Lake Creatures, Wine and Other Liquid Pleasures in Kelowna, British Columbia
Published January 28th, 2025
Photography by Jennifer Bain
I took the tourist bait in Kelowna, clipping a miniature Ogopogo stuffy keychain to the zipper of my purse when I realized the snow globe with Canada’s version of the Loch Ness Monster couldn’t fly home in my carry-on bag.
On the shore of Okanagan Lake, I took the obligatory selfie with artist Peter Soelin’s cheerful 1960 painted fibreglass sculpture of the mythical green creature. But it was on a guided tour of the Sncewips Heritage Museum — a protected place for sqilxʷ culture and heritage — that I learned how settlers mangled the real story.
“Alright, who’s this?” docent Coralee Miller asked in front of a painting of a serpentine creature with deer-like antlers inside a giant kokanee salmon.
“Ogopogo,” someone tentatively replied.
“Ogopogo,” Miller agreed with a grin, stretching out the four-syllable name. “Now are you guys going to be shocked to learn that Ogopogo is not an Okanagan word? So how did that name come to be?”
The story goes that English folk duo Cumberland Clark and Mark Strong played their song “The Ogo-Pogo: The Funny Fox-Trot” in Vernon around 1925. The catchy tune is about a banjo-playing blue water goblin named Ogo-Pogo whose mother was a polliwog and father was a whale.
“So. Hold on. What the heck is that?” asked Miller, who is part of the Westbank First Nation and of syilx/ Okanagan heritage. “Settlers arrive and they see something a little spooky in the water. They tried asking us about it and we’re like `No, hey, it’s fine. It’s not going to hurt you.’ Meanwhile we’re throwing meat in the water as we say this. Those were very unfortunate dots to connect and understandably settlers didn’t take our word for it. They were very wary around the water. And what became a benevolent water spirit to us was now a virgin-devouring lake demon to them.”
It didn’t help, Miller said, that a fellow named John McDougall was crossing the lake in 1855 with horses tied to his canoe when the animals went under and he had to cut himself loose before panic-paddling to shore and insisting he’d encountered a lake demon.
Then in 1872, pioneer woman/settler Susan Allison saw something dinosaur-like in the water and stumbled over the English translation for the water spirit. By the time ferries arrived in the 1880s, they were equipped with anti-lake monster artillery. “You can look it up,” said Miller. “They had to have harpoons and netting and muskets and all those things for people to feel safe enough to jump on the ferry.”
The name Ogopogo stuck, though, and the creature evolved into a mascot and then something to name businesses, sports teams, children’s books and products after. “Tourist bait” is what the Sncewips Heritage Museum, run by the Westbank First Nation in West Kelowna, calls it.
“You can’t go anywhere without seeing ogo-something, right?” said Miller. “But we don’t hate Ogopogo. I think it’s fun that Kelowna made a little mascot for itself. But what our people don’t want is for people to think that Ogopogo and nx̌aʔx̌ʔitkʷ (n'axaitk) are the same thing — they’re not.”
The “Spirit of the Lake” is benevolent, likes sage and tobacco and loves to eat kokanee salmon and be sung to. Her people have never fed it chickens, pigs, puppies or horses (“because that’s messed up”) but occasionally offered tiny slices of meat from a hunt as thanks for the gifts of water in the 135-kilometre long lake.
“Water is our oldest relative,” Miller explained. “As humans we are sustained by water, we are cleansed by water, we are healed by water. When our hearts are hurting, we’re told to take it to water. Water listens. Water remembers you. Water carries that hurt away. Water connects us.”
When I ask what the water spirit looks like, Miller says that “its true form that you can see and touch all the time is water.”
As for my plush Ogopogo, at least it’s a plastic-free collaboration between Love For Kelowna and the Vancouver Aquarium that doesn’t contain the plastic beads (nurdles) that now litter shorelines and oceans.
I visited the birthplace of winemaking in British Columbia in January on a non-stop Air Canada flight from Toronto Pearson. Porter Airlines launches its own non-stop flights May 14.
Kelowna’s name originates from the syilx word for female grizzly bear. Not far from the fibreglass Ogopogo you’ll see Bear, Brower Hatcher’s grizzly-shaped steel frame sculpture.
Surrounded by mountains, lakes, orchards, vineyards and trails, Kelowna (with a metro population of 230,000) boasts a semi-arid climate with long, warm summers and short, mild winters. It draws boaters, golfers, snowboarders and skiers along with those eager to winery hop through the Okanagan Valley wine region.
At Little Straw Vineyards, I met proprietor Karnail Singh Sidhu who is also the founder and viticulturist at Kalala Organic Estate Winery. From the village of Kalala in the state of Punjab in India, he came to Canada as an electrical engineer but when his credentials weren’t recognized, he drew on his farming background and worked his way up from vineyard farmhand to winery owner.
