The Water is Rising in the Anahim and Nimpo Lake Area.

This is about a remote area in west central British Columbia, Canada called the West Chilcotin. Surrounded by numerous glacial mountain ranges, alpine lakes teeming with wild Rainbow Trout, and full of wildlife. Living here goes from no running water or electricity to spacious log homes with all the conveniences and without the smog!
If you would like to see pictures of wildlife, mountains, lakes, exciting snowmobiling, events and more, and read stories like 'Lake Monsters' - just go into Archives on the lower left side of this page.
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14/05/2007 11:53 PM

Runaway Train

I'm sorry folks, but things have piled up on me here and I'm having a tough time finding time to write an article. I hope you'll be patient with me. Get out there and enjoy the spring weather or read a great book. In the meanwhile, I'm not sure when I'll get a chance to update this blog next but hang in there!

13/05/2007 1:25 PM

Happy Mother's Day

Happy sunny Sunday and Happy Mother's Day to all the ladies that had the courage to become Moms. I of course, am not one of them. Probably a good thing because I've never felt the world was prepared for a replica of me, and I know for a fact that there's a lot of people around that would agree with that statement.
Previous commitments of the last couple of days have prevented me from writing here but I figure most people have a lot better things to do on the weekend anyway, than to be reading a blog. Such as being outside...which is where I would really, really like to be today. However, that's where I was the last two days so I'm stuck on the computer until an appointment later this afternoon.
We had an absolutely stunning, spectacular, wonderful, non-windy, sunny, warm, day yesterday. Enough adjectives for you? Trust me, it's not enough to describe our first taste of summer. Even the bugs were coming out. It probably got close to 20C or about 70F yesterday and got pretty toasty while we were moving stuff from one of Terry B.'s properties. Incidentally, it looks like that 12 acre property on Nimpo Lake is now sold so you're out of luck if you were interested in a large piece on the lake.
Today is nearly as nice but there is some cloud mixed with sun. Yesterday was all about sunshine and clear blue skies. It's still getting down to below freezing at night though, with lows ranging around -5C. That's okay too. Gotta keep those mosquitoes at bay as long as possible.
Until today, the water level in Nimpo Lake has continued to rise and both Willy's Creek going in on the south end and the Dean exiting on the Short Arm are boiling right along. Nearly all of the snow around here is gone so most of that will be melt from slightly higher elevations although it may be warm enough up on the mountains now for some snow to be melting there too.
Things are speeding up here at a great rate because the spring bear season is already in progress and the summer vacation season starts soon. That doesn't give much time to the operators to get their lodges and outpost cabins ready. Most of them have already retrieved their docks from the back bay.
I watched one of our neighbours go by with his dock today with all three of his small dogs looking like little sailors, or Captains, on the front of the dock. Only two of the dogs are his, while the other, Missy, is just being looked after. Thought at first to be a whuss, it turns out she fits into the Chilcotin very well, and has ever since shortly after she came here. Andy went out to help our neighbour with the dock and after they passed our peninsula I headed back into the house and was not longer watching. It turns out I missed the action because apparently Missy decided she was going to join Andy in the boat. She reached from the dock to his boat but in typical cartoon fashion, the gulf of water between dock and boat widened and unable to remain stretched between the two surfaces, the dog went into the water. It took some doing but she was rescued none the worse for wear and ready for the next adventure. You've gotta wonder about some of those small dogs. All guts and goin' for glory.
Yikes! Gotta go to a meeting. Have a good one folks!

