On an early August morning, Bree McKeage stood among the vines in paint-splotched work pants and Crocs, sunglasses on, a tattoo peeking from beneath her sleeve. She pointed to the hills beyond the vineyard.
Three fires were burning around the Okanagan Valley – one near Summerland, another in Manning Park, a third near Vernon.
Smoke had swallowed the sun-bleached vineyard. The mountains beyond had disappeared into a grey haze. The air tasted of ash.
For more than a century, the Okanagan has been Canada’s fruit bowl. The long, glacier-carved basin is threaded with vineyards and orchards of peaches, cherries and nectarines. It has also embodied a summer ideal: hot, dry days, aquamarine lakes, vines heavy with grapes and long evenings outdoors. Even the names – Peachland, Summerland, Lake Country – seem to promise leisure and abundance.
But ever since Ms. McKeage and her partner, Rajen Toor, bought their Keremeos, B.C., vineyard in 2022, they have been fighting to keep it alive. Three weeks after taking possession, a deep freeze killed every vine in the vineyard. They replanted, but the new vines would take years to mature. Two years later, another record-breaking polar vortex sent temperatures plunging to –30 C, killing most of those new vines.
Bree McKeage and her partner own Bella Wines in Keremeos. On a recent visit, some grapes were ready to be destemmed and used, while others lay dry on the vine.Aaron Hemens/The Globe and Mail
The shorthand for the Western Canadian dream, for generations, has been: You were born in Regina, made your money in Alberta and retired in Kelowna. The Okanagan was the reward, where a lifetime of work in unforgiving weather could give way to something gentler. That dream helped make the region what it is today. People came to farm, to visit, to settle, to retire, to raise families. But the very climate that once made the Okanagan fruitful and drew generations of sunseekers is now beginning to undermine both its bounty and its appeal.
Deep freezes have wiped out entire peach, nectarine and cherry crops, and, in some cases, entire vineyards. Smoke is ruining vintages. Fires are keeping away summer visitors.
The forces driving those fires are becoming more extreme, too. On Aug. 7, when the Bald Range fire erupted near Summerland, the BC Wildfire Service reported that fuel conditions across the region were the driest ever recorded.
“We’ve been in triage for four years,” said Ms. McKeage, who was raised in Alberta, the daughter of a rancher and farmer, and worked in finance before turning to wine a decade ago.
But after four years of rebuilding, Ms. McKeage, who also owns Bella Wines, a local winery, was finally making her first vintage from her very own vineyard. It should have been a moment of arrival. The couple had put off having children, waiting for the vines to take hold. Instead, they were harvesting smoke-tainted grapes, still fighting to make and sell just enough wine to keep the bank at bay.
Aaron Hemens/The Globe and Mail
The strain was affecting their marriage and their health. Everything else was being delayed: the tasting room, the landscaping, the babies they’d hoped would by now be bouncing on their knees.
Ms. McKeage is willing to consider walking away. Mr. Toor, who was raised on a winery in nearby Oliver, would have to be dragged out. “Sometimes I’m like, how much further should we go?” she says.
“To the end,” he’ll reply.
Would she buy the vineyard again, knowing what she knows now? “No,” she said, her voice suddenly husky. “The old way is gone. We haven’t properly mourned it. We haven’t recognized it. We’re all still trying to make the past happen.”
“There’s no point in saying, we’re resilient, we’ll rebuild,” she said. “But into what?”
Ms. McKeage sees the vineyard as an early warning system for something much larger. Grapes may be among the Okanagan’s most fragile crops, but they are not the only ones suffering.
Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press
“Smokanagan,” some have begun calling it.
The valley’s defining season is becoming harder to count on, not simply because it is getting hotter, but because heat, smoke and fire are arriving all at once.
By early August, the fire near Summerland was moving faster than the models had predicted, forcing more than 20,000 people from their homes in a single night, and killing one. Farmers fled, fences thrown open in hopes their horses, cattle and goats might escape the flames. Evacuees streamed south through the dark, fire glowing on the mountains behind them.
