Winter Knox Mountain Hike, Kelowna BC

It’s been a weird February and March so far. We thought the weather was going to start getting milder, but it keeps randomly snowing. It’s our first winter in Kelowna, so honestly we have no idea what to expect and what is “normal” anyway. It seemed like a nice idea to get out of the house and off the treadmill for a bit, so we decided to do a winter Knox Mountain hike. 

The Hike

We’ve been training indoors quite a bit, and running on the treadmill a lot. Since the weather has been super frigid, the poor doggos have been stuck inside without too many walks. We figured after an especially long tread session, that we would take Louie out for a walk at Knox Mountain. We were only planning on going for a little jaunt to stretch our legs, but ended up walking 5km! An accidental 5km doesn’t happen too often.

Getting There

There’s tons of parking at the base of Knox Mountain, and it was really busy when we arrived in the afternoon. There were even cars parallel parked on the side of the parking lot. Even though it’s super busy, you can usually get a spot. And if you can’t, there’s tons of neighbourhood parking. We walked up Knox Mountain Drive, and there was still a ton of packed snow on the road.

Sometimes you can drive up to the first lookout, but most of the time the road is closed. I thought it was going to be slippery, but we had no trouble getting any grip with our trail shoes. We walked up to the first lookout to get a look at beautiful Kelowna, and then we headed on the trail towards Paul’s Tomb. It’s a nice gradual decline with beautiful views.

We picked an arbitrary spot to turn around, and when we passed the dog park we noticed it was empty. So we headed in to play and run around without a leash. Normally we avoid dog parks because it creates an opportunity for incidents, so we avoid it. It can actually be bad for socialization, and it’s a whole other topic to post about. And now that we live in Kelowna, we also try to avoid letting the doggos off-leash because of bald eagles. Anyway, we thought we could live a little. And wow was it beautiful. View of the lake, a happy doggo running with the hubby. The light was gorgeous on the west side. It was a gorgeous way to wrap up the hike.