Sunny Side Up.

Where’d The Sunshine Go?

It’s that time of the year in BC. The weather’s gone all autumnal and rainy – the fine, misty, miserable drizzle that gets in through any zip or seam. The annoying damp spot on our kitchen ceiling, the one we can’t seem to fix, is back to doing its soggy thing. Yes, it’s Hallo Fall! Hallo mildew!

But to coin an over-used British phrase… “Mustn’t grumble, aye, could be worse.”

We had a very pleasant summer this year. A lovely warm forest-fire-free summer. A few years back it was a different story. Fire season was in full force and the valley north of Pemberton, where our cabin is, was shrouded in a thick pall of foggy smoke. A vigorous blaze was raging up along the banks of Anderson Lake towards the town of Lillooet, about 30km away from our modest shack.

One morning, I wondered down to the lake at about 7am for a quiet wake up skinny dip. I couldn’t see the other side of the valley – 500m away- for smoke. Sitting on the dock, trying to pluck up the courage to jump in, I began to notice flecks of white falling around me and onto the lake. It was raining ash, most likely from the Lillooet fire.

But no smoke this year, thankfully.

To date, BC has endured “only” 784 fires in 2019. They torched 21,000 hectares of forest; a quite remarkable drop on 2018. Last summer’s final tally was 2,117 fires which burned 1.35-million hectares. For comparison, the area of Wales, which sticks out on the west side of the British mainland, is just under 2.1-million hectares. The area of England is 13-million hectares, so the equivalent of 10% of England burned down.

It’s Raining

The forecast of rain got me thinking back to a blog piece I wrote last year (It’s Raining) about -funny enough- rainfall in BC and how our suffering compares to some of the world’s other damp and drippy realms (hint: we have it lucky.) I penned it while mired in darkest Seasonal-Affective-Moaning-About-Rainfall disorder; on the verge of having an umbrella surgically attached to my head. So, what about the opposite side of the coin? How much sun do we get in Raincouver and how does our average compare to the rest of the world?

Environment Canada provides reliable sunshine statistics for Canadian cities. Vancouver averages just under 2,000 hours of sun per year, compared to about 1,500 hours for London. In fact, the statistics show that we get more sun here than anywhere in the UK, despite our reputation for endless rain.

Who Gets The Most?

Canada’s sunniest city is Calgary with 2,396 hours per year, 17 days more than Vancouver, which might explain why everyone feels the need to wear huge cowboy hats there but doesn’t explain why they have such a crap ice hockey team. Bear in mind that some of those sunshine hours happen mid-winter, when the sky is clear and blue but it’s -273°C and your ears would fall off if you ventured outside.

Calgary doesn’t qualify as Canada’s sunniest spot. That honour falls to the delightfully named, and almost deserted village of Manyberries, 300km southeast of Calgary. The lucky residents, all 84 of them, bask in 2,567 hours of sun per year. If your aim is to maintain a Trumpian orange glow to your skin, this is the best place in Canada. Other than that, there’s not much to say about Manyberries, but Wikipedia bravely gives it a go:

Manyberries has a community hall, a curling rink, a park with playground equipment, and a hotel with lounge. Manyberries still has its original Canadian Pacific railway station and a section house, which are both private residences, and are located beside the former Stirling–Weyburn branch line. CPR abandoned the branch line from just east of Stirling to Consul, Saskatchewan in the late 1980s. 

Let’s all move to Manyberries, eh? Then again, maybe not.

I visited their TripAdvisor Canada page, following an optimistically cheerful link titled “Manyberries Tourism 2019: Best of Manyberries, Alberta”. Glad to see that the 84 residents have organised so much for visitors to do:

The rabbit hole of useless-and-far-from-fascinating information about Manyberries, led me to another website with a collection of odds and ends about the village. Nestled halfway down the page was the distance from Manyberries to the Great Mosque of Mecca: 10,372km. Quite why this was included beats me. My first thought was that perhaps Manyberries harbours the Albertan ISIS chapter and I should call the RCMP or CSIS. On reflection, once the second glass of Black Sage Merlot had worn off, I realised the plucky locals were simply clutching at any geographic straws to fill the town web page.

But it did get me thinking about which spot on the globe gets the most sun; it must be somewhere in Sudan or Saudi Arabia, right? But no, how wrong could I be. It’s way closer to home. The sunniest city in the world is Yuma, in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert which clocks up a remarkable 4,105 hours per year and is also North America’s sunniest spot (167 full 24-hour days of sunshine!) It’s closely followed by Calama in Chile (3,926 hours) and Marsa Alam on the Red Sea coast of Egypt with 3,958 hours.

Who Gets The Least?

Iqaluit gets the least sun in Canada, at 1,480 or so, roughly the same as London, funny enough, but Iqaluit has an excuse; it’s so far north there is no sun for a large chunk of the year. The sun sets in early December and doesn’t rise again until August 14^th, or somewhere around there, and promptly dives back down again in early September, or so I’m told.

I feel deeply sorry for the residents of cities mired in the gloom at the other end of the global table. Totoró in Colombia is the least sunny city in the world despite being quite close to the equator. Don’t try sunbathing there. They average 637 hours sun a year; 26 days. That’s it, 26. We don’t need no stinking sunshine. And they can’t even blame extreme southerly or northerly latitudes and prolonged winter darkness. It’s just shitty, rainy and cloudy all the time.

Tórshavn in the Faroe Islands, halfway twixt Scotland and Iceland, gets 840 hours beating Totoró. But to be fair to Totoró, I’m guessing that the the residents there don’t feel the need for heavy wool sweaters, mutton stew and peat fires.

Don’t Forget

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