Escape to Savona

Kamloops Lake from Mount Savona

We needed to escape the endless rain in Williams Lake so we took a short trip to the Okanagan with a stop at one of our favourite spots in BC, Savona on Kamloops Lake.

Steelhead Provincial Park is a former commercial campground so it doesn't have the spacious campsites nestled between the trees like your usual provincial park.  But it does have electrical sites slotted right next to each other.  Since we don't need to plug in we usually get a slightly more private site with a lake view.

Where else in BC can you sit in your campsite and watch

a pair of nesting Lewis's woodpeckers? And orioles, eastern kingbirds, cedar waxwings and yellow-rumped warblers.

There's also a sandy beach so we had our first lake swim of the summer even as a thundershower was approaching.

We read in our Backroads atlas that there were pictographs and caves on nearby Mount Savona so we drove up to the top but found nothing up there but a great view and some cell towers.

And lots of blooming stonecrop

On the way down we discovered a road leading in the right direction so followed it to the end where we found a well-used trail leading straight up the mountain.

I told you it was steep!

I struggled up, totally exhausted.

I told you I was exhausted! I also told you it was steep.

But eventually we could see the caves ahead of us

Almost there

and scrambled up the rocks to the entrance.

It was worth the hike:

Very cool pictographs

Closeup

I told you it was steep!

And a nice view down to the Tunkwa valley.

Back on the road we could see where we'd been: