COMMONPLACE NOTES. 



G33 



and are exactly suited to the British Columbian fruit harvest. When 

 British Columbia wants apples in spring and early summer 

 Australia and Tasmania are just harvesting theirs, so that a balance 

 of trade may be struck. As a matter of fact, for some years 

 past small parcels of Tasmanian apples have been on the British 

 Columbian markets in the off-season. 



The North-West Territories of Canada provide an unlimited market. 

 The enormous increase each year to the population there by the 

 thousands of new settlers now pouring in is entirely out of proportion 

 to the increase of orchards coming into bearing. 



The Grey Canal, in the vicinity of Vernon, is a typical example 

 of irrigation work in a hilly country. Immense sums of money have 

 been spent throughout the irrigated sections of the United States 

 in creating storage reservoirs, and their effect in equalizing the flow 

 of the rivers throughout the year is very marked. But it is seldom 

 that such favourable conditions are found for this purpose as in the 

 Okanagan Valley. Lake Aberdeen, as the headwater of the stream 

 supplying the Grey Canal is called, is a sheet of water four miles long, 

 with deeply indented shores covered with a dense growth of spruce 

 and pine. At a height of 4500 feet above se«i-level the snow remains 

 late. A large dam at the outlet impounds the water to a depth of 

 17 feet, but notwithstanding the enormous body of water represented 

 by this difference in level, more than twice as much passes over the 

 spillways each year and is lost. Lake Haddo is a smaller body of 

 water just below Lake Aberdeen, and in it there exists an opportunity 

 of increasing the amount stored to a very large extent if ever occasion 

 should arise. As at present constructed, however, it is able to furnish 

 abundance of water for all the land served by it. The stream known 

 locally as Jones Creek flows in a circuitous course from the plateau 

 of the lake, cutting its way through twelve miles of rugged caftons 

 to the headgates of the Canal, whose bed width is 14 feet. Three 

 miles from the headgates the Canal crosses a flat, where it is divided, 

 and the whole flow can be diverted if necessary and emptied into a 

 natural watercourse. Further on the water has in many cases to be 

 carried across valleys and depressions. One of these syphons, a mile 

 and a quarter long, carries the Grey Canal across a valley at Lavington. 

 This valley is in reality the divide between waters which flow west 

 to the Okanagan and east to the Thompson Eiver and the Fraser. 

 To have conducted the water across this depression in an open aqueduct 

 would have required pillars 330 feet high. At the lower end or outlet 

 of the syphon pipe the channel is again an open one, carved out of 

 the hillside, and, by a very common optical illusion, it appears to be 

 running uphill, ever climbing Higher from the valley in its course, 

 till at Vernon it is between 700 and 800 feet above the town. 



After passing Vernon it runs north, and passes through the 

 Land Company of Canada, more familiarly known as the Belgian 

 Syndicate, again crosses the Valley, and on the west side of the 

 Valley, in a hollow of the hills, runs into Goose Lake, which has 



