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Page 5

LAKE WINNIPEG'S SHORELINE
NAR: Going to the lake and enjoying the cottage lifestyle is a way of life for Winnipeggers. It's our way of getting close to nature. And what better place than magnificent Lake Winnipeg.

FRANCES RUSSELL: It's very dangerous to compare beaches because as you probably can appreciate people develop very strong attachments to their little corner of Lake Winnipeg. The west side is the prairie side. Palaeozoic side. The east side is the Precambrian Canadian Shield side. So right at the start there's 2 starkly different ambiences for people. The westside beaches are the most accessible to Winnipeg. They're the closest.

That side of the lake has become almost urbanized in a sense. We have a major town in Manitoba, Gimli which was established by the Icelandic settlers in 1870's. And then Winnipeg Beach which was established by the Can Pacific Railway as a sort of mass resort. And then all along the rail line were built these suburbias in the wilderness for Winnipeg's burgeoning middle class of the 20's and 30's..to cottage.

LAKE AGASSIZ
ALEXANDRA PALICKA: This landscape has been forming for a very long time. After the last ice age about 75,000 years ago we had a huge lake called lake Agassiz that formed over this large area and basically it deposited a lot of sand.

And when it retreated we ended up having Lake Winnipeg Lake MB and lake Winnipegosis formed. And that's where you get this beautiful sand from this last ice age. And its still changing today the water changes almost daily and it changes the shoreline. And pushes the sand up and it creates the wonderful dunes that we have here at GB.

NAR: James Teller a professor of geology at the University of Manitoba is an expert on the lake and its geological history.

JAMES TELLER: Lake Agassiz came about because there was a great accumulation of ice across the high latitudes of North America. And that accumulation of ice had impounded the waters that had once drained into the Arctic Ocean and Hudson Bay. When this all came together we had a very large lake. The largest of all was glacial lake Agassiz. Named after Louis Agassiz who came up with the idea back in the middle of the 19th century, that glaciers had once covered a much larger part of the globe.

Lake Agassiz in total covered an area of 350,000 sq km. It expanded and it contracted, it changed its size during its 4000-year history. The climate was getting warmer and warmer... once the ice retreated north of about Fargo ND... then there was a puddle then a lake and then a giant lake that formed out.

NAR: Aboriginal people had fished the lake for 8,000. During the fur trade era starting in the 1700s, the lake became the crossroads of the northwest. In 1783, explorer LaVerendrye travelled through the peninsula of land near the mouth of the Winnipeg River which later became Victoria Beach. He named the area south Grand Marais for Big Marsh. But thousands of years earlier an even larger glacial lake had covered the entire area.

At its height 7,500 years ago the city of Winnipeg lay under 650 feet of water. Today Lake Winnipeg is a shallow lake averaging only 30 feet in depth in the south. By the year Christ was born, the lake took on its present configuration.

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