Summerland Easter

In honor of Easter, I took a little side trip to the Okanagan where my parents live. The best way there was by Greyhound- not my most favorite method of transportation, but it was the best I could do. So, I rode the bus, with a ten pound double smoked ham as my travelling partner (he rode in the seat next to me- quite quiet actually and he was delicious garnished with pickled crabapples on Sunday- I've never been able to say this about any of the other people who have sat next to me before).

The weather was glorious. It was nice enough for me to spend a couple of days pruning the fruit trees around the house, planting posts for raspberry canes, and some early morning spraying of noxious chemicals on even more noxious weeds. I was also very lucky to participate in a little burning; I've missed the annual burning of wooden detritus around the orchard. It was rip roaring fire (well contained, and within all of the rules) and it was a tremendous rush. No photos- can't be trusted to remember about the camera around fire!

On Easter Sunday, before breakfast, we went up Giant's Head. This small mountain is literally in the middle of the town of Summerland and has been the site of many high school runs and visitor "must see" trips. In essence, for a few years, it seemed that I was going up the mountain, and down, nearly every month. In the last nearly twenty years, I think that I've been on the Head only a couple of times. The photo at the top of the blog, was taken about mid height and facing the lake. The morning was so quiet, even the lake looks like glass. It only took about 45 minutes to go up and the same to come down. Really quite easy in the end- not a bad end to confronting something that always felt like Mount Kilimanjaro when I was a teen. It also made breakfast tast really good.



Despite the fact that it is early April, there were lots of wildflowers in bloom. The best guess for this little white flower is some kind of sandwort. When we did the research on this, we were surprised by the vast number of sandworts- and they all have little white flowers. Impossible to really tell, but we think it could be arenaria obtusifolia. Sandworts are often found in dry/arid areas; they bloom really early in the season and then the disappear completely until next season.