The
area around Lake Minnewanka in Alberta has been settled continuously
for at least 13,000 years. One of those settlements was Minnewanka
Landing, which thrived in the summer with tourists and campers. There
were hotels, restaurants, tour guides, and boating. But it's all gone
now. Well, the
people are all gone. The town itself survives at
the bottom of Lake Minnewanka. Dams were built there three times: in
1895, 1912, and 1941. It was the 1941 dam that finally flooded
Minnewanka Landing.
Today the reservoir hides a secret
that many people will never get the chance to experience—unless they're
scuba divers, that is. Thanks to Lake Minnewanka’s glacier-fed, ice-cold
waters, many structures of the former resort town still remain intact,
including house and hotel foundations, wharves, an oven, a chimney, a
cellar, bridge pilings and sidewalks. (A full list of sites is available
here.) Even the footings from the town’s original dam, built by the
federal government in 1895, along with the footings from the dam built
in 1912, remain visible.
Even if you're not a scuba diver, you can
take a tour of Minnewanka Landing in a video at Smithsonian.
The
area around Lake Minnewanka in Alberta has been settled continuously
for at least 13,000 years. One of those settlements was Minnewanka
Landing, which thrived in the summer with tourists and campers. There
were hotels, restaurants, tour guides, and boating. But it's all gone
now. Well, the people are all gone. The town itself survives at
the bottom of Lake Minnewanka. Dams were built there three times: in
1895, 1912, and 1941. It was the 1941 dam that finally flooded
Minnewanka Landing.
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