Ever since we laid eyes on images of the Roderick Dhu fire lookout we knew we had to get there, perched high above Jewel lake this fire lookout is one of the most unique fire towers, and as we learned, one of the harder ones to get to. If you are reading this in hopes of visiting this amazing spot, i'll cut to the chase and tell you what you need to know. The drive from Penticton to Greenwood itself is easy, as is the drive from Greenwood to Jewel lake, annnnd then it definitely gets a little more difficult, and pretty quickly. First off, we strongly suggest a four wheel drive vehicle, although we did the whole drive in two wheel drive we wouldn't have felt comfortable attempting it without. Clearance is important as is the width of your vehicle, this is mostly an ATV trail and we ended up with some scratches and the memories of scraping branch sounds haunting our dreams: in short, do not take your 2020 BMW X5 up there, you will cry. If you have quads, side by sides or dirt bikes we definitely recommend parking your vehicle on the forest service road and using them, but if you have a 4x4 with decent clearance its doable... scary but doable. Before we committed to the forest service road we saw two shorter routes on the map, however, both of these are only options on ATVs or dirt bikes, and not an option for us, so back we went to the forest service road to start our climb. The forest service road is fairly nice, but towards the turn off from the forest service road the trail gets much more rugged and very narrow, and the last 6K got progressively worse, but without a place to turn around we were pretty much committed to achieving this one. At this point you're probably thinking this sounds terrible, but hear me out, its worth it. As soon as you catch a glimpse of these beautiful views and historic old buildings, every bit of anxiety you had on the drive up melts away.
Spoiler alert, only one of us was brave enough to climb the tower...
Views views and more views!
Back on ground safely we checked out the inside of the cabin, which surprisingly had power!
After taking in all the sunset views we could we buckled up for a slightly less frightening descent, and were treated to the most amazing boundary sunset for our drive back home!
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