Exploring the Koots 1019 - Nice Lake by a Dam Site

Another bluebird sky day in the Koots, so we did something we almost never do - we went for a drive, simply to see the scenery. Just north of the end of Kootenay Lake is Duncan Dam, built a few decades ago as part of the Columbia Basin Treaty (to maintain water levels for flood control and power generation), which created a much larger Duncan Lake, now 40 km long rather than its original 14 km. We'd never seen the dam, or the Lake, really, and discovered, once again, great scenery, a nice lake and a beautiful campground (BC Forest Service, by the way) near the settlement of Howser.

We extended the drive to go west along Highway 31 to Trout Lake, mostly just to look at the Lardeau River and to see if any Kokanee Salmon were still around, to watch the Bald Eagles, check out the various FSRs that might be useful for skiing or hiking into the Goat Range Wilderness.... We had planned to have a closer look at the campground on Trout Lake at Gerrard, but a grizzly was feeding on some sort of carcass, so we viewed the scene from the truck and moved on.

On the way back home we had a look at the Meadow Creek Spawning Channel, created during the construction of the Duncan Dam, partly to remediate the disruption caused by the dam. It wasn't all the dam's fault, as it turns out: some time during glacial retreat thousands of years ago, impassable falls were created on the Kootenay River, making it impossible for salmon to migrate upstream. This created a species of salmon that became landlocked, but since they still needed a place to lay their eggs, the spawning channel was created. At the right time of year (early fall), literally hundreds of thousands of salmon arrive here in the process of living out their biological destiny.

The day was brought to a satisfying conclusion at a belated Thanksgiving dinner at neighbours - the first of at least 2 such belated epicurean delights, I hope. The resident pie expert here produced 2 masterpeices created from orphan apples collected a few weeks ago before the bears managed to get them. Ahhhhhh.