When I first came to Kamloops in 1976 I hiked this area in the Batchelor Hills and called the area “the Barren Hills”.  Coming from the forested Coastal area, the hills seemed dry and barren, but the reality is that the lower hills have very few trees, but they have a rich sagebrush grasslands environment.     I have hiked this loop route, or a variation of it, every year now (sometimes twice a year for 49 years).    On a cool and cloudy morning we hiked a loop route of 8.67 km, taking about 2.75 hours.   We encountered no one else on the mostly-dry trails.

We started at the trailhead at the end of a short, bumpy road just past Batchelor Lake, which is mostly dry now.  The trails are signed and we went up the route called the Bighorn Trail.

We left the trail to go up an old track to the top of the g=highest hill I have been calling Orange Cap.     There is a rock face, made reddish orange by iron pigments and there is a lot of orange crustose lichen too.    From the top of the hill, we can see the eastern side of Mara Mountain.

We followed a series of trails and we had several views southwest to Tranquille and Kamloops Lake.

We hike this area in late winter and/or early spring because the south-facing open slope are the first to dry out. There was a little bit of mud in sheltered pockets on north-facing slopes, but almost all of the route provided dry hiking on dirt trails through the grasslands. We spotted our first wildflower of the year, a sagebrush buttercup, on March 10th.