Here is the main runout of the Nature Boy avalanche that occurred in January. Most of the debris spilled across to the low side of the highway, or has been cleared away to there, but you can see some of the bark and smaller stuff in the foreground of this photo.
The old K&S Railway line, built in 1895 to serve the booming silver mining town Sandon, is now a linear non-motorized recreational trail. The Galena Trail runs gradually uphill along the shore of Slocan Lake, and then heads inland alongside Carpenter Creek in to the mountains towards Alamo, Three Forks and Sandon, abandoned towns from mining boom times.
There's a still a lot of snow on the ground, but at the south-facing bases of large trees, reflection of the waxing sun is creating wells.
It's supposed to be an attractive installation at the head of main street, welcoming people to the business core of the village. The Wet Rock.
It's a thrift store without prices. If you see something you like, you take it home, with a cash donation expected/encouraged, but the amount totally up to you. Often people "borrow" items from the donation store for a few days -- puzzles, dishes, skates, board games, costume clothing -- making a nominal donation, so it also functions like a library for "stuff."
Some locals claim this is the world's biggest birch tree and over a hundred years old. Most such trees grow live fast and die young, within 20-30 years. This mammoth takes the arms reach of three and a half children to span the circumference of its trunk.
The gallery building itself was once a schoolhouse. It is now a multi-purpose community arts and culture space. Outdoors it houses the mining exhibit.
Part of the outdoor mining museum exhibit at Silverton Gallery. The towers are reproductions, the hardware mostly original. Mining is what opened this area up in the late 1890s. Old mine workings are in the mountains everywhere.
Slocan Lake doesn't freeze. It is so deep that no matter how cold the air is, unless the wind is incredibly still for weeks on end, the 50-degrees-Fahrenheit water hundreds of metres down is continually mixed with the surface water. At most only the still edges of the lake freeze. While the occasional small lakes that are up near mountain passes do freeze, the snow falls heavily there, and in amongst the peaks the winds are not sustained enough to blow the ice clear. So it's unusual to get a clear glassy surface on lakes around here. But it happens once in a while and when it does it's absolutely magical.
Linda at Occasional Scotland asked for a fire hydrant photo. It took me a while yesterday to find a hydrant -- most were still buried. But this one had been properly dug out, probably by the village's bobcat loader, before the most recent snowfall and is therefore still partly visible.
This is the westerly side-chute of the Nature Boy avalanche. Most of the snow and debris came down a little to the east, but this side chute is such an amazing illustration of the way avalanches can denude a mountain-side. This gully didn't really exist before. There was nothing but a slight depression in the ground in what was forest. Now an eroded gully extends far up the mountain, the trees swept clean, the forest that used to be here now part of the debris pile on the far side the the highway. A dusting of new snow has made the gully quite pretty.
I guess that in other communities this is the sort of impulse that produces graffiti. Here we get pairs of worn-out shoes slung over electrical lines.
