Trip Date: July 2015
After leaving
Tofino and making our way across the Strait of Georgia from
Nanaimo to
Vancouver we followed the Trans-Canada Highway to
Hope, BC, before exiting onto the Coquihalla Highway and heading north to
Kelowna. We arrived in the
Shuswap about mid-afternoon while temperatures soared to +40° Celsius.
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| A beautiful sunset over the lake |
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| It was so bright it looked like the sky was on fire! |
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| Sunset colours slowly fading to grey |
Since the summer of 2002, Christine's family has been renting a cabin on the shores of Shuswap Lake. Previously I wrote a cumulative post about our experiences in the
Shuswap that you can visit right
here. It has become an annual tradition and one that's only been missed twice in those thirteen years; once due to extreme flooding in British Columbia in 2012 and last year when Sarah, Christine, and I were in Africa (please see previous posts titled,
Amsterdam,
Uganda,
Tanzania, and
Zanzibar for additional information about that trip).
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| Rome found her spot on an inflatable air mattress close to the bon fire |
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| Pretty tuckered out after a big day in the sunshine |
Christine's parents were the only ones at the cabin when we arrived, as her siblings, Sarah and Adam, as well as Dan and Nath would be joining us the following day. We enjoyed a leisurely day of swimming, boating, paddleboarding, and trying not to get completely roasted in the late afternoon sun!
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| Jerry looking like an old pro on the paddleboard |
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| Rome and Christine relaxing outside the cabin |
The rest of the week we did much of the same; boating, wakeboarding, kneeboarding, waterskiing, stand-up paddleboarding, swimming, and a lot of relaxing. It was too damn hot to do much of anything else...not that I'm complaining!
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| Sarah wakeboarding |
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| Carving on the kneeboard |
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| My turn on the wakeboard |
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| Attempting to clear the wake |
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| This is what happens when you try to stand-up on the kneeboard! |
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| Christine outside the wake |
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| Wakeboarding |
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| Dan hadn't been wakeboarding in over 15 years, but you wouldn't know it! |
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| Even though she got up on skis, Nath's favourite activity had to have been the tube! |
One afternoon as I was jet-skiing around Copper Island I noticed a few red smudges that I hadn't seen before. I knew that the steep cliffs on Copper Island were home to ancient First Nation pictographs, but on previous trips I had searched high and low for them without much luck. To see what I did find please visit my previous post titled,
First Nation Rock Art. It became obvious that I had missed these on our previous trips, so I wanted to get a closer look. I enlisted Christine to drop me off near Copper Island so I could swim to shore and climb up to the pictographs. There wasn't much left of the artwork, just a few smudges, but they were definitely the remains of pictographs likely painted by the Shuswap People.
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| Could this be a representation of the sun? |
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| This just looks like a number of red streaks on the rock face |
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| The remains of a much larger panel of artwork. Too bad it's so indecipherable today. |
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| These smudges are adjacent to the ones in the previous picture |
You can read more about the pictograph sites I have visited by visiting my
Western Canadian Rock Art section on the
Bradshaw Foundation's webpage.
