27 September 2022 – Just back from travels and I travel again, but I can’t resist. Yet more splendid countryside, this time a long weekend with friends and what of course becomes a welcoming & expanding cluster of friends-of-friends.

We drive into the B.C. southern interior, past Hope and then turn onto Highway 3, the Crowsnest Highway, working our way into the Similkameen Valley.

Our interests keep us in the Princeton – Hedley – Keremeos area, pivoting around the Jura Family Ranch.

It’s a family ranch, producing grassfed beef and lamb, mostly for direct-delivery customers. I stand by, watching sheep streaming back toward the enclosures for their evening meal, with some cattle dotting the pastures just above, and feel catapulted into an Alberta Moment. (The terrain, the activity, the sky…)

Dogs help work the herd and they protect the herd. Coyotes are an on-going concern.

For millennia, this valley has been home to the Similamix and Smelqmix peoples; more recently to ranches and orchards; most recently to the logical offshoot of orchards, namely craft wineries and cideries.

And so we visit other spreads…

and descend on, first, Courcelettes Estate Winery (first vintage 2011) near Keremeos…

and then, second, Twisted Hills Craft Cidery (est. 2012) near Cawston. The tasting and sales room is geodesic-dome modern…

but the orchards are full of traditional apple varieties specifically meant for cider production.

I fall in love with the simplicity of the Wild Ferment offering — an apple variety dating back to the 1550s, wild fermented — and buy a bottle. (I shall finish this post, and pour myself a glass.)

One cannot live by premium beef, lamb, wine and cider alone; one also needs a face-full of chips etc. at a local diner. We visit the K Mountain Diner, in Keremeos…

where we place our order with a rainbow-bright young waitress and appreciate the posy of Community Garden flowers while we wait.

Eat enough chips, and you need some exercise, right?

We hit the KVR Trail. One astoundingly small portion of the Trail, mind you, since this repurposed Kettle Valley Railway trackbed runs more than 600 km between Hope and Midway. Not much grade to it, but serious length and challenging trestles & tunnels along the way.

Big views, more big-sky Alberta Moments for me, spiked path-side with tall spears of mullein…

and a very local, very site-specific view of a kettle pond (i.e. fed from underground, with no surface in- or outflow).

The pond attracts birds, and birders. We talk with a local enthusiast, hear about the Sandhill Crane that has, exceptionally, been spotted in the area.

Some slightly wobbly out-buildings near the road farther along, looking picturesque as all-get-out but needing serious attention if they are ever again to serve any purpose.

Then again, sometimes picturesque is enough.

This battered old cowboy boot has already served two purposes:

once on somebody’s foot, and later rescued from a thrift shop to serve as prop in an elaborate Hallowe’en scenario just last year.

(Yay! Post is complete. On to my glass of Wild Ferment.)