Victoria
Okanagan
Road
Trip
i
C

Tue Apr 14

While Lindsay had a virtual meeting, I went and got us breakfast sandwiches, muffins, and coffee/tea at Queen Of The South. By the time I had the goods her meeting was ended, and we finished packing up.

The next phase of our plan was to drive across the bottom of BC, ending up in Fernie. I’d never been through that part of BC before, and TBH didn’t have much time to research anything in between. I figured we’d just stop somewhere for lunch, and otherwise blast on through to Fernie in a day.

We left Osoyoos, and headed east on the Crowsnest Highway. We immediately started climbing, taking in beautiful views as we crested Anarchist Mountain, and passed through farmland and forest. We drove through a bit of snow at a high mountain pass but quickly drove out of it, and paused to take pictures of Christina Lake.

A few minutes after leaving the lake, we began another climb. We saw signs about needing winter tires through the end of April, but given how warm it had been when we left Osoyoos we figured it didn’t apply that day. Silly us. Not ten minutes later, we found ourselves in the middle of a snowstorm. Five minutes after that, as we drove over the Paulson Pass, we lost control of the car in the snow-covered road at least once. (It turns out we had all-weather mud + snow tires, but not full winters.) We managed to keep it on the road, white-knuckling until we descended toward Castlegar and the snow turned back into rain.

We pulled into the Lion’s Head Pub, and ordered beers to soothe our jangled nerves. While we drank those and waited for sandwiches to arrive, we looked up traffic conditions for the rest of the Crowsnest. Turns out the next section of highway, Kootenay Pass, was already much worse, and would remain so until Thursday morning. We found a live webcam of the pass, and instantly knew we didn’t feel safe driving through it, so we hurriedly changed plans: we booked an AirBnB in Castlegar for two nights and shifted our Fernie AirBnB to Thursday night. Luckily our post-Fernie plans were very fluid, so we had little to reschedule there.

We finished our meals and killed some more time at the pub (they were awesome, and we resolved to return the next day), stopped for coffee, got some groceries, and drove to the AirBnB — they were fantastic and had the place ready for us in ~90 minutes. It had lots of space, a mountain view, laundry facilities, and a comfy bed — for us, at that moment, it was a palace. And most importantly, we were safe. We assembled a charcuterie board and drank sparkling wine from the Okanagan, barely remembering the 20 degrees that had welcomed us just three days before.

Wed Apr 15

Obviously we had no plans, considering we weren’t expecting to be in Castlegar. We took the opportunity to sleep in, relax at the AirBnB, and catch up on emails (and blogging). Eventually we went out for coffee & pastries at Crumbs, then to a park by the Columbia River (I was humming Woody Guthrie all day).

It was pretty cold, so we popped back into the Lion’s Head for some food & drink. Too much food, honestly — their portions are out of control. Bursting, we drove back to the AirBnB, drank a bottle of Tantalus Chardonnay, and tried to save up energy and luck for Thursday.

Thu Apr 16

We had a pretty sleepless night, honestly. We kept looking at weather updates and highway conditions and live webcams of Kootenay Pass. Around 3am Lindsay worked out a plan to avoid it, while I worked on plan C: abandon the south of BC and strike north for Revelstoke.

When we finally got up for good, we were pretty sure plan C was what we’d go with. But our Fernie AirBnB host messages to say their roads were fine, and we decided to go with plan B: take the Kootenay Lake ferry instead of driving over Kootenay Pass. We collected snacks and coffee at Crumbs, said goodbye to our safe haven of Castlegar, and drove north.

Driving along the Kootenay River was beautiful — it was hard to keep my eyes on the road. We eventually made it to Balfour, where the ferry crosses the lake. Unfortunately, the larger ferry was out of service, and we didn’t make it onto the smaller one, so we’d have to wait 90 minutes. Just enough time to eat some lunch at The Landing. When the ferry returned we got right on, and enjoyed a gorgeous 35-minute trip across the lake. Lindsay commented that it might have been a blessing in disguise to be delayed and rerouted this way — when would we ever take such a picturesque ferry ride again?

On the other side of the lake we had a lovely, winding drive. Lindsay curated a mountain-themed playlist. We spotted lots of deer on the roadside. The weather was lovely, save one really bad spot along Moyie Lake between Creston and Cranbrook. Eventually we reached Fernie, grabbed food from the first place we saw (Subway), and got to our AirBnB. We drank a bottle of Nk’Mip Pinot Noir and slept like the dead.

Fri Apr 17

I woke up early, and caught a glimpse of the mountains before they became shrouded in fog. We packed up and moved on, grabbing a late breakfast on our way out of town at The Bridge Bistro.

We drove east, thinking it would be an easy drive, but once again hit miserable weather at Crowsnest Pass. Luckily, we got through it, and then stopped somewhere I’ve wanted to visit for decades: the Frank Slide. I’ve read about it. I’ve sung along live to the Rural Alberta Advantage song about it. But it’s not the same as actually seeing it.

We drove up to the interpretive centre to see the slide from above. We didn’t go through the full tour, but we did chat with one of the guides for a bit, and go out onto the catwalk to see it up close. You can’t really grasp the enormity of it until you see it up close, and that makes it fairly unique in terms of natural disasters: explosions last for an instant, hurricanes pass, fires go out, etc. But this pile of rock would take a century to move, so there it’ll stay forever, reminding us of the town buried beneath it.

Anyway, somewhere in the snowy mess of Crowsnest pass, we’d entered Alberta. It was in this godforsaken province that our journey would end some 24 hours later.