Some 150 structures were damaged or destroyed in and around Summerland, with neighbouring Faulder nearly wiped off the map. Just a week earlier, fire had razed 230 homes near Vernon, at the Okanagan’s northern edge. In the space of days, roughly 400 valley homes were gone.
By early September, when the Bald Range wildfire was finally listed as under control, it had blazed through an area twice the size of the city of Vancouver.
A disaster on this scale once demanded a reckoning. In 2003, 238 Kelowna homes were destroyed by the Okanagan Mountain Park Fire, a catastrophe so extraordinary the province commissioned a sweeping review, led by former Manitoba premier Gary Filmon. The number of homes lost to fire this year is already substantially higher. What has changed is the baseline: Events once considered exceptional are now simply part of the region’s new reality. By area burned, 2026 is unlikely to even rank among B.C.’s worst wildfire seasons of the past decade.
August’s wildfires cast a pall over Penticton and its Peachfest celebrations, the occasion for this giant peach-shaped ice cream stand. The city played host to many displaced people from Summerland and environs.Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press
Many of Summerland’s evacuees ended up in Penticton, a lakeside city built around summer. The crisis landed smack in the middle of Peachfest, the region’s signature summer celebration of sunshine, concerts, parades and peaches. The festival was celebrating a version of summer that was becoming harder to sustain.
A week later, Penticton’s waterfront was strangely deserted. The city should have been packed on an August Friday. Nearly a kilometre of sandy beach runs along the shore. Normally, it would be crowded with kids, towels, paddleboards and tourists moving between the lake and the bars and restaurants beyond it.
Instead, smoke had blotted out the lake and the mountains beyond. Ash lay on parked cars and outdoor tables. There were more ducks than kids. A purple trolley that shuttles tourists between beaches rang its bell, the chime echoing through empty streets.
Playtime on the lake was a muted affair during Penticton’s smokiest days, while the Bald Range fire burned around Summerland.Paige Taylor White/Reuters
The signs were still selling the Okanagan summer. “Sunshine and good vibes,” read one on Lakeshore Drive. Beneath it, a couple walked hand in hand, both wearing black masks. At the Okanagan Lakefront Resort, a billboard captured the contradiction: “Stronger Together B.C.” on one side. “Live the Life. Summer 2026,” on the other.
Tickleberry’s, an Okanagan Falls ice creamery that sells more than 3,000 cones a day in summer, told its 15 staff not to come in. “Feeling the feels today,” owner Kelsey Hoy later wrote on Facebook. “The smoke is thick and the valley is quiet.”
Even the licence plates told the story. In the Okanagan, Alberta plates are nearly as ubiquitous as vineyards. Their absence was another sign of a summer gone seriously wrong.
While smoke enveloped the Tickleberry’s ice cream store in Penticton, the Okanagan Falls business urged staff to stay home.Paige Taylor White/Reuters
Climate models developed two decades ago were not wrong about where the Okanagan was headed. What they failed to capture was the violence of the transition: how warming, combined with less snow, extraordinary freezes, earlier runoff, deeper drought and more fire, could turn summer into a succession of fierce heat waves, destructive wildfires and weeks of suffocating smoke.
Geography magnifies the change. The Okanagan sits in the rain shadow of the Coast and Cascade mountains, making it one of the country’s driest agricultural regions. Its narrow valleys can act as smoke traps. As the climate warms, the snowpack is shrinking and emptying earlier, just as hotter temperatures increase the demand for water. The same conditions that dry the orchards and vineyards also prime the surrounding forests for fire.
So the valley is gaining heat but losing water; gaining growing days but losing certainty about what crops will actually make it through to harvest.
‘Whenever you have a nice day, you think – this is paradise,’ Kaleden wine grower Kevin Rossion says. ‘But we’re working so hard to maintain it.’Aaron Hemens/The Globe and Mail
A few kilometres south of Penticton, Kevin Rossion is still trying to make a living from the landscape. He emerges from the vines, sweaty and out of breath, his black T-shirt darkened at the collar. He had been chasing a foal off the vineyard.
