Okanagan High Rim Trail Hike & MIMM

Well this is the first time I'm linking up for Marvelous in my Monday - such a great idea from Katie at Healthy Diva Life (and in case my Mum is reading this - yes Mum, I know my schooling taught me marvellous is spelt with 2 L's - it's just that Katie doesn't!! - and from here on in, I'll be going back to my British roots and spelling it 'right' ;-) So I'm all over my Marvellous Monday - it's BC Day here (er, in British Columbia Canada - eh!) and it's a Statutory Holiday - nothing more marvellous than a day off work. And usually I often only work part time on Monday's, but for the next month I've been contracted for a bunch of additional hours so I'm working my bee-hind off! So a Stat day is extra-lovely.

We had a marvellous relaxing weekend. On Saturday we finally drove out to a local trail we've been meaning to check out since we lived here (it's only been 4 years!). The Okanagan High Rim trail is actually a 55km trail running from Vernon to Kelowna. We live in Lake Country which is about 1/2 way between the 2 and there are a couple of access points to the trail near where we live. The views from our house are the hills which the High Rim trail runs along. We took about a 20 minute drive up Beaver Lake Road in Lake Country to the nearest access point (which if you're local and looking to find the same access point I believe it was near the KM10 forestry marker on the main Beaver Lake Road - look for the brown & white hikers sign on the left hand side, where there's a decent sized pull out with parking room for several cars). Since we did pretty much all the steep climbing up the hills in the car the hike on foot was a lovely, mostly flat trail. Since it's a pretty wilderness type trail, and from what I can gather, fairly sparsely used I wasn't expecting much of a trail. We've been up in that same area on the motorbikes and have frequently lost our way on trails that turn to dead ends....

But the trail access on either side of the road were well marked. We set off south from Beaver Lake Road and followed the trail for 3-4 kms before turning round. Most of the trail section we were on was marked by pink and black striped ribbons, and the occasional wooden marked stapled to a tree, but really the path was pretty obvious. On a hot summer day it's so refreshing to be up in the hills - the air is cooler, and everything around you is lush and green. Much of the hike was through fairly thick woods so no views to speak of, but man, did it smell good! We encountered a few downed trees and some serious wet patches that had us tippy-toeing around but it was pretty easy going. Meli, rather obviously LOVED it! So many smells, so many sticks to chew and so much freedom. She was a little taken aback by the cows we stumbled into (As was I, all I saw out of the corner of my eye as I turned a corner was something big and black and moving - it was a split second before I realised it wasn't a bear and calmed back down. Because we've seen bears up in them there hills when we've been on the bikes! AND Chris had had this crazy nightmare only the night before about us getting attacked by a bear!) 

We crossed over a couple of cute little trail workers bridges, and there were even a couple of hand painted interpretative signs about the trees we were passing so there's been some love and attention given to this trail at some point - it's amazing it's so little used or even heard of!  I'm so glad we finally made it up to the High Rim Trail - and whilst I'm not likely to hike it as a multi-day trek anytime soon, I'm looking forward to getting back up there and hiking another section too - I anticipate we could get much of it done by hiking north and south from each access point in turn, so over time we'd be able to cover almost all of it!