2012/09 Baker/Kookipi trips - After the summer trip |
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Dear All,
This began as a short letter about our summer in Hope, or at least about the couple of months between the great trek around 
western North America and our trips to England and Minnesota. Then the letter grew as we took a couple more camping trips in September.
The hummingbird was at Minter Gardens, feasting on the buddleia. The monarch butterfly was on a dahlia in our front garden. We didn’t realize that BC had monarchs, but it seems that there is a Fraser Canyon variety of the milkweed they need for their caterpillars.
Of course, after ten weeks of gallivanting around the continent, there was a lot to do with the house and the camping gear. Sandie had already tidied up the front garden but the back yard had gone wild around the river bank, probably because of all the water. The river had been very high back in June, high enough to wash away the foundations of our Centennial Park. It had crossed Wardle Avenue just upstream from us and washed away a garden but luckily there’d been no house damage in Hope.
I grabbed the pruners, advanced into the mass of wild roses, and promptly dropped out of sight. The brick steps I expected to be there had gone, washed away by the river, and now in a heap at the bottom of the bank, as was I. No serious damage except to my dignity, and I had soon hacked the roses down to manageable size. I thought I might as well trim the cherry tree while I was there and was sawing off the surplus branches, some more than ten feet long. A calm day suddenly turned windy and blew one of the branches. I let go a little late and I was down the bank again, but this time in an elegant flip, landing flat on my back in the sand, between the rocks and the river, a very lucky placement. I went running a few times with no problems after this so I don’t think I did any serious damage.
The river eventually dropped far enough for us to go on some of our walks. We were able to get across to Croft Island, though all the well-worn trails had been erased by the high water. As usual there were fishermen on the far side, but they were only fishing for spring salmon, the big ones. This is one of the low years in the sockeye cycle so the sockeye season didn’t open at all.
The camping equipment was easily fixed up. The rear lights on the Little Guy were replaced under warranty, but still no clue why they cracked; they are mounted all around in soft rubber. The truck needed its steering realigned, but we got away with only buying one new tyre.
When we came back from our summer trip we found we had some new signs on our front lawn, courtesy of the Hope district. One points to the Hope bike route and the other warns the reader that this is bear country. We assume that this means the whole neighbourhood rather than just our front lawn. There are similar “bear in area” signs at all the wooded areas, but it’s not clear what anyone’s supposed to do about it.
I spotted this large bear soon after. It was on the far beach so the pictures are short on pixels. It was sitting up on its haunches, chewing happily on a big fish as if it was an ear of corn. While I was watching, a coyote came out of the woods and started nipping at the bear’s heels. I expected to see the coyote torn apart but the bear got up and moved off. Whenever the coyote got too close the bear would spin around and take a swipe, as in the third picture, but the coyote was too smart to get hit. Eventually the bear disappeared upstream and the coyote ruled the beach, and had the rest of the fish.
At the end of July, our television stopped working. I think I mentioned last year that analog TV was supposed to go away last August, but CBC (our only channel here in Hope) got a last minute dispensation, because of its poverty, to delay the conversion of its repeater stations, like the one in Hope, to digital. So, if you lived in a big city like Vancouver you had digital but the rest of the country stayed analog. Well, CBC had even less budget this year and the delay became permanent; instead of converting its 2000 repeaters it shut them down. We have a digital TV and a converter for our old analog TV but we now had no signal at all in Hope.
This wasn’t a great loss but it niggled, and I went looking on the Internet for some solution cheaper than subscribing to cable. To my surprise I found the Local Television Satellite Solution, a program set up by the government and the cable provider; in return for being allowed to take over a TV network, the cable company had to put this program into effect for people who’d been cut off by the conversion to digital. I was skeptical about this as no one else seemed to know about it, but I signed up. About ten days later a satellite receiver was delivered and a couple of weeks after that, two guys showed up to install a satellite dish. They were having trouble finding a good spot to mount it and I pointed out that it might be a lot easier to hook us up to the cable that runs past the house. “Do you want to pay for that?” Obviously not; we went with the program. When they left we had thirteen channels. Some are duplicates from up north and Alberta, but that’s OK; sometimes it’s nice to watch Yellowknife’s national ten o’clock news at nine. So far it’s cost us nothing and the service is supposed to be free for five years.
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