strong but dry winds that so commonly race through this valley. Annual precipitation at Keremeos is only about 20 centimetres, compared with 30 at Osoyoos and Penticton.
The hay fields of the Similkameen are home to long-billed curlews and bobolinks, two birds rare in British Columbia. Curlews are the largest of the North American sandpipers and are characterized by long, curved bills that they use to pick up grassland insects on their breeding grounds and probe for intertidal worms on their mudflat wintering grounds in the subtropics.
Bobolinks are small songbirds related to blackbirds and meadowlarks; the females look like brown sparrows, but the males have a most unusual plumage. Most birds—indeed, most animals— have a basic colour pattern: they are dark on top to match the ground when viewed from above and light underneath to match the sky when seen from below. Male bobolinks are the opposite— jet-black below and white and cream above. This pattern sets them off against both backgrounds as they fly over the meadows, singing their bubbling songs to attract the attention of females. Populations of both curlews and bobolinks are threatened across the continent by the loss of natural grasslands.
The village of Cawston was the site of a Hudson’s Bay Company outpost starting in 1860, when Fort Okanogan (near Brewster, Washington, where the Okanagan River meets the Columbia) was abandoned to the United States and the company needed another site to winter livestock north of the border. This post—called Shimilkameen in most records—was short-lived, closing in 1872 as trade across the new border slowed.
The Similkameen Valley shares many rare species with the Okanagan, but it has at least one to itself: the Mormon metalmark. This small, orange-and-black butterfly can be found in only a few sites in the province, all in the Similkameen Valley around Keremeos. It has a curious habitat preference: gravelly slopes sparsely vegetated with snow buckwheat and common rabbitbrush. The adult butterflies feed on the nectar of the rabbitbrush’s golden flowers in late summer, and the females lay their eggs on the soft grey leaves of the buckwheat, the only plant the larval caterpillars will eat. So few of these butterflies remain in the province that the population is listed as endangered.
Just north of Cawston, the highway crosses the tiny channel of Keremeos Creek as it winds across the bottomlands of the Similkameen River. This creek gives the town of Keremeos its name, since the Native word means “creek that cuts through the flats.” From Keremeos, you can continue west on Highway 3 towards Vancouver or return via Highway 3A to Penticton. An alternate route is the gravel Old Fairview Road, which is reached via Upper Bench and Lowe roads; this route snakes up through sagebrush and aspen then into Douglas-fir before reaching a pass at about 1,075 metres elevation. It then descends to the Fairview area of west Oliver.
bitterroot flower
side trip
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