10/05/2007 8:22 PM

The Statement

You know, every time I make a profound statement, someone makes a liar out of me. You know how I was talking about those fighter jets nearly always doing their maneuvers only when there's a heavy cloud cover? Well this morning there were five of them playing around up there and there wasn't a cloud in the sky. Andy made sure to call me outside to watch them and you could often see the contrails when normally we can only hear them and guess what they're doing. Incidentally, the sky was such a clear blue that my camera had nothing to focus on so I couldn't even get pictures of them as they did their matched turns and other maneuvers for quite a long period of time.
Yesterday the first fishing boat was out on Nimpo Lake and today the first floatplane. Tweedsmuir Air had their Beaver out doing some practice runs warming up for the summer season which has already started for them. They have had clients ready to go, they just haven't been able to get on the lake before today. Yesterday they were still locked in by ice in the back bay but I think the boys cutting a channel in the ice for the dock yesterday was just enough to start the ice sheet moving.
I had to chuckle to myself this morning thinking it was a good thing our neighbour across the lake went to town early this morning because by late morning the sheet had moved over in front of her resort. I can just see her going, "What the heck!!? I thought the ice went out?" I'd have had a fit if that had moved in front of our place. When I first saw it I estimated it to be about 500 yards long and fairly wide and moving slowly out of the South Arm. It had shortened up considerably an hour later and by this afternoon, it was gone completely after a brisk wind kicked up.
It froze again last night but it was quite warm today and was still +10C or 50F early this evening so it was a really beautiful day. Finally!
The weatherman is predicting sun for the lower mainland and rain for the north coast so it's hard to say what we'll get. There's a big low pressure system spiraling off the coast to the north so as long as it doesn't slip southwards and get us, we should be in good shape for the next few days. Really sudden warm temperatures would not bode well for the province, as I've mentioned before. Parts of Prince George are already under a flood watch and one of the city parks close to the Fraser River is under water. The Nechako and North Thompson are coming up and the one fellow reiterated what I was already sure of. The snow pack is not yet melting in earnest, it's still building. The snow pack in the watershed that Prince George is in is estimated to be up to 300% more than normal and higher than any on record. Most people in the province are hoping for a cool spring and early summer with a very slow melt. I guess we'll know within the next week if that's going to be the case since the middle of May is when you normally see a big warm up.
Our lake level is amazing. The water is still rising, although only by inches rather than in feet like the rivers. Our dock looks downright funny because with the join in the middle, the outer section is riding really high in the water and rather than sitting level, it looks like something is wrong with it. We walked our point this morning and there are bushes and trees sitting in water that have always had dry feet before, and the lake has crept onto a small section of land. Our meadow no longer exists as such but just looks like another bay. However, though ours is probably one of the lowest properties on Nimpo Lake, we're still a long ways from having to break out the scuba gear.
Just to let you know, there's a really beauty of a resort coming up for sale. I'm just waiting for the information to come in so that I can post it on the property for sale page.

09/05/2007 8:17 PM

Springtime Nimpo

It is so nice to look out there and see water for as far as the eye can see. I don't know why I was so impatient to see the ice go out this year but it seems I'm not the only one that thought it long overdue. The owner of Escott Bay on Anahim Lake told me their ice just went out yesterday as well and they were glad of it!
It was wild and wonderful about midnight last night when I went outside to get wood to bank down the stove for the night. Something must have set the loons off in the back bay because they stated yodeling and then all the loon pairs in the vicinity started calling back and forth. It was just beautiful, and all the more so because I haven't heard that for about six or seven months.
I guess we weren't the only ones wanting spring to get on with it. The boys over at Eliguk's base from across Nimpo Lake were determined to get their dock from its winter resting spot in the back bay to its normal summer spot in front of the base. The only problem was that ice goes out of the back bay last and there was quite a bit of it between the two points. The fellows ran back and forth with a boat breaking up ice and eventually opened up an avenue for the dock.
The dock was an L-shaped one, so the pilot of the boat pushed from behind keeping the point of the L to the fore, providing a prow shape to go through the water. The fellow helping him stood on the dock and kept the ice broken up in front of it as it moved forward, and pushed it to either side with a long oar. It actually worked very well and they succeeded in getting the dock to its rightful summer position even though they were pushing the season a bit. We've seen what happens before when you push it too much. Your dock ends up locked in ice. It happened here one year on the other end of the summer when a dock was moved too late in the fall, and it stayed locked in ice all winter.
I just took a look outside and noticed that the large ice sheet the guys moved through earlier today has moved right over to where they parked the dock, even though that was completely clear earlier today. The sheet will keep moving around until it finally disintegrates and hopefully it's too mushy and soft to do any damage.
It's a good thing we had one or two warm days before the snow and the ice went out when it did. It's chilled back down again and last night it started dropping pretty early in the evening. It was -5C or about 22F early this morning and although it warmed up today and wasn't bad in the sun, when it clouded over there was a distinct chill in the air. Andy said the water along the shoreline was iced over this morning and I think the weatherman called for cooler temperatures over the next few days. That will continue to delay the spring melt and it just means when it does warm up, low lying areas in the province are going to be threatened by even more serious flooding. There's fresh snow on our mountains so I expect the same is true around the province, and all that fresh snow just increases the snow pack.
Our lake level continues to climb, which is glorious to see. We really needed the lake to come up after last summer's drought like conditions sucked the level down to an all time low. For the first time since I've been here, our meadow now looks to be part of Nimpo Lake and you would never guess there's grass under all that water. I don't know how much the lake has come up in the last couple of weeks. Some people say two feet but we're guessing less than that. A lot of the frost has come out of the ground already and nearly all of the local snow is melted now, so any more rise will come from mountain snow and that probably won't get serious about melting for another month or so. Between now and then the lake level will drop substantially again.

