Paddling Slocan Lake

On Friday, July 7, 2017, we decided that the best way to beat the 96F heat - the hottest day this summer - would be to go kayaking, so we hauled our kayaks down to Slocan's town beach to slip into the waters of Slocan Lake:

When you start paddling a lake you've never paddled before, you never quite know what you'll discover.  We try to find lakes that are likely to be interesting, but we don't always have control over what we find.

In this case, no sooner did we slip into the water, then we paddled straight through one of the thickest mayfly hatches we've ever seen.  The flies coming off the water were so heavy that you could see them easily.  In this case, they were pinkish-red clouds:

Slocan is a town that has seen better days, but its people enjoy their home's location, with access to a gorgeous lake, hiking in the surrounding Valhalla Mountains, river paddling, tubing and fishing, and numerous other outdoor activities.  There are a few home along the western shore of Slocan Lake, technically within the borders of Valhalla Provincial Park, but grandfathered because they were privately owned when the park was formed.  Some of the cabins had boats moored offshore:

There were also old boathouses that are remnants of earlier days:

Someone found an opportunity to post a humorous sign on the inaccessible lakeshore, but there is no doubt that it was accurate, because the mountainsides rise steeply directly from the water's edge:

This season has seen similar unusual patterns all the way from the south end of U.S. 395 in Riverside, California, up the Eastern Sierra through U.S. 97 in the eastern-central sections of Oregon and Washington, and on up through the Okanagan, Arrow Lake and Kootenay Valleys of British Columbia.  All these areas experienced very heavy snowfall, two to three times normal, with very warm springs and summers.  Aside from the flooding caused by the fast release of melting snow, the warm seasons and wet soil combined to produce an extraordinary level of pollen.  Everywhere we have been, thick layers of pollen have graced the lakes.  Slocan Lake is no exception.  The floating pollen made fascinating patterns:

Further up the lake, we encountered someone's handiwork in rock architecture:  a stone arch constructed of nothing but random stones stacked together on a large boulder out in the lake:

A big surprise because we had read nothing about it was a whole series of pictographs painted on the rock walls of the cliffs by the lake.  According to an archaeologist we ran into later, there are several areas such as this where the Salish First Nations tribes migrated through the centuries.

About four miles out, we stopped for lunch, then turned the bows of our kayaks back toward Slocan.  As we neared town, along the eastern shore, we spotted what appeared to be a railroad or road grade just above lake level.  Kathy's GPS showed the location of the "Slocan Tunnel" along this stretch, but we didn't know any more details - so we decided to hop out of the kayaks to see what lay where the GPS showed as a tunnel.  In the photo below, Kathy secures the kayaks before joining David up on the road grade --

-- which appeared to be the old, paved highway that preceded the current highway.  It is slowly being reclaimed by nature, but could easily be hiked or bicycled:

We gave up looking for the tunnel and hopped back in our little boats, only to discover the Slocan Tunnel about 200 yards south of where it was shown on the GPS:

It was clear that the highway had been buried by a rockslide near the tunnel, and we later learned through research that the tunnel, built in the 1920's with the old highway, was abandoned when the new Highway 6 was built here in 1989.  The mountain side is unstable and has seen rockslides which the locals have not had the resources to clear.

When we took the photo above, we didn't notice the teenagers standing on the rock cliff above and to the right of the tunnel.  However, when we noticed them, we asked what they were doing.  They happily demonstrated with jumps from the cliff into the deep lake water!

Further south along the shore, the sheer cliffs offered a playground for three or four different groups of rock climbers:

As we had paddled the lake, we had noted a large number of round logs that looked as if they had been partially milled.  Many of them had sizeable holes, like eyes of needles, through their ends.  We also noted a number of such logs floating in the lake, with orange highway safety cones placed on them.  We had trouble making sense of all this, until we finally came upon two or three bundles of logs that were chained together through the holed in the ends of the logs.  It became clear that these had been large rafts of logs awaiting shipment to lumber mills.  Apparently one or more, over time, broke loose and slowly floated to the lakeshore.  Where they floated to shore at Slocan, we saw that the townspeople had, over time, stacked them near the shore to eliminate the hazard to boats and swimmers.  Here, Kathy inspects one of the broken rafts:

Our campground in Slocan was located on Springer Creek, which flows into the lake.  As we were completing our paddle, we found where Springer Creek empties into the lake.  Kathy couldn't resist paddling up Springer Creek, and then let herself be pushed downstream under a wooden pedestrian bridge - just for fun:

It's always great to end an adventure with a flourish!