The other evening while we had our visit with friends, sitting in their rose garden, I noticed an interesting cloud formations playing out in the sky and took the photo above. Later on our drive back home the clouds continued their display and that photo is below.
Don’t jump to conclusions, although my name is David, this in not my rose garden, I am too lazy a gardener to produce something as grand this. This garden belongs to friends who we visit every Saturday night. Last night we did our visiting sitting in lawn chairs surrounded by David’s roses. What a idyllic setting for a visit. The evening was a perfect temperature and the mosquito coils kept the pests at bay.
As you can see David has quite a variety of roses, it is hard to keep him away from nurseries when they go to town. He is one of those gardeners who takes the time to do everything right, and clearly all that effort pays off. All his roses are healthy and beautiful. He has them properly manicured and labelled. It is a treat to be able to share in the results of all his gardening efforts.
Driving back this morning from my early walk with Kona at Koeneman Park, this mother deer and speckled fawn walked across the road in front of us. Luckily we were in the car because Kona, of course, freaked out with an eruption of frantic barking and could not be calmed down. The deer just looked at us, pondered the barking, then decided it might be better to move on.
I am happy to report that the Fraser River has retreated a bit and is no longer covering our road. The extreme heat warning has ended and we woke up to more normal temperatures this morning (17°C, 62°F). We are much relieved and would be more so if we would get some rain without lightning.
While a flooded river can be very dangerous, the Fraser’s overflow water in Koeneman Park has no current or hazardous bottom, so it was a relatively safe place to cool off during our 40.4°C (104°F) temperatures and people were taking advantage of the newly created pools of water. I took this photo after we got done walking Kona through the flooded areas at Koeneman to cool her off.
You can see my paintings at: davidmarchant2.ca
We do a lot of our afternoon dog walks on Horseshoe Lake Road, but I guess it will be a while before we do our next one there. Like all of the low lying land in the Valley, it is now flooded (photo above). The Fraser River continues to rise and the photo below shows the water that is now totally covering the low area of Mountain View Road where it runs along the river.
The good news is that our temperatures have cooled after yesterday’s 40.3C (104.5F), and today’s high will be a more tolerable 30C (86F). Sadly the Fraser has not yet peaked, supposedly that will happen tomorrow.
Every Spring the Fraser River rises with melt water and we have watched its water creep toward our road, wondering if it will reach it. In the 40 something years we have lived in the Robson Valley it never has, but this morning when we drove to town, waters from the Fraser had started to spread across the road.
The extremely hot weather persists (38C, 100F today), so the river will continue to rise. We are beginning to wonder if our only route out will be flooded. Luckily we have enough supplies stored away to live on, if it does.
It is difficult to ignore the fact that weather-wise, things are changing. We spent two summers breathing smoke from distant forest fires that obscured our mountains and blotted the sun, then last Summer intense rains saturated the ground, causing mudslides and mosquitoes, now we are into a record breaking heat wave. Summers used to be so enjoyable and benign, now we know longer know what is going to hit us.
Below is a shot of pastureland between the Fraser River and the McBride townsite.
This photo makes my greenhouse look like a pile of junk, but please excuse its appearance; desperate times call for desperate measures. The extreme heat we are experiencing (41C, 105.8F today) is intensified inside my greenhouse, which has been reaching daily high temperatures of 51C (125F) or more (the greenhouse thermometer doesn’t go any higher), and I am surprised my tomato plants are still alive.
In an attempt to try to lessen the heat inside the greenhouse, I put up whatever I could find (feed bags and old pieces of Tyveck) to try and prevent at least some of the sun from penetrating the place. I haven’t really been able to tell that it has made any difference, since the temperature reading yesterday was the same as the day before.
It seems I spend my life wishing that the weather we are getting would change into something better. Last year is was the extreme amounts of rain that was causing all of the problems. I will try to be positive by saying the weather around here does provide a lot of grist for conversation.
See my paintings at: davidmarchant2.ca
