Beachfront condos and shops along Beach Avenue on Okanakan Lake in Peachland, British Columbia, Canada
Beachfront Property at Peachland, British Columbia (Purchase)
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During my May trip to the Thompson Okanagan I stopped to photograph along Beach avenue in Peachland, British Columbia. The benches along the beach proved a good place to eat lunch and watch some storm clouds come up from the south and up towards Kelowna.
I also visited Hardy Falls in Peachland, which is a small waterfall along Deep Creek on the south end of the town. A quick 10 minute or so walk along a trail next to Deep Creek and I was at the falls. The area had changed much since the scouting images I looked at were made. A rockfall has blocked view of the lower part of the waterfall from the trail, and closed the end of the trail itself. I had briefly considered a way to get a better angle on the falls, but a rock rattled down the hillside into the water and I decided the photo below would suffice!
Beach at Short’s Point in Fintry Provincial Park on the shore of Okanagan Lake in Fintry, British Columbia, Canada.
Beach at Short’s Point at Okanagan Lake (Purchase)
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This beach scene from the Short’s Point area of Fintry Provincial Park would have been rather mundane if someone hadn’t left their catamaran sailboat on the shore for me to photograph. I spent some time walking along the beach at Fintry looking for compositions but didn’t walk all of it – the Fintry beach is 2km long!
Otter Bay Beach on the shores of Okanagan Lake at Ellison Provincial Park in Vernon, British Columbia, Canada
Otter Bay Beach on Okanagan Lake
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As I pointed out in my previous Okanagan beach post, I am not much of a beach goer. However, last year while at Ellison Provincial Park I photographed Otter Bay Beach during a sunny spring day. On my trip this year I went back to this location, but the conditions were not quite right for photography, unfortunately. I will probably be back to try again this fall or in spring 2014.
Otter Bay Beach on the shores of Okanagan Lake at Ellison Provincial Park in Vernon, British Columbia, Canada
Otter Bay Beach at Ellison Provincial Park (Purchase)
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Last week I went on a photography trip to Vernon, British Columbia. I headed up the Crowsnest Highway 3 through Manning Provincial Park, through Princeton, and then on to Keremeos, Penticton, Kelowna and then Vernon. On a previous trip to the area I stayed in Lake Country which is between Kelowna and Vernon but found that most of the areas that attracted me, namely Kalamalka Lake, were near Vernon and not Kelowna.
On the second day of my trip I visited Ellison Provincial Park. I didn’t really know anything about Ellison except it was close to Vernon and is on the shores of Okanagan Lake, not Kalamalka Lake. I parked in the day use area parking and walked down the short trail to Otter Bay beach. The first photograph here is of Otter Bay beach – the shallow water warm enough to exhibit some of the green minerals in the water. I made a few photographs of this area and then moved onto the adjacent rocky hill and photographed this Ponderosa Pine (Pinus ponderosa) along the shoreline. If you look closely at this second photograph from Ellison you can see the small, purple wildflowers of the Shrubby Penstemon (Penstemon fruticosus). These flowers were everywhere between the rocks, as well as some sporadic Arrowleaf Balsamroot (Balsamorhiza sagittata). Photos of those will be coming soon!
Later in the day I had waited through a brief but interesting storm in the parking lot at Kekuli Bay, but since the storm had somewhat cleared I was searching for a place to view a potential sunset. The night before there was a good sunset – but I was too unfamiliar with the area to find a good place to photograph it. I was stuck on the wrong side of some hills and ran out of light before finding a way around them. Earlier in the day at Ellison I had figured this would be a good place to go for sunset, if I didn’t find anything else better in the rest of the days exploration. The sunset light never really materialized, but in preparation for it I had found myself back near at Ellison just in case. I didn’t go down to the water as the light just wasn’t there but just as I was leaving I had the opportunity to photograph some Mule Deer (Odocoileus hemionus) and in an adjacent field, a larger group of Columbian Black-tailed Deer (Odocoileus hemionus columbianus). While making the photographs of the Black-tailed Deer, I tried to not just get “closeups” of the animals with my 70-200mm lens (plus a 1.4x TC for good measure!) but also zoom out a bit to get the animals in context with their environment. Sometimes a photograph showing the animal in their habitat can be stronger than one showing just the animal. I’ve started to do this with wildflowers as well.
Many more photographs of this trip are to come. I think my favourites are from Kalamalka Provincial Park – a place that will definitely be on my list to visit when I travel back here in the Fall!
When driving along Hwy 3 south of Summerland I noticed that the far shore of Okanagan Lake was looking rather… void of trees. I took this to record how stark it was but also to record what I had just realized – that this was the site of the Okanagan Mountain Park Fire of 2003.
