When we reach transition season and all the trails are either snowy, icy, or muddy, we have a few “go-to trails” we can hike in late winter and early spring. The Savona to Sabiston Creek hike is just above the lake and the whole route is on a south-facing slope, so it is often the first to clear and dry out. The trail continues along above the shoreline and then climbs above Sabiston Creek up to the road above but in mid-March, we turned off to have lunch at a gravelly beach instead.

The trailhead is at the Savona Cemetery and starts as a double track accessed through a gate. The first kilometer is a double track through sagebrush and grassland slopes.

At a gully the trail becomes a single track, traversing gullies and ridges with fine views up and down Kamloops Lake.

At 4km the trail drops down to a fenceline next to the CNR line. The trail continues on, climbing the ridges after that, but we prefer to turn down the slope to the beach as our turn-around point. There are lots of bleached logs on the shoreline, perfect for lunch on the beach.

The view up the lake shows all rugged hills coming down to the lake.

Below us on the lake were ice discs. ” Ice discs form on the outer bends in a river where the accelerating water creates a force called ‘rotational shear’, which breaks off a chunk of ice and twists it around. As the disc rotates, it grinds against surrounding ice — smoothing into a circle.”(Wikipedia) In this case the central flow (and wind force) of the water through the center of Kamloops Lake was faster than the water in a leeward bay below our trail which acted like an eddy, spiralling the ice into circles.

Our out-and-back route on the Savona to Sabiston Beach trail/route was 8.4 km on a sunny day in the middle of March. Watch for us there again next year at the same time.