Kootenay Lake make-up post

It has apparently been weeks since I had a Deep Thought, or even a thought that seemed worth posting (and given some of the things that actually DID get posted, you will know that there's been a certain lack of inspiration lately). So, this post is a nice easy one: I went to Kootenay Lake to visit my brother, I did some stuff, I took some pictures, and this is my pictorial trip report. This is probably more like what normal blogs put up. I don't know, I haven't taken the Facebook "What Kind of Blogger Are You?" quiz. Pretty much certain there IS one.

Here's how it went: I got up at the crack of dawn (4 a.m. - yeah, I'm one of THOSE people) and was full of coffee and on the road by 5:20. The weather was not great down here, but my smug sense of superiority from being so ahead of the clock kept me warm. I saw I think 9 deer in Manning Park, 8 of them mule deer and one white tail. Don't worry, I won't sustain this level of detail for long.

Got near Osoyoos, the sun was shining, and I remembered somebody somewhere expressing interest in Spotted Lake, so I stopped at the one Spotted Lake I know:

This is a culturally significant site, which I didn't know til I stopped.

Climbing up out of Osoyoos, doing the hairpins going up the Anarchist Summit, I took advantage of a little-known option that was only ever offered by Honda on their 1998 Accords: the TiltoMeter. It tells you how close to skidding or rolling over you might be when cornering. Here's a shot of it in action (just ignore the guy lurking in the mirror):

Up nearer the top, having foregone my usual amusing shot of the cheesy Sasquatch statue, I was struck by how pretty an equally cheesy man-made pond looked in the mid-morning light:

Arrived at Christina Lake just before noon, and texted McNulty this picture of the lake in response to his "where are you?" His place is about 200 m to the left of where I was standing. What a wit, what a wag, what a pretty lake:

As we sat on the deck drinking coffee, this turtle made its way onto the dock ramp to glean whatever warmth the overcast sun offered. I had no idea turtles would live in a big lake, thought they only did little ponds...maybe this one was avoiding the nearby dive team, who apparently have full time jobs removing milfoil from the lake. I kind of wonder whether milfoil is what this turtle eats, and how many turtles we could buy for the cost of a full time dive team...:

Got to Kootenay Lake around dinner. We went for a short bike ride the next day, and I have a bunch of pretty boring GoPro footage of it. On the day following that, we did sanding. Here's a before and after shot of most of the deck furniture. I chose to add captions in case somehow you didn't find the incredible improvement startlingly obvious: 

Before

After

Hmmm...even with the captions, that didn't work out so well.  Here are two of the same kind of chair, sanded and not sanded:

Okay I give up already on the sanding. We did it and by now the doughty Uncle Sam will have stained and oiled them to a like-new sheen.

Thursday morning I woke up to this view from the deck, around 7:45.  This HAD to be a good day for a long ride:

We finally got ourselves onto our bikes and riding by about 10:30.  We went as far north as Kaslo, but we wisely opted to not ride right down into town...because we would have had to turn right around and slug our way right back up that big hill to get OUT of town. Here's the official sign. I still like the one outside Hope, BC, best. It says "Experience Hope". But Kaslo's doing okay with this one:

Here is one of very few photographs of the elusive Uncle Sam at rest, having a snack. My ear is in the photo because I had to sneak it. He thought I was only taking the picture of the bikes below, but I switched to selfie mode to catch him over my left shoulder, all unaware. The beauty part is he'll never know I posted this because he'll never read this blog. He looks pretty good for a 68 year old guy, eh? 

About 33 km in, having a snack...Uncle Sam.

This is the beard picture:

I am desolated to report that although it was a beautiful day, and I spent all of it looking like more of a dork even than usual with a GoPro mounted on my helmet, I screwed up the settings on it and so got none of the fabulous images of a very placid Kootenay Lake with snow-capped mountains to the east. Sorry. In all we rode 100 km over an elapsed roughly 6 hrs, of which 4.5 were spent in the saddle. In spite of all my time in spin class, and in spite of the 10 years he has on me, Sam is still a significantly stronger rider than I am. I'm about equally pleased and maddened by that.

Speaking of maddening, I've had a running debate with my hiking group leader about what is a huckleberry and what isn't. The picture below goes to explaining at least part of why that's such a confusing question:

I left the lake at the crack of dawn on Saturday May 30. Coming up out of Castlegar towards the Nancy Greene, I saw something I've never seen before in all these trips: what looked like a full grown moose crossing the highway. It took a second to comprehend what it even was - no frame of reference. Those things are HUGE, and if that one wasn't full grown I don't think I want to see what a big one looks like. I was so excited I failed to get a picture before it lumbered off into the bush, which is a big disappointment, to me at least.  By way of compensation for the missing image, I give you a picture that Rob Brown, whom I used to work with, took himself of Mt. Everest. It has nothing to do with this trip or Kootenay Lake, but I thought it was cool that someone I know has seen the big mountain:

There. Feel free to add comment remark. I'll put this one up and see whether I can make the subscription thing work...