The man waved to me, and I got out of my vehicle and walked over to say hello. As I drove onto the rocky beach and prepared to turn around, I spied, to my astonishment, a man standing knee deep in the Wild Horse River, leaning forward with a pan in his hand. Wild Horse Creek.Īfter driving for what seemed like an eternity, I came to a ‘turnoff’ which was really nothing more than an eroded bank leading down to the Wildhorse River. I drove on and on into the mountains, praying that I wouldn’t run into another vehicle bound for Fort Steele. This dirt road (which, in retrospect, must have been the Fort Steele-Wildhorse Road) was a bit of a one-way trail, and I had little choice but to follow it until it widened sufficiently to allow me to turn my car around. Near a gas station graced by one of those goofy cutout board inviting passersby to transplant their faces onto the vacant countenance of a faceless prospector, I ended up taking a wrong turn and heading up a narrow and somewhat precarious logging road which runs along a cliff overhanging the Wild Horse River. A bridge over Wild Horse Creek.Īfter enjoying the sights and sounds of Fort Steele, I set out to get a photo of the confluence of the Kootenay and Wild Horse Rivers, where an old CPR railway station once stood. Today, visitors to Fort Steele can walk down the raised wooden sidewalks past horse drawn carriages, a steam engine locomotive, and actors dressed in period costume who appear baffled by the size of your tiny camera.įort Steele, British Columbia. Although the original settlement dwindled into a ghost town in the early 1900s, a true-to-life replica of the frontier community was built in the late 1960s and opened to the public as the Fort Steele Heritage Town, a living museum designed to imitate Fort Steele as it appeared in the 19 th Century. The settlement acquired its new name in 1888, when the famous Mountie Sam Steele came to town to settle a contentious dispute between a local prospector and a Kootenai Indian whom he accused of murder (Fort Steele was never a ‘fort’ in the truest sense of the term, although it did house a NWMP outpost). Sam Steele.įort Steele was once a town called Galbraith’s Ferry, established in 1864 by a ferry operator named John Galbraith, who made his living transporting prospectors across the Kootenay River. About halfway through my trip, I decided to pay a visit to Fort Steele, a living history museum just up the B.C. That summer, I took a week-long solo road trip through the Canadian Rockies, in part for the purpose of acquiring photos for my own website. The winegrowing zone straddles the county line between Napa and its eastern neighbor Solano County, meaning that only wines grown in the Napa portion of Wild Horse Valley can claim the better-known and more economically lucrative Napa Valley title.I’m going to tell you a story about a little adventure I had in the summer of 2014, which led to my accidental discovery of a ghost town in the wilderness of southern British Columbia. Wild Horse Valley had its first vineyards planted in the late 19th Century, and it was one of the first AVAs to be established in Napa, after Howell Mountain and Napa Valley itself. Today, there are only around 100 acres (40ha) dedicated to vine, and just a handful of boutique producers using the terroir. In fact, Wild Horse Valley's soils, while desirable to smaller producers, have effectively prohibited large-scale producers from developing the area. This vine stress helps reduce yields and increases the concentration of the harvested fruit. The lean mountain soils in Wild Horse Valley force vines to dig strong, deep, healthy root systems in search of water and nutrients. Intense sunshine, high diurnal temperature variation and these reliable breezes make for healthy vineyards capable of producing ripe, intensely colored wines balanced in both acidity and tannin. This altitude raises the vines above the fog level, but the valley's western slopes are open to breezes from the nearby San Pablo Bay. Wild Horse Valley is elevated well above the Silverado Trail, with the valley floor rising roughly 1,400 feet (425m) above sea level. The AVA is one of the smallest in the United States, covering just 3,300 acres (1,350ha) of land on the hills above Coombsville. It is one of the cooler AVAs in the area, and is planted to Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, rather than the Napa stalwart, Cabernet Sauvignon. Wild Horse Valley is a viticultural subregion of the world-famous Napa Valley, located in the Vaca Mountains above Napa town itself.
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