Mr. Rossion, a Belgian, moved to the Okanagan from Spain, where he had been working as a DJ when he met his wife, a native of the valley. Eventually, they bought a vineyard and farmhouse in Kaleden, high above Skaha Lake. Kaleden combines kalos, Greek for beautiful, with Eden, the biblical paradise. With vineyards climbing the slopes, a languid lake below, rugged peaks rising behind, the name could hardly be more fitting.
But today the smoke had drained the landscape of its colour. The blue of the lake had all but disappeared. The vineyards were shaded grey.
The shape of paradise was still there. It just hurt a little to look.
Mr. Rossion has spent the last decade managing vineyards for a large winery all while growing grapes of his own. “Whenever you have a nice day, you think – this is paradise. But we’re working so hard to maintain it.”
Grape prices have plunged. Many wineries turned to imported grapes after the 2024 freeze. The rebound in local production has since left some growers struggling to find buyers. Last year, Mr. Rossion left a third of his grapes on the vine: They weren’t worth harvesting.
“We don’t even enjoy it,” he said. “We’re just working all the time. We’re like, why are we working so hard?”
Mr. Rossion once lived in Spain, the ancestral home of the dark tempranillo variety of grapes in his vineyard. Muscat ottonel, used for white wine, originated in France.Aaron Hemens/The Globe and Mail
He’s not the only one questioning this way of life.
After two decades of drawing people from elsewhere in Canada, the region has begun to lose them. From 2013 to 2023, the Thompson-Okanagan had been gaining an average of 4,185 people a year through interprovincial migration. But in 2024, it lost 709 people to other provinces – the first such reversal in 21 years.
More than 20 per cent of the Okanagan’s 196 wineries are for sale or in foreclosure, according to Nicole Eastman, an associate broker with Sotheby’s International Realty Canada who specializes in wineries and vineyards. Thirty-five are publicly or privately listed for sale; another five are distressed sales.
The Rossions have started using their home to help make the operation work. One suite houses the vineyard staff; a second is rented through Airbnb to pay for their wages. Mr. Rossion, his wife and their three children share the third.
His wife, a lifelong Kaledenite, cannot imagine leaving. Mr. Rossion, gazing through the grey, is no longer so sure. “The point of being here is to be outside.”
Ted Vollo, owner of Summerland Heritage Cider, is back at his orchards after having to evacuate in a hurry when the fires in August drew too close.Aaron Hemens/The Globe and Mail
For Ted Vollo, the question was less whether the Okanagan was still paradise than whether he could imagine living anywhere else.
When asked what he loved about Summerland, he started to cry.
He described the way a tractor, a chainsaw or an offer of help arrived just when you needed it most; how chance conversations could stretch to 20 minutes and leave you feeling a little more connected.
He had spent the previous week worrying about his apple crop and the place three generations of his family had farmed. But what seemed to undo him was talking about what it was all for.
He had left Summerland as a young man, studied geophysics and spent years working as a geologist in remote parts of the country. Eventually, he came back. He wanted to be close to people who knew his mom. And his mom’s mom.
It was home. But now it was becoming harder to recognize.
The power had gone out when Mr. Vollo fled Summerland. Weeks later, someone has piled fridges full of rotten food on the town’s Garnet Valley Road.Aaron Hemens/The Globe and Mail
He was preparing to start picking his crop when the evacuation order landed. His wife was away working in Yukon, leaving Mr. Vollo to gather their 18-month-old son, and their cat and dog. At 2:30 a.m., with the electricity out, he carried his sleeping boy to the car. As they drove through the smoke, the baby stared quietly at the line of headlights snaking through the dark.
Gala picking was a week away. Honeycrisp and Ambrosia were close behind.
