BC Uncharted: Wine Country, Hot Springs, and the Rockies

Meet your group in Vancouver this morning as we start our journey east. The city falls away quickly once we’re into the Fraser Valley. A stop in Hope has a special charm, the quiet meeting point of three main highways heading north and east. 

Highway 3 climbs into the Cascade Mountains through a landscape that shifts to forest and by the time we reach E.C. Manning Provincial Park, Vancouver feels like a different world.

Seasonally (usually open from the end of June to September), we ascend the steep road to Cascade Lookout — a viewpoint that opens up east across the Similkameen Valley, layers of ridge and valley folding out toward the horizon, and the first sense of how much terrain lies ahead. 

Manning Park Lodge sits in a clearing in the old-growth forest, and the evening has the particular quality of places that are genuinely removed from things. We have time this afternoon for an optional walk or canoe rental on Lightning Lake. 

Meals included: Welcome dinner
Overnight: Manning Park
Hotel: Manning Park Lodge

The drive east from Manning descends through the Similkameen Valley. It’s dry, rocky, and warm in a way that signals the landscape is changing fundamentally. Through Keremeos, where farm stands line the highway in summer, and up over the hills into the Okanagan basin, where Okanagan Lake appears below you and the whole valley opens up in a wash of blue and green.

Penticton sits at the southern end of the lake, and there’s time to drop bags at the hotel before the afternoon’s main event: a guided e-bike tour along the Naramata Bench. The Bench is one of BC’s most celebrated wine regions, a narrow shelf of vineyard above the eastern shore of Okanagan Lake, and seeing it by e-bike rather than car window is the right way to understand why winemakers come here and don’t leave. The tour winds between estates, with tastings built in and the lake visible through the vine rows below.

Meals included: Breakfast, dinner
Overnight: Penticton
Hotel: Okanagan Lakefront Resort or similar

A full day based in Penticton, with two very different ways to experience the landscape. The morning is on foot: the hike to Naramata Falls follows the creek up through a dry canyon that softens into cedar and cottonwood as it climbs, arriving at a waterfall that feels disproportionately lush given the desert country below. It’s the kind of walk that earns its ending.

The afternoon trades the trail for the water. A guided boat tour on Okanagan Lake puts the whole valley in perspective — the benchlands, the town, the long reach of the lake north toward Kelowna. Wine and local cheese come out once you’re on the water, and the afternoon tends to take its time from there. It’s an unhurried end to a day that covered a lot of ground without ever feeling rushed.

Meals included: Breakfast
Overnight: Penticton
Hotel: Okanagan Lakefront Resort or similar

This is a day that earns its driving. The route south from Penticton drops toward Osoyoos along the western edge of Canada’s only true desert – the Okanagan Desert – where the scrub and sagebrush give way to something that looks like it belongs further south. The first stop is Nk’Mip Desert Cultural Centre, the cultural home of the Osoyoos Indian Band and the Okanagan Nation. Interpretive trails lead through the rare antelope brush ecosystem, with storytelling about the Syilx people’s relationship to this desert landscape over thousands of years. It’s a quietly powerful introduction to a part of BC that’s easy to drive through without really seeing.

From Osoyoos the route swings east on Highway 3 through Grand Forks and Castlegar and into the West Kootenays, the landscape greening again as the elevation climbs and the valleys narrow. A stop in Crescent Valley for a guided river float breaks the drive in the best possible way: the group boards a raft on the upper Slocan River for a late afternoon drift past sandy beaches and old cottonwoods, the Selkirk Mountains rising on both sides. The Slocan is gentle and clear and very beautiful, and the float has the particular effect of making everything feel a little slower than it did before.

We arrive in Nelson this evening, a heritage city built on a hillside above Kootenay Lake, with a main street of restored Victorian buildings and a creative community that has been quietly flourishing here for decades.

Meals included: Breakfast, dinner
Overnight: Nelson
Hotel: Alpine Inn or similar

A full day on the road, but the road is the point. The loop north from Nelson follows the western shore of Kootenay Lake through a string of small communities that each have their own particular character: Balfour, where the ferry launches across the lake and New Denver, a former silver-mining town that has found a second life as a community of artists, gardeners, and people who came for a visit and stayed.

Kaslo is the loop’s turning point and a worthwhile pause for lunch. A restored steamboat sits at the town wharf, the main street is intact and unhurried, and the Kaslo River Walk follows the creek through town in a way that makes twenty minutes feel like a proper break. Further south, the road passes through Retallack, where a short trail leads into a stand of old-growth western red cedar trees. 

The loop closes at Ainsworth Hot Springs, where the cave pools are carved directly into the cliff face above the lake. Soaking in hot mineral water inside a horseshoe-shaped cave, looking out across Kootenay Lake, is one of those experiences that makes the Kootenays feel like they belong somewhere further off the map than they actually are. 

Meals included: Breakfast, lunch
Overnight: Nelson
Hotel: Alpine Inn or similar

The route south from Nelson follows Kootenay Lake to Crawford Bay, a small community on the east shore that has become home to one of the most concentrated collections of working artisans in British Columbia. Blacksmiths, weavers, broom makers, potters, copper enamel artists, jewellers — the studios are tucked back from the road in converted barns and small workshops, and the visits feel genuinely like dropping in rather than browsing a gift shop. There’s no set schedule; the morning is yours to wander between studios and watch people making things by hand in the way they’ve been made for centuries.

The afternoon continues south through Creston, where the valley floor widens into the Creston Valley Wildlife Management Area, a significant wetland complex and one of BC’s great bird sanctuaries. A boardwalk trail winds through the marshes, and in the right season the birdlife is exceptional: osprey, herons, warblers, and waterfowl in numbers that remind you this valley has been a migratory corridor long before any road ran through it.

You’ll arrive in Cranbrook in the late afternoon with a chance to explore this working mountain town with a railway heritage. 

Meals included: Breakfast, dinner
Overnight: Cranbrook
Hotel: Baker Hotel or similar

The Columbia Valley north from Cranbrook is wide and pastoral, with the Rockies rising to the east and the Purcells to the west. The road follows the valley through Invermere and Radium Hot Springs, where a soak in the national park pools — warm mineral water in an open-air basin with canyon walls on three sides — is a fitting transition from the Kootenays to the mountains.

Kootenay National Park begins at the hot springs, and the drive up Highway 93 through the park delivers two of the most accessible geological stops in the Canadian Rockies. Marble Canyon, where Tokumm Creek has carved a slot through limestone over thousands of years, is a short trail that earns outsized drama — the gorge narrows to a few metres at its deepest points, the footbridges spanning further and further into the dark. The Paint Pots are something different: ochre-stained springs bubbling up through a rust-coloured meadow, used by the Ktunaxa Nation for centuries as a source of pigment, and still carrying that quality of a place that has been meaningful for a long time.

Banff arrives in the afternoon, the mountains fully present in every direction. The farewell dinner marks the end of a trip that covered a lot of ground: desert, lake, forest, canyon and rock alongside a small group of new friends.

Meals included: Breakfast, farewell dinner
Overnight: Banff
Hotel: Banff Caribou Lodge or similar

Today we say our farewells and individually catch your airport transfer. Calgary is about ninety minutes from Banff and you will be scheduled to depart with plenty of time for your flight. 

If the Rockies still have a hold on you, there’s nothing stopping you from staying a little longer. Banff repays extra days generously, and we would be happy to point you toward what’s worth doing next. Our team can help you organize day trips around Banff, Lake Louise, Moraine Lake, the Icefields parkway, and more. 

Meals included: Breakfast