Western Canada Wilderness Committee

The Okanagan Report, part 2: Marmots and Quails and Bear Creek - Oh, My!

Bear Creek is nice spot just off of the highway leading from Westbank to Kelowna. It’s primarily a campground but is also a popular picnic, swimming and boating area. To camp there one needs to make reservation. I met a lady there who didn’t make reservations, but had been assigned a spot in the parking lot where she could camp in her RV for the same $22 a night fee that all the other campers paid. It’s not like the parking lot was needed for cars…

Yes, Bear Creek the popular day-use area is now very much primarily a campground. Most of the locals had forsaken it the weekend I was there. To qualify, much of the weekend the weather was pretty sketchy with occasional light showers. And you know how the Okanaganers (I’m sure that’s not a real word but the meaning should be obvious) are: if it’s not like 30 or 40 degrees out, they keep their clothes on. But the other reason to come to Bear Creek is an exciting hiking trail. And to rub salt in the wounds, despite the shiny new parking meters to provide all the shiny new revenue, the trail was closed because of safety reasons. Apparently, a fence along the route, which is supposed to keep you from falling off the edge of the trail, was down and so they closed it up. I talked to some hikers that didn’t mind a little danger with their great outdoors and they told me that after talking to one of the parks staff they were told that the fence wasn’t getting fixed because of budget problems and that the trail wasn’t all that bad. One of the hikers gave his (admittedly not expert) estimate of the problem at “a couple of hundred bucks to fix”.

So let’s talk about the new meters:

I went Okanagan Lake Park and put a loonie in the meter. It was one of those manual push-in-the-coin-slot-out-comes-the-ticket-from-the-other-slot kinda meters (if you know parking meters, I think that description should work; I don’t know any technical names for the different kinds). Long story short, it stole my money and it didn’t give me a parking ticket.

At Sun-Oka Beach, the fancy digital meter jammed up and people told me that though they put as much as $6 in it, they still only got a ticket for an hour of parking.

Lastly, the meters don’t give change. I don’t know how advanced these things would have to be, but I’m pretty sure giving change is not a new technology. The digital ones talk(!) for pity’s sake (“insert payment now”, “collect your ticket from the slot”, “have a nice day”, etc.). And yet if you want one hour of parking ($1) and put in a twoonie, it keeps your dollar. That’s cold, dude.

Moving on, the press in Kelowna came out to see me. The Daily Courier ended up putting the story about the new meters on the front page (next to the story with the headline ‘Bloody Retribution?’ I swear I had nothing to do with that one). If you look on our site, you should find a link to it. While normally a very right-wing paper (I remember a story, from last year while I was WCWC canvass directing out there, about the importance of allowing grizzly bear hunting for trophy purposes), they came out on our side on this one and even wrote an additional editorial on the same subject backing us up. Thank you’s go out to Ron Seymour and the chief editor. Follow up, guys.

So despite the relatively low turn out of people to the park, those that were there backed the petition pretty strongly. There were also a couple more RV’s camped in the parking lot by the time I was finished.

One morning when I showed up, there were 4 cars parked on the highway just outside the park, apparently avoiding the pay parking in an obvious no-parking zones.

On a personal note, thank you to Garry for having me over to watch wrestling and to Sam, Jo, Serena, Josh and Terry for having me at the house boat. It had no power or plumbing and there was a bullet hole through one of the windows (from a previous owner, I was assured). It was great. Thanks guys. You all rule.

The last thing I’ll mention is that there are a lot of marmot colonies around Okanagan Lake. The marmots like to sun themselves on the side of the road but get spooked when cars drive by, running across the road to their burrows. So, my advice is to drive carefully. Also, watch out for quails. They do the same thing.