Sidhu is also Sikh, proudly wears a turban and famously doesn’t drink. “I just don’t like it,” he confided. “I drink juice and water mostly.” His refined sense of smell is his most powerful winemaking tool.
I’m not much of a drinker these days either, but after chatting with Karnail’s daughter Simran Sidhu (who is head of operations), I thoroughly enjoyed drinking Kalala’s merlot icewine from a small Belgian dark chocolate cup.
Did I mention that Kelowna hopes to become Canada’s first UNESCO City of Gastronomy? The application goes in soon so the city can hopefully join a network of more than 350 global cities celebrated in seven creative fields.
The designation would recognize Kelowna’s strong connection to the land and year-round tourism economy based on food, craft beverages, wine and agritourism. It would showcase syilx Indigenous foods and the region’s evolving culinary scene.
With the Delta Hotels Grand Okanagan Resort as my base for three nights, I ate and drank my way through the city for the first time.
There was cheese and chocolate fondue at the View Winery, and a family-style feast at Mission Hill Family Estate that ended with tonka bean crème brûlée. Tonka beans, from the Amazon rainforest, are strangely banned in the U.S.A. because they contain the chemical coumarin that can be toxic but hasn’t killed anybody. (I was more taken by the preserved cherries on the dessert than the vaguely vanilla tonka bean flavour.)
There was a perfect smash burger at BNA Burger, and a lunch at Kekuli Café (named for a traditional Indigenous winter dwelling) that revolved around bannock tacos and a delicious Saskatoon berry tea latte. Twice I went to an artisan bakery called Sprout for sourdough toast with raspberry rose jam and a Vancouver-made peanut butter.
My only regret is that while there was time for dinner at Bernie’s Supper Club & Cinema, I ate my steak and Okanagan seasonal vegetables in the dining room instead of upstairs in the upscale theatre with big comfy chairs and footrests.
Trust me when I say that Farming Karma Fruit Company’s sodas made from B.C.-grown fruit are an inspired alternative to alcohol. So are all the kombuchas — but especially holy hibiscus and lavender lemonade flavours — made by MotherLove Ferments by fermenting sweetened tea with a culture of bacteria and yeast known as a SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast).
As she poured kombucha samples, Charlotte Perry said fans of the tart/slightly sour beverage love the benefit to gut health but also “the social leaning towards sobriety and exploring alternatives to alcohol.”
That theme continued at Craft 42 Roasters, a tasting room and roastery with a cafe front. I nursed a single-origin hot chocolate made with oat milk while my caffeine-loving friends savoured a guided tasting of three pour-over coffees from Ethiopia, Kenya and Colombia.
“We really see a lot of parallels with wine and coffee,” said guide Aaron Moore who is married to owner Taylor MacInnis. “So you’re saying it’s an agricultural process. There’s processing, there’s fermentation, there’s flavour notes. It’s about perception and paying attention, again, to the agricultural product that it is.”
I didn’t make it to Big White Ski Resort but still managed to stay active between all the drinking and dining.
At the Telemark Nordic Club, president Brent Hobbs showed me how much cross-country skiing has changed since I was a kid and switched to downhill. “It’s affordable. It’s accessible. It’s fun,” he said. “You get your head above the clouds. You enjoy the sunshine in the middle of winter — and you can encounter a moose.”
We didn’t luck into a moose but moved on to Scenic Canyon Regional Park for a guided “owling experience” with birder extraordinaire, geography student and aspiring urban planner Kalin Ocaña. We admired an American Dipper, North America’s only truly aquatic songbird, looked in vain for Western Screech Owls and heard two Great Horned Owls hooting at dusk.
Back on the downtown waterfront, just steps from the Ogopogo statue, American Coots (chicken-like birds with bright white beaks) paddled about Okanagan Lake in front of a seasonal floating sauna and plunge pool.
Löyly Floating Sauna offers 70-minute wellness breaks — shared or private — for those keen to do three rounds of the sauna-cold plunge-rest routine. Sauna host Reilly Harper said the business name is pronounced low-lu and is a Finnish word for the act of pouring water on rocks and enjoying the steam.
Okanagan Lake’s famous water spirit doesn’t scare me, but losing my breath in winter water does. I kicked off my boots and dipped my toes in the 4C water. That split-second jolt was more than enough time to properly bond with this storied lake.
Jennifer Bain
After a career at daily newspapers, Jennifer began travelling the world in search of quirk in 2018. She goes wherever the story is, but has a soft spot for Canada and has been to all 10 provinces and all three territories. Jennifer has won multiple awards and written two cookbooks and three travel books. She lives in Toronto but has a vacation house on Fogo Island, Newfoundland, which some cheekily say is one of the four corners of the supposedly flat earth.