High Above Kamloops Lake

[Andrew O'Neill]

[Graham Patterson]

A picture-rich environment! The two people taking photographs in the background during your 'speed' section was amusing.

[paulbarden]

Did ya get back to Costco before the missus lost her cool??!

[Andrew O'Neill]

Did ya get back to Costco before the missus lost her cool??!

I timed it perfectly! Just as I pulled into the parking lot, they were coming out! I wasn't able to get a hotdog, though

[Drew Wiley]

I still didn't see any kamloops in the shot, nor dromedaries either. If you had gotten up earlier, you might have seen some, like 10,000 years earlier. It does remind me of canyons on the Snake River, and in Eastern Oregon and Washington, south of the border, of presumably similar geological vintage.

[Andrew O'Neill]

A picture-rich environment! The two people taking photographs in the background during your 'speed' section was amusing.

I know, right?? I stopped several times just to watch them, taking selfies, etc. Thankfully, they were off camera! I don't care for people in my shots.

[Andrew O'Neill]

I still didn't see any kamloops in the shot, nor dromedaries either. If you had gotten up earlier, you might have seen some, like 10,000 years earlier. It does remind me of canyons on the Snake River, and in Eastern Oregon and Washington, south of the border, of presumably similar geological vintage.

Well, if you had been a wee bit north of here, up in the Caribou, you would have seen a camel or two (they might have been two-humpers. I don't recall)... brought in for the gold rush of the mid 19th C. They lingered for a while after the rush, roaming wild.

[Drew Wiley]

I ran into heaps of camel skeletons in old channel deposits down on floodplains, along with the jumbled up bones of horses and mastodons. It seems that ice dams upcanyon would break from time to time, releasing vast amounts of water all at once on those hapless herds of animals grazing down on the floodplain. The degree of preservation was high due to all the pumice ash picked up at the same time, and encapsulating them almost like an animal version of Pompeii, but via water mudflow, not pyroclastic. Mid-Pleistocene.

And that's what your Kamploops perspective reminded me of. There were probably ice dam breaches there too during the Pleistocene. There certainly were in similar-looking canyons in the US Northwest. My dad worked on some of the modern dams as both a surveyor and then inspector, and took me out of school a couple weeks at a time as a child to roam all the backroads of Oregon and Washington to teach me about the geology. I learned far more from him than I ever did in school. When supervising a big canal project here in CA they encountered quite a few exceptional Columbian Mammoth specimens. Your thread did tempt me to look up some of the websites on Kamloops and nearby geology.

Saharan camels were imported by a desert contingent of the US Army in the late 1800's, and by a few mining operations as well. I don't know of any surviving stray herds.

[Andrew O'Neill]

I know of one massive ice break in the southern Okanagan. I'm sure there were umpteen up here, even on the prairies, where I grew up.