Careful What you Talk About….

We were headed up to the Shuswap for a family wedding this past weekend and as we passed down off the Coquihala connector and into Westbank we were talking about the fires that roared through the area across the lake 6 years ago. it devastated the hills and the forests of blackened trunks still stand as a testament to the wrath that nature can unleash on the earth.

The wedding was at 3:30pm that day and the party was great. As we were heading back to our hotel room for the night and thinking about which wineries we would visit the next day, the news came on CBC radio and said something about 17,000 people out of their homes in Kelowna due to the forest fires!

We couldn’t believe that there had been fires burning when we came through that area at 11am and wondered how we could have missed the smoke.

Turns out we didn’t… the fires broke out in the early afternoon, about 4 hours after we passed through. In that short period of time they had grown substantially and by morning, our route home had been closed. Damn, no visit to St. Hubertus, or Quails Gate, or Mt Boucherie….. but the bottom line was that it was simply astonishing how fast those fires exploded!

So, a 220 km detour to get home…although we did find a new and absolutely fabulous winery on the way home!!