Joe McWilliams
What a pleasure it is to live next to Lesser Slave Lake!
There’s always something new to see, or at least slightly different, or unexpected.
It may be how long it takes the lake to freeze over. Or, just when you’ve gotten used to it taking longer, it freezes over in one night, and stays that way for seven months.
Seven months of nothing but a windswept field of snow. Pretty dull, you would think, and it often is. Boring, but uncomfortable, when there’s the slightest breeze. Not a great combination.
But then one day you’ll go out there and find long fault lines in the ice, and in other places, mountainous heaps of ice shoved up God knows when or how.
And you realize the situation is not static at all. There are big forces at work. Some of the prettiest scenes I’ve ever seen have been blocks of blue-green ice, with sunlight filtering through, towering well over a person’s head. A long line of icy upheaval, transforming the landscape.
Then there are the snow dunes, which can make for great snowshoeing or skiing.
Yet another time out by the lake, there was a sleek, fat otter, dining on a fish it had caught, on an ice floe off the mouth of Oilmen’s Creek. What a treat!
Still another occasion worth remembering was the time the wind and snow conditions were perfect for a whole field of snowballs to appear on the lake. That was another first for me, though I’ve seen it once since, on fields north of Westlock.
How about those times when the lake ice is exposed, appearing so dark it is almost black, but with white, marbly lines running criss-cross through it. There are paintings by famous artists that aren’t half as beautiful, and I’ve got the pictures to prove it.
Or how about that glorious few weeks of skating on the world’s biggest rink, in late 2023 and early 2024? I’m not sure it’s ever going to get better than that. All it took was a snowless winter, and the lake to cooperate by freezing smoothly over a big area. Only once in 30 years have I seen both those things happen at the same time.
OK, I’m sort of gushing here. But having that big lake in the back yard makes life around here so much more interesting.
And you’ll notice I haven’t even mentioned the fishing, or the boating aspects of the story. That’s a big part of the picture, but I’ll leave it to somebody else to rave about.
Nor have I mentioned beaches. At the east end of the big lake we are spoiled in the beach department, and don’t we know it. If you like rocks, we’ve got lots of those, too.
The lake, as I say, is constantly throwing up surprises. One that comes to mind is something I can still hardly believe it, if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. Or did I? Optical illusions happen.
I was out on the ice at The Narrows, back in the mid-1990s I think it was, to watch and photograph a commercial net pull. For some reason I was looking down the lake to the west when a huge wall of ice appeared, across the entire width of the lake (or so it seemed). It rose to an impossible height, and then subsided, leaving no trace. Nobody else in the party saw it. It was like something out of an animated film.
There are other times when you’re out on the lake and the sounds of cracking never stop. Fascinating, frightening and beautiful. Nature doing its thing, and I feel lucky to have a front-row seat.