Warmth, fruit and wine: Osoyoos for the winter

To shovel or not to shovel? That question didn’t take long to answer.

Osoyoos, British Columbia – the warmest place in Canada – is where we’ll spend the winter. Mere inches of snow, lots of sunshine, surrounded by orchards and vineyards, and a small-town friendly place. Add in reasonable rental rates and just hours rather than many days away from two-thirds of our kids, and you can see why we’ve chosen this place to park Vandalf for a well-needed rest.

We’ve rented a two-bedroom condo apartment in a small resort in this central-southern B.C. town in the Okanagan valley, just north of the American border.

One of the first things we did was fill our fridge with fruits and vegetables from one of the countless fruit stands in and around the town and the Okanagan Valley. Juicy peaches and ripe plums taste more intense and sweeter when they’re sold so close to where they’re picked.

Osoyoos Lake is reportedly the warmest fresh-water lake in Canada. It’s certainly warmer than Lake Superior – the coldest of the Great Lakes – where I swam in August!  

It’s still in the mid-20s (degrees Celsius) during the day, so we could have camped for a while longer, but we had booked this apartment when we were still in Alberta, where it got cold a lot more quickly. (Our camper van named Vandalf is insulated but doesn’t have a heater.) We wore our winter coats, hats and long underwear at the end of August while in Jasper National Park! But now we’re back to shorts, T-shirts and swimming outside in the resort pool.

Winter lasts for just three months in Osoyoos, and the coldest it gets is, on average, minus 4 Celsius. The average annual snowfall is a mere 2.1 inches. That’s why this area usually attracts Canadian snowbirds – those who don’t want to go to the southern U.S. for the winter. And this year, with Covid, the snowbird numbers here are even higher.

The south Okanagan valley is a desert – well, technically a shrub-grassland – that we’re looking forward to finding more about. One thing we’ve learned: cyclists who don’t invest in puncture-proof tires will get lots of flats. The cacti and other desert plants have lots of pointy things that plunge through tires on the trails. That’s what the guys in the local cycle shop told us.  

In the Okanagan language, the word S’oo-yoos means “the narrows” and when you look at the map, you can see that the town straddles a narrowing in Osoyoos Lake. According to Wikipedia, the “’O-‘ prefix is not indigenous in origin and was attached by settler-promoters wanting to harmonize the name with other place names beginning with O in the Okanagan region (Oliver, Omak, Oroville, Okanagan).”

We think it’s pronounced Oh-SOY-yoose, but you have to say it quickly to sound like a local, so we have to master that.

There’s a lot to keep us busy through the winter. Places to visit include the Nk’Mip Desert Cultural Centre (owned by the Osoyoos Indian Band), Osoyoos Desert Centre, art gallery, museum, Osoyoos Model Railroad, and Spotted Lake. Then there are all the hiking and biking trails and, of course, all the wineries, cideries, breweries and distillers.

I also have a lot of catching up to do on blogposts! In the last month, while we’ve explored Alberta and British Columbia, we’ve had problems finding reliable wifi and internet for uploading stories and photos about our adventures on the Icefields Parkway, whale watching and beachcombing on Vancouver Island, and chasing down salmon and oysters. Expect more updates soon!