Brent Mountain Trail and Hike

Brent Mountain Trail & Hike 
Jorma Jyrkkanen, BSc, PDP                              21 Sept 2002

Access & Background

Dear old Marion Walters, whose dear old ex Husband Jack Walters recently passed away from injuries sustained in a car accident, wanted all her years with and without Jack, to hike up Brent Mountain, now had her chance. She is a Pentictonite, 81 years old, spunky and full of stories. I cut her a maple cane to help with the walking and up we went.

To get to Brent Mountain Trail, head west from Penticton along the Green Mountain road through the Indian Reserve, for 21 kms to the Apex Mountain road. Travel along the Apex Mountain road for 4.1 to 4.23 kms, depending on whose wheels measured it to the Shatford Logging road. This road is marked only with a stop sign at this junction. It is all two wheel derivable to the parking lot.

Go up Shatford 3.79 kms to the old 8 km marker and turn left. Travel along this til you come to a fork with a fence and a ten km sign. Take the right fork and continue on around one switchback and two recent cutblocks til you come to another fork. Take the left one, to a spur at which you go up the rough cobble spur 260 m to a landing and the start of your hike. The GPS coordinate at the trailhead was lat 49 28.01 x long 119 51.941 (degrees minutes) at 1808 m. Weyerhauser put the Shatford main to bed past the 8 km marker.

You will have traveled about 4.68 kms from Shatford Main. The trailhead has a good sign but not visible from the parking lot. It is hidden by pine regen but you will find it in the standing timber at the block edge.

Marion told us about their life at Dead Man’s Creek. You see Jack was a ‘Jack of all trades’ and a cowboy and a prospector and a saw mill operator, and a paving crew manager and everything in between. She told us of how he drank constantly until one of his daughters finally said, "Dad, are you drunk again?"

The Hike

Marion told us of when her grandmother met the infamous outlaw Bill Miner’s wife of how she could catch flies between her fingers in mid-air. She had never heard of such a thing before.

The slash was full of pine regen, pearly everlasting, fireweed and lupine and bits of grass and cow poo. The initial trail was pretty steep and Marion had to pause a lot but she made it up over the biggest hump to the first ridge and we were greeted by two steers in the toolie berries. Juniper was ripe so I ground some into my palms to make a nice scent. She told us it was good for kidneys and a bit sprinkled on the bottom of a tea cut wouldn’t kill you.

I showed her azalea and she called it Hudson’s Bay tea and said it made you tipsy. I noticed dwarf red huckleberry and some normal blue huckleberry bushes but all cleaned off already. At that point I left the ladies and scurried on to gain some elevation. They decided to stop in a small glade overlooking a peaceful view but I wanted that GPS coordinate at the top to see how accurate my map lifting had been. We had also passed a Provincial Park boundary sign along the trail. Yet I hadn’t seen any sign of a Park indicated on any maps of the area.

It burned me that Jack’s buddies never told anyone at his mamorial that his Opal Mine claim needed work and they waited til his permit expired and jumped it. Ab Ablett of all characters should have known and told Steven her son at the service. His estate lost the Opal Mine claim because of those sneaky claim jumping rats.

There is a rock outcropping you pass that gives good panorama of the mountains and valleys at lower elevations and I paused there to catch a view. Scurrying along, I came bye and bye to a fork in the trail where the signs say take the left. I took the right and soon found out why.

Corduroy logs over boggy areas had been crushed by cows and hikers and destroyed small bog ecosystems. This branch of the trail was also getting a lot of runoff erosion in places and generally too wet for a large sustained well used trail. Cattle were a serious problem on this trail and in this ecosystem I found their tracks and grazing right to the summit alpine meadow.

The trail breaks out into alpine meadow eventually and one trudges up this to the old abandoned Forestry Fire Lookout. Reminded me of my own Ranger work at Hadashville Manitoba Judy and Jeff and I went back there in 1976 to fix up our family farm. My Lookout fix was at lat 49 29.171 x long 119 54.47 and2213 m elevation determined from 6 satellites. This is higher than either the forestry map (2203) or 1966 determinations (7228 ft or 2202 m) on 1/250 k maps. Either the land here has lifted since then or somebody was very wrong.

The hut is full of pack rat poo but still in good shape. I borrowed the-sign in book for transposing onto the net because it was almost full and it was nearing the end of the season anyway and it would be lonely there over the winter. Two guardian ravens joined me in the final ascent and the view was opening up and turning out to be spectacular. I could see from the now very familiar Monashees to Cathedral Park to Manning. Wow.

The Ravens were an omen according to ancient Celtic mythology, that there would be a death soon.

Sheep Rock Mountain was about a half hour hike south and looked worth investigating at some later date.

I left quickly because the ladies might be wanting to head down already and this time I followed a sign pointing right, around the right side of the knoll in the way. This was obviously the fork I was supposed to take to detour the damaged trail section and while it was on wonderful footing and dry soils, it was longer for sure. After rejoining the old trail, I scampered down hollering periodically til I got a response and found the ladies nearing the Parking Lot, having had a wonderful time of it.

This was mostly a bush hike but the views were well worth it.

Found out Marion had been having dizzy spells lately. She seemed to miss Jack a lot even thought they lived apart prior to his death. They were still dear friends even after their separation. After his death she found condoms and black panty hose in his apartment and a rifle. What was an old geezer like jack doing with that stuff!?

Every cowboy has to have a gun of course and I can totally relate to that but the black panty hose?? Wonder if he wore em or just kept em as a souvenier?

Back at her pad, Marion treated us to more stories and tea and macadamia nut cookies. She showed us a cup that her mother brought from Ontario by sailing in a sailing ship around the Cape to BC from Ontario.

Maps

Not worth the powder to blow them to hell. None of the maps I looked at had either the Shatford logging road on them or the trail. The maps covering the area are the 1/250 k map in NAD 27 ‘Penticton 82E’ and the 1/50k map ‘Penticton 82E/5’ Edition 3.

The 1/250 showed a trail to the peak from Shingle Creek but we were advised by the Forester who I spoke to follow only the directions on the back of the ‘Penticton Forest District Recreation Map’. These directions turned out to be fairly close to accurate.

Cows are trashing the ecosystem up there and there is definitely a conflict between range use, ecosystem conservation and wildlife values. Trail signs along the access roads are missing probably because the ranchers do no want anyone to see what is going on.

© 2002 Jorma Jyrkkanen