A Big Fish Story

Our Kamloops B&B innkeepers told us that if we took a detour from the well-beaten path when we left for Kelowna on Thursday we might be able to see the Fall Sockeye Salmon run.  Since we weren't in a hurry, we took their advice and drove about an hour north east until we reached Adams Lake.

The Adams River Salmon Society was preparing to put on the "Salute to the Sockeye" festival to celebrate the return of these brilliant red fish from the Pacific Ocean to their ancestral spawning grounds.  Although these fish (and Coho and Chinook Salmon) return to the river each Fall, every four years there is a "bumper crop" of spawning fish and the festival is held.  We were lucky enough to be in B.C. for this big event.  Thousands of people come to the festival and although there were quite a few visitors (including some groups of school kids) on Thursday, the place will really be hopping on Sunday.

We walked a mile or more around the area, stopping at several places to see the fish in the swallow waters close to shore.  Farther away from us, the masses of sockeye made the river look like gallons of red dye had been spilled into the river.  The female fish wagged their tails back and forth to create nests in the rocky river bottom where their eggs would be laid.  Some fish leaped in and out of the water.  Some who had finished spawning, lay dead and decomposing, returning nutrients to the ecosystem.

Here the semi-arid land extending east from Kamloops had had given way to forests and the huge Shuswap Lake, a body of water resembling the large mountain lakes, Coeur d'Alene and Pend Oreille, in northern Idaho. After doing our fish-watching, we stopped at Toby' Coffee Shop in Sorrento (named by a man who spent his honeymoon in that Italian town). At the suggestion of one of the staff at Toby's we turned off the main highway at Salmon Arm and followed a country road that ran through farmland until we re-connected with Highway 97 northwest of Vernon. 

At the end of the afternoon we arrived in Kelowna which, much to our surprise, was not a small, wine-country town like St.Helena, but a city of well over 100,000 residents.  Our first impression of the place was not favorable:  Stop-and-go traffic, lots of chain stores and restaurants, and our in-aptly named hotel (the "Prestige") was located right on the main road through town.  After a very disappointing first-night's dinner in Kelowna and finding our hotel a big step down from the accommodations we had earlier in the trip, we considered staying one-night and moving on.