Today we went exploring along the shore to have a look at some of the lakeside towns. We started off backtracking a little bit to a town called Nelson (known as The Queen City), which is the largest town in the Kootenays and is the seat of the Regional District of Central Kootenay. It's an old town, famous for its impressive collection of heritage buildings from its glory days in a regional silver rush. During the Vietnam War, many young, educated American draft dodgers escaped here and so shaped the city with a very liberal culture.
We walked through a weekly market where we saw lots of stalls selling fresh fruit and vegetables from local farms. There were also many people with arts and crafts, but we didn't stay very long because the heat was becoming unbearable. We escaped for a while into a little bookstore, which had been very thoughtfully curated. It seemed like everything had been chosen to fit into interesting categories, rather than just stocking the latest bestseller list. We then headed back to the relief of the air-conditioned car, only to find that we'd been ticketed $10 for not putting money in the meter. Whoops!
We carried on through a place called Balfour to the ferry terminal, where you can catch the Kootenay Lake Ferry across the lake. This ferry is the longest free scenic ferry in the world, crossing 8km of the lake in about 35 minutes. The ferry was waiting when we arrived, so we drove straight on. I think we were the last car on, perfect timing!
We drove down to Pilot Point, where we made sandwiches for lunch and then went on a half-kilometre walk through the forest to the Pilot Bay Lighthouse. The lighthouse had been in use from 1905 until 1993, through the age of the sternwheelers on the lake. It is now the last remaining inland lighthouse in British Columbia and is maintained by a group of volunteers. We were surprised that we could not only go inside the lighthouse but climb all the way to the top and out a little door onto the balcony.
Further inland from the lighthouse, in a small village called Crawford Bay, we came across a broom shop. It was a tiny little log building, with an extremely uneven concrete (or maybe just stone?) floor. We watched a lady weaving a broom, and talked to her about the bio-security problems we'd have if we tried to bring one back to New Zealand with us. Their brooms are made from a grass which they called broomcorn, that they source from Mexico. The corn is intricately woven to a handle, often made from wildly shaped pieces of wood.
Back across the ferry, we headed to a town called Kaslo, where we put on some laundry and wandered down the road to see a stern-wheeled steamship called the S.S. Moyie. We'd arrived just at their closing time, but the guy at the counter said we could accompany him on a free tour as he went around and locked all the doors to the ship. He showed us around the cargo deck, which was full of period-appropriate items like old Ford cars, a horsedrawn firetruck, and lots of luggage and boxes of fruit. They even had a real cylinder phonograph! Our guide told us that most of the things on this deck were donated and that there was a committee which decided what to display in order to keep the portrayal of the ship as an accurate snapshot in time.
When the ship had been pulled out of the water back in 1958, it had been in pretty bad condition. All the gilded artwork on the walls in the smoking and ladies lounges had been painted over, and parts of this ship were missing (like the sternwheel cover, deemed non-critical and so not worth the money to replace when it broke in service). The Kootenay Lake Historical Society has worked tirelessly to restore her to her former brilliance and has been rewarded by the designation of the ship as a National Historic Site.
We finished the day off with a beer at the local Angry Hen brewery and headed back to lounge around the campsite. It's already noticeable how the day length has shortened as we've come back down from the mountains; it's not light at 11pm anymore!