Cherries, Trains, and Stemwinder

Cherry season up in the Similkameen. Kessa went up to help pick cherries and tend to her farm plot, and I came up to lend moral support and look after kids. The whole cherry experience was pretty neat. It is the first main fruit crop of the season, and it was a mad flurry of activity on the farm getting the cherries picked, sorted, packaged and brought to market.

The kids thrive on the farm, and there is so much for them to explore there. Favorite past times are climbing the walnut tree, and this trip they discovered the fun of catching grasshoppers.

Leif has been digging trains a lot lately. He likes that he has a "boy" thing to do, so the two of us had a guys-day-out and checked out the model train place in Osoyoos. It is a huge room with a whole bunch of rail lines and trains running around. The people runing it clearly have a passion for it.

Leif was still pretty stoked on the trains, and wanted to see a "big" train, so I went with the kids to the Kettle Valley Railway out in Summerland. It was pretty neat bit of history. I have been wanting to bike the old railway for a while now. An old steam train runs a small distance of the line, and it is a nice piece of history. They do the ambience up pretty well, including a old-timer playing banjo as the train rolls along.

My last day there we headed out for a hike up Stemwinder Mountain near Hedley. This featured me getting some-what lost (well at least I couldn't find the proper start to the trail). I bumped into a ranch-hand who was up there, and asked for directions to the trail, and he gave me the exact directions to where I was standing talking to him. Funny.

Regardless the trip was a great ecology session with the kids. We got to explore all sorts of plants and the wild strawberries were in season. We were listening to a bird identification CD on the way up, and then we heard a bunch of the birds once we got up there (Red-tailed hawk, Hermit thrush, Swainson's thrush). We also saw a bunch of cattle, and there was a huge colony of ground squirrels. We also played a good game of "Who's poo is this?" which featured fur-filled scat from a coyote (eating the ground squirrels) and after poking around in some pellets Nemiah figured out they belonged to deer. Folks thought it silly I played this game with the kids. Am I the only parent who pokes around poo with their kids?

Lupine

Wild roses