Beneath the tranquil, glacier-fed waters of Alberta’s Lake Minnewanka lies a secret. Divers who descend into its icy depths don’t just find rocks, silt, and drifting fish — they discover remnants of another world. Sidewalks that once echoed with footsteps, chimneys that once funneled smoke from cottage fires, and the skeletal remains of hotels and piers that once buzzed with summer laughter now rest in silence, sixty feet underwater.
This drowned town, once called Minnewanka Landing, is more than a curiosity for adventurous scuba divers. It is a submerged chronicle of human ambition, industrial hunger, and the price of progress. To visit it today is to peer into a ghost town preserved not by desert winds or timeworn dust, but by freezing, crystalline waters that have held it intact for more than eighty years.
A Village by the Lake
The story begins in the late 19th century, long before the idea of submerging this valley seemed possible. The original lake, smaller than the one we see today, was already known to Indigenous peoples for millennia. The Stoney Nakoda Nation called it Minn-waki — “Lake of the Spirits.” For them, its waters held healing powers, and its shores were sacred. Archaeological finds — stone tools, spear points, arrowheads — reveal a human presence stretching back more than 13,000 years.
By the 1880s, however, settlers saw the lake differently. They saw it as an escape from the growing bustle of nearby Calgary, a retreat where city families could spend summers in nature. In 1886, a log-built hotel was erected along the shore. This was the spark that transformed the site into a destination known as Minnewanka Landing.
Soon, cottages sprouted along avenues and streets. Restaurants opened to serve vacationers, boat operators offered excursions across the sparkling lake, and by the early 1900s, the Landing had become a lively summer resort. Families swam in the clear waters, musicians played in hotel lounges, and wooden piers extended out into the lake like gateways to adventure. For a while, it must have seemed like a perfect paradise — a place where nature and human enjoyment coexisted.
But the forces of change were already stirring downstream.
The First Flood
In 1912, the Calgary Power Company built a small dam at the lake’s outlet. Its purpose was modest: generate hydroelectricity for Calgary and nearby communities. The dam raised the water by about twelve feet. That rise was enough to swallow parts of Minnewanka Landing. Shoreline cabins vanished. Docks were engulfed. Yet the town adapted.
Residents built higher up the slope, and developers carved out 42 new lots for cabins and cottages. Visitors still came, even if some of the original structures lay beneath the lake’s surface. To the families who spent their summers there, Minnewanka Landing remained alive, though perhaps a little diminished.
But the water had claimed its first pieces of the village, and it would not be the last time.
The Second Dam — and the Final Submersion
The 1940s brought a storm of urgency that reached far beyond the quiet Canadian Rockies. World War II had plunged nations into industrial overdrive. Calgary’s demand for electricity surged, not just for households, but for factories and wartime infrastructure.
In 1941, under the War Measures Act, the government suspended restrictions that normally protected national parks from industrial development. Calgary Power seized the opportunity and built a much larger dam. This time, the waters of Lake Minnewanka rose not by twelve feet, but by nearly a hundred.
The effect was catastrophic for Minnewanka Landing. Streets, cottages, restaurants, and the beloved hotel all disappeared beneath the rising water. Families who had spent generations summering at the Landing packed up for the last time. Some salvaged possessions; others left belongings behind, swallowed forever by the flood. By the year’s end, the entire community was gone — drowned under a reservoir whose surface reflected only sky, mountains, and silence.
The laughter of vacationers, the hum of boat engines, and the clatter of dining rooms were replaced by a quiet so profound it was almost cruel.
The Ghosts Beneath
Today, the remains of Minnewanka Landing rest about sixty feet underwater. Unlike towns left to crumble in deserts or forests, Minnewanka’s icy depths have preserved its bones. The frigid temperatures prevent decay. Divers who descend through the cold, crystalline water find foundations of cottages, sidewalks that still lead nowhere, the footings of piers, the collapsed oven of a lakeside kitchen, and the chimneys of long-forgotten cabins.
Even the foundations of the first dam from 1895 and the 1912 structure are visible, silent milestones in the march of industry.
For divers, it is an eerie experience. Imagine swimming past timber walls where you can still see the grain in the wood, or gliding over a stone chimney rising incongruously from the silt. Every structure whispers of lives interrupted, of summers that ended not with autumn but with drowning.
Roughly 8,000 divers visit Lake Minnewanka each year, many of them drawn not only by the challenge of cold-water diving but by the thrill of brushing against history in such a surreal, otherworldly setting. Beneath the lake’s placid surface, time itself feels suspended.
The Spirits of the Lake
But the story of Minnewanka is not only about cottages and dams. Long before European settlers built resorts, the Stoney Nakoda Nation revered these waters. For them, this was not a vacation retreat — it was sacred ground.
They called it Minn-waki — “Lake of the Spirits” — and believed the waters held healing powers. Elders tell stories of mountain passes their ancestors followed to reach the lake, where they would pray, gather strength, and connect with something larger than themselves.
Elder Watson Kakwitz once explained: “That lake had healing powers. Our people held it in reverence. It was never just a body of water — it was alive.”
The submersion of Minnewanka Landing, then, is layered with irony. What was once considered a place of spirits by Indigenous communities became a playground for settlers, then an industrial reservoir, and now a recreational lake again. At every stage, the meaning of the lake shifted — yet something enduring, something untouchable, remains. Those who dive beneath its waters often describe the sensation as otherworldly, as if the spirits of both the drowned town and the people who once revered it linger still.
Above the Waterline
Today, Lake Minnewanka is a jewel of Banff National Park. Kayakers paddle its length, cyclists and hikers trace the trails along its northern shore, and boat tours ferry visitors into the heart of its chilly, blue expanse. Steuart Canyon offers dramatic views, while Mount Elmer, rising more than 3,000 meters, looms like a sentinel over the lake.
Tourists snap photographs, unaware that just beneath their boats lies a ghost town. Families camp along the shore, oblivious that their campfires echo the laughter of long-gone vacationers whose cabins lie drowned below.
The paradox is striking: the same waters that swallowed a community now attract thousands of visitors each year. The tragedy became a tourist attraction.
The Price of Progress
The story of Lake Minnewanka is ultimately about choices — choices that societies make when progress demands sacrifice. Calgary’s lights, factories, and wartime production required electricity. That demand meant dams. And the dams meant the end of Minnewanka Landing.
It’s easy to see the loss as unavoidable, as the collateral damage of progress. But when you stand on the shore and realize that an entire community lies beneath your feet, the question lingers: what do we lose when we build?
Some might argue the drowned cottages were insignificant compared to the greater good. Yet the silence beneath the water speaks otherwise. Every submerged sidewalk, every chimney base, every wooden beam preserved in the cold is a reminder that history often drowns quietly, without ceremony, leaving only divers and dreamers to remember it.
Conclusion
Lake Minnewanka’s story is more than a historical footnote. It is a reminder of the delicate balance between preservation and progress, between human ambition and the landscapes we alter. Beneath its cold waters lies a village that thrived, adapted, and ultimately vanished — not to fire or abandonment, but to deliberate flooding in the name of power.
And yet, in its ghostly survival, the drowned town continues to speak. Divers still walk its submerged sidewalks. Elders still tell stories of its sacred spirit. Tourists still gaze at the lake’s surface, unaware of the ghosts just below.
Lake Minnewanka is at once a place of beauty, a place of loss, and a place of mystery. It is a lake of spirits in every sense of the word — a reminder that progress carries costs, and that even in silence, the past endures.