Big Bar Ranch
Part 2 of our Summer Trip
Generally summer vacations have to be
booked at least months in advance, if not year in advance.
Back around Christmas there were a lot of COVID restrictions and
we didn't know what the summer was going to be like so we picked a
conservative plan for the summer - find places far from the crowds
that are still new experiences. We picked two places -
Cathedral Provincial Park and Big Bar Ranch. We picked Big
Bar Ranch specifically because Nature Vancouver was originally
planning on doing a summer camp here and they really sold us on
the location.
Big Bar Ranch has a lot of history here, but the current
management team is new. The cabin we stayed in was built in
the 60's or 70's but it has been brought up to date (internet!)
and made for a comfortable stay. I really wanted to take the
kids horse back riding (we booked 4 half day trips), but there is
a lot more to do around Big Bar Ranch than just riding the trails.
Our First Horseback Ride
To ride at the ranch you need a helmet and cowboy boots -
both are provided. The horses were saddled up when we came
out after lunch and we were quickly on our way. The ranch is
located in the shadow of the marble mountains and there are
springs everywhere around here - when other fields have gone
brown, there are many green fields and small ponds.
Our first walk was to the Canyon - a large hole in the ground that
eventually leads to the Fraser river. Our horses knew the
route and the rules - they line and mostly go with little
direction. The horses have a strong social life so some
horses want to be in front, some want to follow and some don't
want to be next to others. The guides of started is in the
correct order and the horses made sure we didn't mess it up to
much.
After the overlook of the canyon, we
returned by a forest can came back to camp. After a
few hours on the horse back us parents were a bit sore but the
kids were all smiles.
Town Day!
I planned the trip to have some horse back
riding days and some "adventure" days where we would
explore. After our first day riding, we went for an
adventure - grab lunch near Cache Creek and an ice cream in
Clinton and then go for a swim at the near by lake. Our
first stop was Desert Hills Ranch. There are two locations -
the big one is in Ashcroft, but there is a smaller Desert Hills
just north of Cache Creek that has some fruit, a lot of hot sauces
and excellent Tacos!
After lunch, we drove a few km North to Horstings Farmers Market
and grabbed some fresh fruit and a bit more lunch for the
kids. They had an outdoor covered patio and a great
selection of baked goods.
Finally we drove up to Clinton and
stopped in at Hunnies for an ice cream. Helen found they
also carried garlic products from a farm near 70 mile that we like
so we wound up buying an arm full of dressing mixes. Ice
Cream is already good, but Ice Cream on a hot day is fantastic.
Big Bar Lake
Big Bar Lake is a Provincial Park on the
same dirt road as Big Bar Ranch so we pass it on the way back
home. We stopped in and got out the swim stuff.
It's a great lake for a swim, but it's also impressive how much
wildlife is here as well. Yes, the mosquitoes are bad at the
picnic tables, but when you are out swimming there are small
swarms of damsel flies. Just on shore you can easily find
Dragonflies just by looking at the likely perches.
The lake isn't that deep (with a bit of elevation you can see the
bottom) which apparently makes the loons happy. We watched a
loon parent fishing and giving it's catches to the juvenile bird
that was with it. It was quite a dedicated parent.
Fraser Canyon
We had horseback riding booked for
Sunday, but a horseshoe appointment pushed our ride from the
morning to the afternoon. Looking at a map, Big Bar Ranch
isn't on the Fraser Canyon, but the Fraser river is close.
We decided to drive down a check out the reaction ferry to get you
across. We got to the river side and found at least a dozen
big trucks. The ferry operator was on a break and we weren't
in a hurry so we chatted with the truck operators. They were
workers from
Kiewit here to clear the massive big bar
landslide on the river a few km up from here. In November or
December 2018 a huge landslide created a choke point the river
where the salmon couldn't pass. They have been working for
the better part of a year breaking up the that now block the river
and building a fish ladder. The project is using this ferry
(and the aerial tramway when the river can't be passed by boat)
much harder than usual. The operator said the aerial tramway
would normally make 5 trips a week when there was ice on
river. This last year, they put 10 years of wear onto the
tramway.
The ferry also doesn't run in the river is too high. The
ferry had just started running again after a few days where the
river was so high that the ferry had no place to load. At
this time of year the river can rise or fall by 3 feet in a single
night so the operator has to come out in the middle of the night
to move the ferry so it isn't marooned on the shore in the
morning. The Fraser is a busy river!
We drove up the road (the road going North is blocked with
construction traffic for the slide remediation) and took in the
view. While the dirt road would eventually find the road to
Lillooet, there was a forest fire up there that made the road
non-passable. We took in the view, turned around and then came
back to the ferry.
Second Ride
This was our second
afternoon ride. I got a new horse this time - a horse that was
used to being a pack horse and walking on a lead connected to the
horse in front. The ranch is having a hard time finding young
horses at a reasonable price - COVID seems to brought out a lot of
people on recreational properties and the horses are going to people
that are willing to spend.
The ride today was east of the ranch up to the power lines and then
along under the power lines north. There is a string of water
bodies along the the road and we walked near to them for much of the
way back.
I'm not a light guy and my horse
Teddy was sweating hard. As we went up slopes, the horse
started panting. I didn't want to be the guy that killed a
horse so I walked back the last km or so. I actually like the
lower perspective and I have a lot more control of my own feet than
I do of a horse.
When we got back to camp I asked about
Teddy. Turns out Teddy hasn't been ridden in more than a month
and he is just out of shape. The horse wasn't at risk and
needs a bit more work to get into shape, but carrying children isn't
going to do it. You see a pattern at the ranch - the first
day, the parents ride with their kids. All of the rides after
that, the kids go out with the guides and the parents stay back at
the ranch. Helen and I rode more than any other parent we saw
in the ranch.
Third Ride
This
ride was up into the forest toward the ride of mountains to the east
of the ranch. You get to appreciate details on the trails -
all of the gates are designed to be accessed by someone on horse
back (with considerable skill) and several of the trail junctions
had maps posted on the trees high enough to be easily read from the
back of a horse. Everyone here rides with a guide, but a lot
of thought has been put in to make that work.
Claira had somewhat of a Disney
view of horses - she just wanted to be it's friend. After the
horse obeyed her direction, she would give it a pat on the
bumb. The horse of course has it's own brain - It wants to
stop for a snack and stay a certain distance from it's trail
mates. The horses don't watch out for branches that will hit
you, but not the horse - that is your job. As you ride with a
horse, it can become quite sensitive to your input - a small pull on
the reins will redirect it. That said, sometimes it needs
reminding that you are in charge and little kids can have a hard
time pulling up a horses head and giving it a hard enough hit.
Claira ultimately needed a "go" stick to hit her horse because it
just ignored her. At one point her horse wedged itself next to
some trees (and nice grass) and Claira had a hard time getting the
horse to go sideways enough. The guide used horse relationship
to sort it out - her horse is not liked by the guest horses - it
isn't part of the Big Bar herd and it chases the other horses.
When the guide rode face to face with Claira's horse, Claira's horse
backed down and did the right thing. I was impressed.
Big Bar Lake Hike
The last time we went to Big Bar Lake, it
was a Saturday and there were a handful of cars parked in the
parking lot and a few other people in the lake. When we
arrive on a Monday afternoon we had the day use area all to
ourselves. I went for a quick swim in the lake (it sure
feels nice to cool off), applied a lot of sun screen and started
walking for the Otter Marsh trail.
When you are walking, you sometimes have
to make choices about what kind of subject you are looking to
photograph. My 105mm lens is great for flowers and
butterflies but is hard to to use for landscape and you would have
to be very lucky to use it for birds. When butterflies are
popping up every few meters. it's easy to focus on them as a
subject.
The Otter Marsh trail is quite nice - you cover a number of
different micro biomes in a short period of time. I was
maybe half an hour in when I realized I was at least an hour to
return if I kept going. There is no cell phone coverage out
here so I decided to return early. I was glad I did - the
kids got cold from swimming in the lake, but were mobbed by the
mosquitoes when they came out. They were very glad to go to
the truck when I returned back.
You see more insect life here than you ever do in the city.
It's great to see butterflies and dragonflies, but the mosquitoes
are quite a bummer. The ranch people say the mosquitoes do wax
and wane with the weather of the summer, but for the week we were
there, they were a quite bad around water and near sunset.
Day Trip to 100 Mile House
We had two back to back days riding horses
so I was glad we booked a day off to try and recover some hip
movement. We decided to do another road trip - this time
North to 100 Mile House. Our first stop was at Chasm.
The web page told us the park was closed because of fire danger,
but we decided to check and it turned out to be completely
open! It's basically a smoky roadside attraction - pull in,
take a few snaps, get back on the highway. I'm sure the
overnight trails are closed, but we weren't doing any of that.
We drove up to 100 mile house to have sushi for lunch and visit
the Save on Foods for some groceries. 100 Mile is a very
practical town - one book store which had a good selection of kids
books and local books and a huge selection of used pulp
fiction. There was a large quilting store and a small office
supply store. You could find a decent selection of cuisines
in the restaurants, but there was only one of each.
There was quite a nice little park in town -
Centennial Park with a walk to Bridge Creek Falls. It wasn't a
long walk, but the moisture from the river makes for a quite a
different forest from what you see in most of this part of the
world.
As we drove back to Big Bar Ranch, you could feel the forest fires
closing in. The Flat Lake fire was throwing up quite a bit of
smoke and would close the highway the next day. f
Drive Up To Long Lake
The nice light is in the evening. (I
disavow that there are beautiful sunrises as well). Given
how remote we are and the lack of cell phone coverage by anyone,
we didn't really like the idea of riding these roads at night, but
as long as we got back at a reasonable time, we could have some
adventure in the evening. We drove a little North of the
Ranch to Long Lake to see a new body of water.
Google Maps has no idea how to guess the speed on dirt roads so
the travel estimates are very conservative - often 30km/h where
some of these roads are wide, mostly straight and mostly flat
and you can reasonably go faster. We drove along the lake
chain and found a small like that was drying out.
I really
like new habitats that come with changes in water. These salt
lakes have their own plants and insects. We were in the truck
about to go out for a walk when we spotted a large bird near the
forest edge - perhaps a hawk or an owl. The raptor disappeared
faster than I could get my lens setup, but a few moments later a
familiar sound came flying by - Sand Hill Cranes! These birds
are easy to see at Reifel bird sanctuary, but I haven't actually
seen them in the wild before. An amazing place.
I walked down to the pond and found interesting plants and
insects. I wish I could have stayed for an hour but the kids
were freaking out about the bugs and it was getting dark. I
need to get out more in the evenings.
Fourth Ride
Big Bar Ranch doesn't own a huge amount of
property so most of the trails are actually on crown land or the
neighboring OK Ranch. They have permission to ride (on one
ride we stopped by for a check in) so it's interesting to see the
inside of working ranches. The ride today took us to some
ponds in OK Ranch, but we also got to see some land management in
progress. OK Ranch is using biosolids to try and improve the
soil condition. The fields of grass looked healthy to my
uneducated eyes.
The walk was mostly south up a cattle path
(fenced on both sides) to huge grassy fields. As I understand
the bio-solid program, cows grazing isn't bad, but if they do over
graze the land is very slow to recover. Using Biosolids, they
can recover over grazed land back to something productive and
sustainable for cattle ranching. The tall grass is habitat
that should be here so it seems reasonable to me.
We walked down to a lake, around the lake (some really skittish
birds in the lake) and then started our trip back.
There are several routes into and out of the
ranch and we took a new route back this time. The small
lake on ranch property has quite steep sides but the horses know
what they are doing. It's quite a sight to look down on a
horse so close to yourself, but the horses didn't seem to
care. They were a bit more sensitive about walking into the
outlet stream, but back on solid ground, they were fine.
Drive Back to Fraser Canyon
I decided
for another early evening activity - drive one of the roads above
the Fraser Canyon to look out of over the Canyon nearer to
sunset. After dinner, I put the camera and tripod in the
truck and drove off to see the Canyon.
I wasn't far down
the road before I spotted movement on the high side of the road -
a dozen Big Horn Sheep were making good time up a trail.
They didn't like it when I stopped and setup my tripod, but what
can you do.
After they disappeared into the cliffs I got ready to go, but
noticed there were still more sheep! A few stragglers were
on the other side of the road and wanted to catch up with the
heard. I waited patiently and the sheep started making
progress.
They gave me lots of space, but eventually the crossed the road
and followed the same trail as the earlier herd. It's nice
to see such a large mammal in the wild.
The Flat Lake forest fire was getting larger
and the wind caused the smoke to start blowing in our
direction. While I was out you could see the front of smoke
making it's way down the canyon. I was a long way from the
fire itself, but the air quality was definitely going to be worse
for a while.
Wildlife Around Camp
We are a long way from any sort of city here so
just walking outside at night you see the milky way. I decided
to walk up to the gate at night to take a photo. There are
several farm dogs and sadly one of the farm dogs heard me and
wouldn't stop barking even thought I was hundreds of meters
away. I worried I kept everyone up, but apparently the people
in the main building mostly ignore the dog. Early July is not
a dark nights time - technically it doesn't get to be night at this
time of the year at this latitude, but I had not problem taking a
photo of the stars.
The ranch
does have a small herd of all female goats. The original idea
was to use them to keep pigweed under control, but apparently some
of them got sick eating weeds so now they get grass. They are
all one family and not very used to visitors (they got very excited)
so with a bit of supervision, we were okay.
The farm also has pigs which are great for eating kitchen scraps,
but you don't want to go pet them. The fields have rock piles
and I noticed marmot would often come out and enjoy the
sunset. I thought this was pretty rare, but the guide told me
that every rock pile around here likely has marmots living under it.
Under the eaves of our cabin were a few families of swallows.
The horse corals had a resident flock of Brewers Blackbirds - very
skittish around people, but happy to be close to the animals.
Down by the lake there were plenty of small birds. We saw a
humingbird almost every day, but it never stopped long enough for me
to figure out what kind it was. I spotted a hawk hunting one
day and an osprey another day. There was no shortage of
wildlife if you took the time to watch.
We had a great time out at the ranch and would recommend Big Bar
Ranch to a friend.
Tags: horse(12), swimming(4), lake(4), floaty(4), butterfly(4), dorsal(3)
People: Claira(10), Nara(10), Helen(1)
From: John Harvey Photo > Blogs for 2024 to 2005 > Big Bar Ranch
From: John Harvey Photo > John's Overnight Page > Big Bar Ranch
Last Modified Sunday, January 29th, 2023 at 20:43:13 Edit
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