A week at Bear Creek Provincial Park, West Kelowna
Cathy and I both thought that spending a week at Bear Creek Provincial Park might be a bit too long, but it turned out that it was nowhere near long enough. We did very little touring and didn’t even make it to any wineries (!). But it was an excellent week of family time, including a particularly good afternoon with my 93-year-old Dad.
Each of the 122 campsites is large, and most have a good degree of privacy. Ours, #116 in the furthest-south of the park’s 3 loops, backed onto a grassy area about 100×200 feet in size. I picked it partially because it was the furthest from the kids’ play area in the park.
The campground is rather spendy at $35 per night with no hookups, but the level of maintenance in the park is very high, there’s no charge for showers, and the location for our needs was perfect, only 20 minutes from my Dad.
There are wild roses everywhere in our part of the park, and the smell was wonderful.
A bridge crosses Bear Creek to reach our campsite, and the creek was always part of our dog walking routes. The flow is quite heavy as it’s still Spring runoff.
The park is quite small at only 178 hectares (440 acres), but 5 km (3.1 mi) of trails offer wonderful energetic hiking around Bear Creek’s dramatic canyon. A wildfire burned the trees on the southern part of the trail network in 2011.
During the week, we walked most of the trail network, from the high, hot, great-view sections to the cool forest section along the creek. Poor Tucker, still nervous after the bear attack at Tumbler Ridge, was certain that a rock in the creek was dangerous. Unable to convince him to come down to check it out, I finally picked him up and took him down to it 🙂
There are map-signs at several points in the network, and it would be all but impossible to get lost for more than a few minutes.
The views into the canyon, and particularly of the main waterfall, are very impressive. There are 5 viewpoints with very secure fences to allow safe viewing.
Downtown Kelowna is very close – the campground is only 7 km (4.4 m) off the main highway running through West Kelowna and across Okanagan Lake to Kelowna.
The kids had a ball on these trails – there were just enough other people, many of them with dogs, to be great socialization for them without it ever feeling “busy”.
At the southern edge of the campground, active log booming is still going on to feed the Tolko sawmill across Okanagan Lake at the edge of downtown Kelowna. This is the view of the booms from one of the trails.
A couple more views from the canyon from viewpoints along the southern rim.
I only saw these flowers in one tiny patch along the canyon rim.
As much time as we spent on the trails, I could have spent a lot more – they really are wonderful, as we all needed the exercise.
The lakeshore on both sides of the park is getting more expensive homes all the time – homes running into the tens of millions of dollars now.
I arrived at Bear Creek on May 12th, and Cathy flew in from Whitehorse on Saturday the 14th. That weekend, the campground was completely full, and many of the sites had large groups in them. We rather expected that it would get noisy, but it never did. Being an hour or less from the homes of more than 100,000 people, this is one of the busier campgrounds in the province.
While the dogs worked off some energy with Cathy and I, Molly was loving her sunny window on the world :
Once the weekend was over, the beach was quiet again – we never did go there when more than 2 people were on it.
The day use area is lovely.
Looking across the lake at some of the huge homes – some of the funiculars alone must have cost a small fortune.
There aren’t a huge number of Canada geese, but they sure make a mess of the lawns. It makes a dog mess look pretty small in comparison – I expect that some kids come back to their RV rather messy! And both Bella and Tucker got a bit sick from eating it – yuuuum!
As each campsite was vacated, each was raked – I’ve never seen that done in a provincial park before.
Final preparations were being made for the summer season, including painting all the lines in the large day use parking lots, and road markings.
Once the weekend crowd left, my sister and her husband who live about 20 miles away moved their new trailer in to a site behind us for a couple of nights, with their 2 dogs. That turned out to be a wonderful way to get the family together.
It’s always fun watching Tucker and Bella playing, especially when he lays on top of her to do it 🙂
For me, the best part of the week was bringing Dad out for an afternoon, with dinner and wine. I really wanted him to see what The Good Life looks like for 2 of his kids and their spouses, and it was perfect.
We had planned on going to a leash-free dog beach (Gellatly Beach) in West Kelowna a few times, but it turned out that we only got there once.
The kids had a blast, with several dogs to play with, although every dog wanted the squeaky balls that we brought for Bella and Tucker.
On our last night, we met a friend from Whitehorse who’s in the midst of a lengthy process of moving to West Kelowna. A wine-paired dinner at The Cove, followed by a visit at his beautiful home, was a great way to end our Kelowna week. On May 19th, we’d move to Osoyoos, in the South Okanagan, for a couple of days.
About The Author