Mr. Vollo estimates he could lose about 30 per cent of his crop. Even saying that makes him uncomfortable. He knows farmers who have lost so much more. Ripe peaches were softening on the trees, ash settling over the fruit. Some cherry growers were just two or three days from finishing when the fire tore through. “There’s no point in complaining about 30 when your neighbours lost 80,” Mr. Vollo said.
So he just moves on.
“There’s always next year,” he said, channelling his father and grandfather. “Next year” is the farmer’s answer to almost everything.
Mr. Vollo, freckled and red-blond, has a boyish air, always ready with a joke.
He has been farming for only six years, but he has already seen enough to know that the rules have fundamentally changed. Betting on next year was starting to feel a little too ambitious.
Loving something doesn’t make the numbers disappear, though. Some years, the farm and cidery barely produce enough to cover the bills. His brothers didn’t want to take on the farm. Financially, Mr. Vollo understood why. But to him, legacy matters. He could not stomach being the one to let it go.
Grant Williams moved from Prince George to the Okanagan because he wanted what the north couldn’t give him: lakes he could swim in starting in May, a place where he never had to wear gloves or plug in his car. Eleven years later, he hasn’t even returned to visit.
But smoke that once seemed exceptional in the valley has become familiar.
Mr. Williams knows how quickly a summer economy can be thrown off balance. He and his wife once owned Medici’s, a coffee shop and gelateria in Oliver, which bills itself as the country’s wine capital. Summer was everything: eight weeks to earn enough to carry the business through the rest of the year.
Behind him, the restaurants and beach stores along Osoyoos’s main drag stood empty. The region has built a multibillion-dollar tourism economy around its summers. Now summer itself is becoming the region’s most unreliable economic asset.
For now, visitors keep coming. Short-term-rental demand has held relatively steady in the region for the past five years, according to AirDNA, which tracks vacation rental bookings. June demand was weaker than in the rest of B.C. in 2022 and 2023, but recovered thereafter.
Increasingly, however, Okanagan residents are escaping to the coast or Vancouver Island for part of the summer – taking their holidays and camping trips somewhere else.
The valley may have to find a new way to sell summer. May and June, September and even October could become its new sweet spots, as visitors shift away from the hottest, smokiest weeks.
But an orchard can’t shift its calendar to suit the climate. Apples ripen when they ripen; grapes won’t wait for the smoke to clear.
August vacations on Lake Okanagan are a harder sell as wildfires intensify. Locals are more likely to go west for the holidays.Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press
For some residents, the answer has been to leave.
Every spring, Tanis Houle packed an evacuation kit and moved her family’s most precious belongings into the crawlspace beneath their Oliver home, so they would be ready to grab if they needed to flee. Come winter, she brought them back out.
Her husband had been wanting to leave the valley for years, but those pleas went mostly unheeded. Then she sweltered through the 2021 heat dome while pregnant, and navigated extreme heat, smoke and an evacuation with a toddler.
For weeks, it was too hot to take her son to the beach. “We could only spend time outside if the activity involved being constantly submerged in water,” Ms. Houle recalled. She had to scoop ash out of his kiddie pool just so he could swim.
“Every other type of weather, you can dress for. You can’t safely dress a young child for extreme heat or off-the-charts air pollution.”
“We started noticing that sometimes the month of July, and almost always August, were write-offs.”
One summer after another, the signs kept pointing toward the exit. They chose Comox on Vancouver Island.
The move gave her a different perspective. After a couple smokeless summers, she began to worry about the health effects of the years her son had spent breathing it. She also realized how much they had bent their lives around conditions that, looking back, were extraordinary.
She had grown up spending almost every summer day outside, without thought of either heat or smoke.
But leaving sure didn’t make her love the Okanagan any less. She longs to swim in its turquoise lakes, to eat fresh cherries and peaches until her hands are sticky with juice. She misses the piney scent of ponderosa and the summers of her childhood – long, unbroken blue-sky days.
She was supposed to return this August, but cancelled because of the smoke.
“I know leaving the Okanagan was the best decision for our family. But I’m homesick for a place that doesn’t exist anymore.”
Aaron Hemens/The Globe and Mail
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