Christmas is Coming

 We drove out to the gravel pit at Westcoast Road to find a Christmas tree.

A bit scrawny, but good enough for us.

And transformed when decorated:

Stockings are hung on the fireplace.

This year's craft project:

I knew I'd find a use for the old Christmas cards I've been saving for years.

And we had a spectacular sunset the other night:

It's December

 

It's December!  We finally had our first real snow that stuck.

We've hung the Christmas wreaths on our front doors,

Set out the Advent wreath,

And turned on the Christmas lights.

 

What's going on?

 

Our art gallery has a new mural (disguising a shipping container).  We walk by it on our Wednesday walk.

But walks in the creek valley are now on hold as the city is repairing bridges.

On our last walk we saw the beaver are hard at work

building a lodge

And improving their dam

Before winter.

We also saw a coyote watching us from the opposite in his luxurious winter coat. (No photo).

It gets dark ever earlier, but still some good sunsets.

Weekend at Tatla Lake

 Our friends were housesitting at Tatla Lake and invited us for the weekend.  Mark's sister and her husband own the only piece of private -property on Tatla Lake and have recently built a house there.  It's a half hour drive in from Tatla on a bumpy gravel road.

New house on left, old cabin on right, solar array extreme right.

We were impressed with their commitment to building a small house.  It has only one bedroom upstairs and a small guest room in the basement.  They are off the grid so everything is solar powered.

It's really well insulated.

See the really thick (unfinished) walls? Proper window sills

We walked along the lakeshore 

To a point looking out over the lake.

Looking back toward the house and it's sheltering island:

In the evening a large flock of trumpeter swans flew in.

And settled on the lake.

Another walk with Nyxie the cat:

Leo and Mark used the sauna.

All in all a fun weekend.

Late Thanksgiving in Smithers

 

View of Hudson Bay Mountain dusted with snow from my mother's house.

We visited Smithers a week after Thanksgiving.  The big feast was delayed so we could share with our niece Sonja who had been working at a fishing lodge on the Babine River.  The rest of the year she lives in India so we were very happy to see her.

Not many pictures were taken, but as you can see above, the mountains were covered with snow.  We did a couple of hikes while we were there.

Sybille and Leo on trail by the Bulkley River

My birthday fell on the same weekend so I got to celebrate with my mom!

Here I am with my birthday bagels baked by brother-in-law Dave.

On the theme of Thanksgiving, we've been harvesting our garden produce, including 1 large acorn squash (10" long) and five delicata squash (ate one already).

Aren't those delicatas beautiful!

Five pounds of beets:

Some of Leo's potato harvest:

Also 6 pounds of parsnips and 2 bags of carrots (no photos)!

Off to our Favourite Campground

Nicola Valley

 The N'kwala forest service recreation site 20 minutes west of Merritt is our most frequented campground.  We started coming here in the 90's as a meetup with Leo's relatives: his brother Arthur from 100 Mile House, his cousin Eric and his aunt Louise fom Williams Lake and his cousin Doreen and husband John from Delta.  Later we camped here while paddling the Nicola River with our friends.

It's free, it's big and there's always a spot to camp, even on busy weekends as it was when we arrived on this trip.

In among the Ponderosa pines

We didn't get a picnic table but we did get a primitive fire ring (stones).

We went for a walk along the river. Lots of spawned out salmon.

We ran into a local who told us that most of the Nicola Valley was burnt up.  You couldn't see anything fom the campsite.

The next morning we hiked up the hill overlooking the campground.  Somehow we missed the trail so ended up bushwacking up the (steep) hillside.  Bushwacking is not that big a deal on a dry interior hillside.

It took us half an hour to reach the overlook.

You can see our trailer down there.

Closeup

From there we walked uphill for another hour.

Steep

I had to take a few breaks.

But we finally reached the top.

From here we could see that the fire had burnt up the next hill.

We found it even harder to go downhill on the steep slope.  We finally found the trail 5 minutes from the bottom.

Plant of the day:

Prickly Pear Cactus

Bird of the day was Clark's nutcracker, but no photos.

The next day as we drove home westward toward Spences Bridge, we saw that the fire had burnt all the hillsides on both sides of the Nicola River and a few homes had burned down.  Most however were saved.

Burnt to the road

This is the same fire that burnt down Lytton.

Checking out the damage

So ended our last camping trip of the season.  We used our trailer 23 nights this year, which averages out to $1135 per night thus far.

For comparison we spent approximately 340 nights in our old trailer over 11 years, for an average of 31 days a year or $41 per Night.  That included 4 lengthy snowbirding trips so I think we did pretty well this year.

Hike in Kalamalka Lake Provincial Park

Our second day in Vernon we hiked to Cosens Bay in Kalamalka Lake Provincial Park. 

 Nice views of upland meadows then you walk down through Ponderosa pine forest

Okay, maybe Leo is climbing back up again in this picture

to the beach.

 

I had to admire how tall the oregon grapes grow here and the size of the berries.

The park was busy with hikers and mountain bikers. On the way back we stopped at a bench and had a snack and admired the view: