Summer Holiday: What a View!

On August 27, I headed out with my parents on a holiday. We were headed to Saskatchewan.

The first night we stopped in Osooyos, BC. Osooyos has Canada's lowest annual precipitation, Canada's warmest annual temperatures, and is home to Canada's warmest fresh water lake.


The next morning we headed east on Highway 3--The Crowsnest Highway. The first three pictures were taken from the Anarchist Mountain Lookout.

You travel from 910 ft. to 4.045 ft. as you travel up the steep incline on the mountain.

This is a view of the Okanagan Valley with Osooyos in the centre.
The green spots are where people have irrigated their orchards. This area is Canada's only desert--this area forms the northern tip of the Sonoran Desert which extends from Mexico to Canada.
This is a picture looking south to Oroville, Washington.

The next four pictures were taken near Pincher Creek, Alberta.

In 1868, a group of Montana prospectors camped along a creek north of the border. They left behind a pair of pincers--a farrier's tool for trimming a horse's hooves--in the creek when they rode out for the Kootenay gold fields. In 1874, The Northwest Mounted Police marched west from Manitoba to bring peace to Western Canada. On their patrols, they discovered the rusting pincers in the creek, and hence forth it became known as Pincher Creek.
The mountains in the background are the Rocky Mountains.
Pincher Creek is home to many wind turbines designed to harness the energy from the wind. A single wind turbine in an average year will produce 2,000 MWh of electricity, enough power for over 250 Canadian homes. Using wind to produce electricity rather than burning coal will leave 900,000 kilograms of coal in the ground and reduce 2,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases annually, the same impact as taking 417 cars off the road or planing 10,000 trees. Impressive!