I’ve restructured the journal a bit, and we’ve made several changes to the original plan for ending our tour.  As a reminder, here is how the last ten days were described in the introductory post for the tour:

We’ve made several changes to the original plan, mostly due to input from our friends Ken and Mary that we connected with in Kamloops.  The main changes were to add an out and back overnight to Revelstoke, and to drop the three day loop from Nelson to Trail and back.  Instead of the Trail loop, we added days in Radium and Creston.  The new plan looks like this:

The river structure in the upper Columbia and the Kootenay is fascinating, to me at least.  The Columbia begins in spring-fed Columbia Lake, just north of Canal Flats.  From there it flows in a long fishhook arc northward to Mica Creek and then south again.  The Kootenay begins about two thousand feet higher up, in the mountains of Kootenay National Park.  From there it drops down to Canal Flats, where it passes just two kilometers from Columbia Lake, nearly connecting to the infant Columbia River.  From there it flows south, crossing the border into Montana and Idaho before flowing north again, finally joining the Columbia at Castlegar.

So, the burning etymological question of the day: what is the source of a river.  Why is Columbia Lake regarded as the source, rather than the Kootenay which extends another fifty miles higher into the mountains?  And for that matter, why isn’t the Vermillion River the source?  Shouldn’t we either rename the Kootenay the south fork of the Columbia, or rename the Columbia to the Kootenay or the Vermillion?

And while we’re at it, does anyone know the background on the naming of the aquamarine Vermillion River?  I didn’t see anything vermillionish around it when we were there.