The highway travels along a flat bench with an airstrip on the northeast side of the road; this bench is a remnant terrace from glacial times, when a huge block of stagnant ice filled the valley. Meltwaters from the surrounding plateaus carried sand and gravel into the valley, depositing them in flats around the ice. When the big ice block melted, it left a hollow that was filled by the Okanagan River to become Osoyoos Lake.
The viewpoint near the top of the first long hill (about 5 kilometres from Highway 97) is well worth a stop. From this vantage you can easily appreciate the effect that irrigation has had on the lower grasslands. Across Osoyoos Lake are the large acreages of grapes planted by Vincor, with the last remaining substantial area of antelope brush grassland visible between the northern section of vineyards and the Nk’Mip development east of the Osoyoos townsite.
Violet-green swallows chatter overhead, flying in and out of nest sites in clefts in the rocky cliffs above the highway. Ravens and magpies are often seen here as they loaf above the Osoyoos Landfill, occasionally joined by a golden eagle. On the flat directly below you is the site of the Osoyoos Desert Centre, accessible from 146th Avenue off Highway 97. From May through early October, the centre provides guided tours of the desert grasslands—their ecology, conservation, and restoration—along a 1.5-kilometre boardwalk (www.desert.org).
The road levels off a bit at the top of the long hill, travelling through rolling grasslands dominated by big sagebrush. You soon pass Spotted Lake, a striking alkaline pond filled with mysterious salt circles, on the southwest side of the road. These circles are made of epsom salts—mostly magnesium and sodium sulphates, with small amounts of sodium carbonate and calcium sulphate. The rings are thought to be formed through crystallization processes driven by the alternate flooding and drying of the lake. You’ll also find a small pull-off with an information kiosk halfway along the lake. Local Native peoples—who call the lake Kliluk— consider it sacred; the Okanagan Nation owns the lake, and access is not permitted.
Just past Spotted Lake, you pass a few sloughs that were once rich marshes full of waterfowl and other animals in summer, but they are now mostly dry, because their spring meltwater sources go to domestic and agricultural uses. At the top of the next hill you reach Richter Pass—at 682 metres elevation, a pass so low you aren’t even at the lower tree line, let alone near the alpine tree line. Summers are too hot and dry here for trees to germinate successfully; at the upper tree line atop local mountains, summers are simply too short for trees to grow.
Continuing southwest over Richter Pass, you descend a long hill through the Elkink Ranch. This was once the Richter Ranch, one of the big spreads in the Okanagan-Similkameen in the early 1900s. Watch for chukar, a species of partridge, along the roadside. These striking birds, with bright red legs and bills and sandy-coloured plumage set off by a bold black necklace, are native to southern Europe and the Middle East. The steep, rocky hillsides around Richter Pass and other parts of the south Okanagan are very similar to the rugged, dry habitats in the chukar’s homeland, and the bird has prospered since being introduced to this part of Canada in the 1950s. On spring mornings the males can often be heard giving their low, cackling chukar-chukar calls from prominent rocks.
Another interesting bird often seen along this route is the Lewis’s woodpecker, one of the strangest woodpeckers in North America. These birds excavate nest holes like other woodpeckers, preferring the big, old ponderosa pines that stand like sentinels in the midst of the sagebrush. But the Lewis’s are otherwise very unwoodpecker-like. They look and act like small crows much of the time, with glossy black plumage and steady, rowing flight— totally different from the bounding flight typical of the woodpecker family. At close range they are strikingly beautiful, with bright pink breasts, elegant grey collars, and deep wine-red faces. They have two methods of foraging, neither of them the usual getting-bugs-out-of-dead-trees tactic used by their cousins. In summer they spend hours in high, circling flights like giant swallows, hawking large insects out of the air. In late summer and fall, they turn their attentions to the abundant supply of berries and fruit available; native species such as saskatoons and chokecherries are suitable, but in the modern era, the birds’ favourites are cherries and grapes. In September they migrate to the oak woodlands and almond orchards of California to feed on nuts, returning again in early May as the bugs start to fly.
The highway’s southwestward course brings it back towards the international boundary, and it must make a broad northward turn to stay in Canada. At the southernmost part of this turn is the junction for the road that makes the 3-kilometre trip to the United States border at Chopaka Customs and on to Nighthawk, Washington. This road is popular with birders and botanists, since it provides access to some of the best sagebrush habitat in Canada (public land on the west side of the road only). It was also the location of the last sighting of white-tailed jackrabbits in British Columbia. These large hares are still common on the Canadian prairies—even in suburban Edmonton and Calgary—but the British Columbia population proved too sensitive to hunting pressure and habitat loss to survive and was extirpated in the 1980s. The last confirmed sighting was in the summer of 1981, when I saw three of these big hares just north of the border.
As the highway turns north, it drops into the steep-walled valley of the Similkameen River. The river winds through a floodplain dotted with ponderosa pine/cottonwood woodlands and lush pastures; it flows south across the border and eventually joins the Okanagan River at the south end of Osoyoos Lake. At the confluence of the two rivers, the Similkameen is about three times the size of the Okanagan.
Although similar to the Okanagan in climate, the Similkameen Valley is closer to and more firmly in the rain shadow of the Cascade Mountains. Storms streaming west from the Pacific lose almost all their moisture as they climb over the cold peaks, producing the strong but dry winds that so commonly race through this valley. Annual precipitation at Keremeos is only about 20 centimetres, compared with 30 at Osoyoos and Penticton.
The hay fields of the Similkameen are home to long-billed curlews and bobolinks, two birds rare in British Columbia. Curlews are the largest of the North American sandpipers and are characterized by long, curved bills that they use to pick up grassland insects on their breeding grounds and probe for intertidal worms on their mudflat wintering grounds in the subtropics.
Bobolinks are small songbirds related to blackbirds and meadowlarks; the females look like brown sparrows, but the males have a most unusual plumage. Most birds—indeed, most animals— have a basic colour pattern: they are dark on top to match the ground when viewed from above and light underneath to match the sky when seen from below. Male bobolinks are the opposite— jet-black below and white and cream above. This pattern sets them off against both backgrounds as they fly over the meadows, singing their bubbling songs to attract the attention of females. Populations of both curlews and bobolinks are threatened across the continent by the loss of natural grasslands.
The village of Cawston was the site of a Hudson’s Bay Company outpost starting in 1860, when Fort Okanogan (near Brewster, Washington, where the Okanagan River meets the Columbia) was abandoned to the United States and the company needed another site to winter livestock north of the border. This post—called Shimilkameen in most records—was short-lived, closing in 1872 as trade across the new border slowed.
The Similkameen Valley shares many rare species with the Okanagan, but it has at least one to itself: the Mormon metalmark. This small, orange-and-black butterfly can be found in only a few sites in the province, all in the Similkameen Valley around Keremeos. It has a curious habitat preference: gravelly slopes sparsely vegetated with snow buckwheat and common rabbitbrush. The adult butterflies feed on the nectar of the rabbitbrush’s golden flowers in late summer, and the females lay their eggs on the soft grey leaves of the buckwheat, the only plant the larval caterpillars will eat. So few of these butterflies remain in the province that the population is listed as endangered.
Just north of Cawston, the highway crosses the tiny channel of Keremeos Creek as it winds across the bottomlands of the Similkameen River. This creek gives the town of Keremeos its name, since the Native word means “creek that cuts through the flats.” From Keremeos, you can continue west on Highway 3 towards Vancouver or return via Highway 3A to Penticton. An alternate route is the gravel Old Fairview Road,