embedded in the mud of a little creek, which we walked over. I ate a few red thimbleberries from the well-laden bushes that grew nearby. Given that bears have a reputation for loving banquets at berry patches, I figured it was unlikely a bear had been here recently.
I meditated about the forest's recent past, apart from the wildfires. Seeing a ribbon of the Tonka forestry company along part of the terrain, I wondered if this was just a property boundary or a warning that more of the forest would be logged. I also wasn't sure if the trees were just spindly due to the Monashee Mountains altitude, or most of the trees on Sugar Mountain Lookout were in fact a young generation, growing in an area that had been clearcut (once or twice?) between the 1880s and 1960s.
Eventually we heard a revving motor up the mountain. As it neared, we stepped politely back from the path at the trailside. Two young women, laughing and enjoying themselves, slowly tumbled down the rocky slope in an open-topped, four-wheel ATV. They paused their motor to chat with us. 'On Fridays,' they explained, 'the men of the area come around here in their pick-up trucks. But mostly it's pretty quiet.'
Further up the path a black t-shirt had been tossed over a tree limb: a practical joke during one of those Friday parties? Or perhaps it was an ad hoc lost-and-found.
Anyway, our time was up. The brothers and Uncle Pu posed for a photograph, pretty cheerful, preparing to turn back. Meanwhile I was grumpy because I'd wanted to reach the top of something.
The climb back down was more dangerous than the way up. I did slip once, dropping into a Cossack split like the ones in the women's gymnastics floor routines at the Paris Summer Olympics. But I carefully stretched out my leg muscles, and in a minute the limb felt fine again.
It was too late in the day to drive to New Denver afterward.
Instead, we returned to Lumby – I'd say, a bit crestfallen. We didn't even bother to eat any dinner, just went to sleep to the sounds of a baseball or softball game beside the motel. My notes say that the guest in the room next door was watching TV again; but it was quieter and I wouldn't have remembered it without the written evidence.
The next day we'd already begin referring to Sugar Mountain as 'Bitter Mountain'...
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