Seton Portage II

 We spent at week at the Derban's at Seton Portage.  There's an old orchard on a bench above Seton Lake, irrigated by water diverted from a mountain stream by a series of ditches and pipes, in operation for 100 years.  The apples are so good that Canada used to send a box of them to Buckingham Palace every year - quite a transportation feat, which I hope the recipient appreciated.  The old orchard burned in 2009 when a forest fire burned the entire mountainside, but some trees survived and are growing vigourously again.

An essential piece of equipment for travelling in this area in the summer is an ice-cream maker.  There are three distinct raspberry-like berries in the area - the normal raspberry-coloured raspberry-flavoured ones, a sloe-black one with a richer flavour that grows throughout the southern Interior called a black-cap, and a peachy-coloured sweet mild one that only seems to grow in this area, called a white-cap.  We had sorbet of all of these, and also gelato of saskatoon berries, which grow on full-sized trees here.