Powell Lake is a

lake A lake is often a naturally occurring, relatively large and fixed body of water on or near the Earth's surface. It is localized in a basin or interconnected basins surrounded by dry land. Lakes lie completely on land and are separate from ...

in the northern

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region of

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, adjacent to the city of Powell River, which sits on the low rise of land forming a natural dam between the lake and the

Strait of Georgia The Strait of Georgia () or the Georgia Strait is an arm of the Salish Sea between Vancouver Island and the extreme southwestern mainland coast of British Columbia, Canada, and the extreme northwestern mainland coast of Washington, United Stat ...

. The lake flows to the ocean through Powell River and features Goat Island, a large mountainous island. It serves as a reservoir for a small hydroelectric generating station which was built to serve the city's paper mill; and also as a water supply for that paper mill. The damming was completed in 1911. Its surface was raised 10 metres; from 46 to 56 metres above sea level. After damming; the lake consisted of six interconnected basins. The lake is also

meromictic A meromictic lake is a lake which has layers of water that do not intermix. In ordinary, holomictic lakes, at least once each year, there is a physical mixing of the surface and the deep waters. The term ''meromictic'' was coined by the Austria ...

, containing fresh water down to approximately 100 metres depth, after which the water is saline. The salt water was trapped in the lake some 10,000 years ago due to retreating glaciers, which raised the land around the lake.

Name origin

Recent research on the origins of the naming of Powell Lake, once believed it to be named Dr Israel Wood Powell have located documents that reveal it was not named him. There are no historical documents that factually show who Powell Lake or Powell River was actually named after.

Indigenous history

"According to John Hackett, Hegus (“Chief,” in the Sliammon language) of the Tla’amin Nation, the Tla’amin people had, at that time, a main village called Tis’kwat located in that exact spot. But the people started seeing European settlers coming into their territory, setting up camps and eventually starting to log and extract resources from the area." However, any evidence will likely be found under the current waters of Powell Lake, since it was only a river system meandering between mountainous valleys before the dam at the river head was built to provide power for the timber mill and a floating highway to deliver logs from cutting areas in the adjacent mountains. One view is that the original Powell River was a salmon breeding ground before settlement and logging interests dammed the waters use, suggesting ecological, cultural and geographical desirability for native settlement on the life giving river close to the ocean. However, there is no doubt that one time Powell Lake was once an ocean inlet as it contains ancient salt water at its deepest points, some of which are more than 500m. Geologists posit that the mouth of Powell Lake rebounded with the recession of glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age, creating a fresh water barrier system, which led to the destruction of its salmon runs and its becoming a fresh water lake. If there were indigenous communities based on salmon runs in that system, that must have been many thousands of years ago.

References

* Sunshine Coast (British Columbia) Lakes of British Columbia {{BritishColumbiaSouthCoast-geo-stub

Name origin

Indigenous history

See also

References