Shuswappin along in BC

Shuswap. The name is fun so this area of the province must be fun too, right?

Shuswap to Wells Gray

From Vernon we headed north to the Shuswap (not sure if it is "the Shuswap" or "the Shuswap area") which includes the towns of Sicamous, Salmon Arm and Chase. Salmon Arm is a really nice town – cute little downtown area, nice bike trails close to town and some provincial parks close by as well. With all the flooding that has been going on in BC, it seems cities, towns and parks have felt the effects. In one park west of Salmon Arm (Roderick Haig Brown Wilderness Area - known for its Salmon run in November which turns the river red) entire bridges were washed out and parts of trails closed because of flooding.

Maverick and Dawson hanging out at a coffee shop in Salmon Arm

View from the Salmon Arm Wharf

Just to back up, near Vernon we came across a “recreation area”.  This is a more rustic campground than the provincial parks we had been staying in but still has everything we needed (picnic table, pit toilet, designated camp site). The one near Vernon had an attendant who told us about the BC sites and trails website and that other Recreation Areas that didn’t have attendants were free! So we’ve been keeping our eye out for them fairly often. Unfortunately sometimes they are down long bush roads and when you’ve driven ½ hour out of your way to find the bush road, ½ hour down the bush road and then ½ hour back out the bush road when you couldn’t find the site, you might as well have just paid for camping. We’ve gotten better at researching how to get to them a little more and have come across some nice ones.

Anyway, from the Shuswap, we headed west to Kamloops and did a 2 hour tour of the BC Wildlife Park to determine whether we saw a grizzly bear or a black bear on one of our bike rides. Mike thinks it was a grizzly. I still can’t tell. The BC Wildlife Park rescues orphaned or injured animals and tries to rehabilitate  them to return to the wild but if the animal can’t return to live in the wild, they live their remaining years in the park with all of us humans watching them. It is incredible to see these animals but I struggle with the whole zoo aspect of it. 

After the Wildlife Park, we looked for a visitors centre in Kamloops but when we couldn’t find one, Mike just turned north and 3 hours later we were in Wells Gray Provincial Park looking at Water falls taller than Niagara Falls. Pretty crazy.  We were also entering tour bus country as the most impressive waterfalls have roads (not trails) to them so easily accessible to the people on the tour buses. Plus Wells Gray is along a drive loop that can involve Jasper and Banff (perfect for a tour bus) And I am not knocking tour buses. I did one in Europe 12 years ago. It was a lovely experience to have decisions made for me so I just had to show up and enjoy. Anyway the water falls were impressive. We tried to do some hiking in the park but the mosquitoes were terrible. Although as I write this (7 days later) mosquitoes are still terrible so we may need to just get used to it.

** Note on the link above.  A reader of the blogs asked that I put a map of the area I was talking about.  So I put a link to a google map because I haven't actually figured out how to put the map in the blog post.  I will keep working on it when we get WIFI again.