08/05/2007 8:18 PM

Snow in Nimpo

Now this is why I live in the Chilcotin. You just never know what's
Snowstorm over the lake in May.

coming next. Spring was yesterday and it looks like summer has been canceled this year.
We woke up to a snowstorm this morning that continued for most of the day. Really wet, sloppy stuff that had a lot of moisture in it. Which is good actually, because we really needed it. That, and the rain we got last night. I actually set the rain gauge out yesterday evening when it began to look like it was going to set in for the night, but of course it was full of slush this morning so there was really no way to guess how much we actually got before it turned to snow. It was still +5C or 40F when I went to bed last night so I wasn't exactly expecting white stuff when I got up. Bit of a surprise, but not completely out of the norm. We get snow every month of the year and May can still be considered a winter month here.
Just to show you how thick the stuff was coming down and how low the ceiling today; I was filling up the bird feeders this morning because I felt bad for the little guys trying to find food in that sloppy snow on the ground when I heard a jet overhead. I could tell right away that it was the boys from Comox. Or I assume that's where they're based out of. I've mentioned before that we occasionally get fighter jets doing maneuvers in our airspace, probably because very little else occupies our airspace at higher altitudes. But they always seem to come up when it's partially cloudy or we've a really low ceiling. I don't know if that's to keep anyone from being able to monitor their maneuvers, or what, (Are there spies anymore? Or did those go with the Berlin Wall?) but you will almost never see or hear them on a clear, sunny day.
A few moments after hearing the sound of the jet, I heard this massive boom and must have jumped about two feet into the air. At first I thought it was thunder but it just kept on reverberating and then the sound slowly died away. I thought, "There's no way it can be thunder. It's snowing for Pete's sake!" Then I realized I could hear the sound of a jet that sounded far, far away and thought, "Okay, somebody just broke the sound barrier and they were probably pretty low when they did it." I expect the heavy, low cloud magnified the sound or maybe the surface of the lake did.
I could hear people's dogs around Nimpo Lake start barking immediately after so it must have scared the p' out of them too. Shortly after, I received a phone call from a neighbour a couple of places over making sure we hadn't had an explosion here or hadn't decided to use dynamite to blow our stumps after all. He said that the walls in his house vibrated while another neighbour, who had also checked around, said that his roof vibrated. We all agreed that it was pretty difficult to determine if there were flames resulting from an explosion, when we were in the middle of a snowstorm. I called across the lake just to verify that it was a sonic boom and was told by a lady long around airplanes that it was indeed. I was pretty sure since I spent the first few years of my life next to an Air Force base, but the phone calls had started to make me wonder. As the one fellow said, we're all a little gun shy about explosions and fire around here. With good reason.
The ice didn't go off of Nimpo Lake completely last night, so I guess yesterday doesn't qualify as the official iceout day. We still had a line of ice out between us and the big island, and while down at the North end of Nimpo today, I could still see ice on the Main Arm past the point. However, a good wind came up this evening and has pretty much demolished the ice in front of us, while a neighbour down on the south end called to say that suddenly, he could no longer see ice from where he was. Since the ice can't be seen right now from the North Arm, I think this evening qualifies as official iceout for this year. Mary says so too and since she's our iceout referee, consider it so.
All I can say is that it sure was nice to see blue water this evening after the sun came out.
This is the start of a new week so you can find last week's articles at May, Week One.

The purpose of this web site is to draw attention to a remote area of west central British Columbia. It is a beautiful area that relies heavily on tourism. The search engines don't know much about the West Chilcotin, Anahim Lake, Nimpo Lake or any of the other small communities in the region and I hope to change that! Even as large as this site will eventually be, there just isn't enough room or time in the day to fully describe this incredible country but I am going to try scraping away at the tip of the iceberg, so join me!

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