Last post Frankie drove you up to the lake, here’s what awaits at kilometer 23 down that dirt road. It’s Grizzly Swamp!

I’ll give you a bit of history on the “Swamp” which technically is called Grizzly Lake if you look it up on a map…

It used to be an actual little swamp, until the early 1950’s when the area it’s in (the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia) started to develop a large agricultural industry. Orchards, mostly. The city started using so much water that they couldn’t fill the demand anymore and there was always a fear of drought, so they decided to dam Grizzly Swamp and turn it into an actual lake for the Vernon Irrigation District to empty at it’s discretion (which I’ll touch on later when we talk about the fish in the lake). Here’s one of the dams, this one is right next to the spot that we camp at and is more like an overflow that can’t be opened or closed, it’s a solid concrete structure that just sits at the same height and when there’s a shit ton of water melting high in the mountains and filling the lake it pours over this thing and feeds into a creek system.

This is one of the larger dams, I think it’s just made of gravel. I didn’t get a photo of the third one unfortunately but trust me when I say that it looks similar to this one. When they need the water they do something in that little building (I have no idea what) and something (I have no idea what) opens up and the water goes more swiftly down the line where it gets dispersed to some people for drinking water and to others so that they can water their crops.

See the man-made treeline in this photo? The very abrupt line where the shorter trees meet the big ones? When I was a little kid we came to Grizzly, and I remember it feeling like a war zone. It was a super muddy place with just a ton of stumps and some tiny saplings. They had clearcut the trees in this area in the 1950’s but they didn’t decide to reforest until the 70’s for some reason. The tiny saplings that I remember from when I was a kid are now like 20 feet tall! Instead of a war zone, it’s like an actual forest that you can get lost in again. It’s a pretty awesome example of how rad reforestation is.

Next entry I’ll introduce you to our camp and some of the shit that we use, it’ll kinda be like a hype post. Stay tuned for CampBeast!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 at 09:13 and is filed under Fishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.