Trip Reflections

Lane Minnewanka

Nidhi Hegde

Last summer vacation me and some family friends went on a ten-day trip to Alberta. We drove all around the Banff area and visited parks and lakes. The scenery was stunning with large mountains topped with snow surrounding us. One part of the trip that stuck with me was the cruise we took on Lake Minnewanka. Lake Minnewanka is in the Banff national park, so the scenery was one of the best. We took a small boat across the water along with some other people we didn’t know. We were briefed on the safety regulations and met our tour guide and captain. The captain's name was John and the tour guide's name was Christina. We started the boat and the cruise began. Christina said we wouldn’t be going through the whole lake because the winds coming from the Columbia icefields (plateau of ice located on the mountains) would push the boat away. We were about a quarter of the way to the end of one side when the tour guide started talking. There were many things she told us about, ranging from the animals to the people that lived there.

She started with the trees first. There were mountains on both sides of the lake. The right side was filled with pine trees whereas the left side had different patches of trees, rocks and bushes and looked barer She asked which side was healthier. The whole boat pointed their hands to the right, including me. From there Christina shook her head. She explained to us that the left side was healthier because it had different species of trees and bushes and had patches of rock on it for animals to stay. The right side however was filled with only pine trees and not a patch of rock in sight. You might be wondering why they are so different from each other. Christina said that a few years ago a forest fire spread in the forest and killed off more than half the trees there. The forest fire wasn’t natural though. It was started purposely to stop the overpopulation of trees. It went a little bad and burned off more trees than wanted. You might think this is a bad thing, but it was actually really good. The forests on the mountains hadn’t had a forest fire in almost 100 years because of the water surrounding it. It is healthy for forests to have a small fire every 20 years or so.

After she told us about the trees, she told us about the water. Alberta is famous for its turquoise-colored water but not a lot of people know why it is that way. Calcite is the reason why. Calcite is a mineral found in dirt near volcanoes or mountains. In Banff there are a lot of mountains. The calcite made its way into the water and turned it turquoise. This fact was cool because I always wondered how the water could be so different from water in other places. We were then almost to the other side and we started to get out of the rows of seats and got onto the deck. The water was really pretty and we took lots of photos. Some water even splashed onto us. When all the passengers got back into their seats, the tour guide started to talk again.

We started learning about how to identify the animals in the area. We learnt about the bears, horned sheep and even chipmunks. She even had some bones from animals. A fun fact about the chipmunks is that they are the main reason tourists in Alberta go to the hospital. The tourists think that feeding the animals some of their snacks is a good idea. What they don’t know is that chipmunks don’t have very good eyesight and so they think that their fingers are part of the meal. This incident happens regularly. That's why there are signs everywhere telling people not to feed the animals. When the tour guide told us this, we were all shocked as we thought chipmunks were harmless. We were on the other side now. The boat made a sharp turn around and we started heading back. The captain-John said that he once got bitten by a chipmunk too. We started heading back to the docking station, but the learning didn’t stop there.

Christina told us an old story that took place in Lake Minnewanka. Once there was a tribe of First Nations that lived on the shore of the lake and told the kids in the village a story about the spirit in the lake to make sure the kids don’t go near the water. The water in the lake is under zero degrees Celsius so if anyone stayed in it for over fifteen minutes, they would get hypothermia. They said there was a half human-half fish spirit in the lake that would pull you into the water if you went close. After a while many people stopped visiting the lake because of the spirit. Everyone thought that if they went on the boats they would be sucked into the water. The place was losing money fast. Until an Englishman showed up with a monster like creature which he said was the monster in the lake. The newspapers wrote about him and he quickly got attention for supposedly “catching the monster in the lake”. People from around the country came to see the lake monster. He got lots of money and fame and lived in luxury until the day he died. However, one day his daughter was cleaning out his room when she saw something in a box. A tag for a taxidermy company was found in the box. The order was for an orangutan skeleton and a large fish tail to be put together and shipped from Japan. The English man’s daughter then told this to the public. The lake monster skeleton was just a taxidermy craft from a store in Japan. People were mad at him but realized that there was really no lake monster and it was safe to go to the water. The taxidermy was then put in a showcase and can still be seen today in the nearby trading post. This is how Lake Minnewanka got its name. Minnewanka means spirit so the lake is called spirit lake.

After this the tour guide told us about the history of Lake Minnewanka. There was a settlement nearby that was living happily. The houses were built on muddy land though and they didn’t know that under the mud was water. Lots of it. The settlement drowned underwater and was never recovered. Many people go scuba diving to see it. This isn’t the end though. The settlement was rebuilt on better ground. The settlement was near a rich mountain that could be used for electricity, so an electric company came around to use it. They quickly started hacking away at the rocks and didn’t realize they were creating a rockslide while they were doing it. The rocks came down one by one straight towards the settlement and crushed it. The people from the settlement couldn’t believe it. They sued the electrical company, but it didn’t work. The government granted them access to the mountain and they powered up Banff with it. By the end of this story, we were at the docking station and everyone was ready to get out. We had a great time on the boat and listening to the stories. We learnt a lot and had a good experience. If you ever visit Banff and go on a cruise on Lake Minnewanka maybe you can ask the employees if they know who John and Christina are and say hi!