Lake Winnipeg’s Paradise Beaches
Lake Winnipeg’s
Paradise Beaches
Written and Produced By George Siamandas
© Prairie Public Television 2001
INTRODUCTION
NAR: Its another beautiful summer’s day. A perfect day to head for the beach. Since the turn of the century, when Manitobans first discovered its beauty, they’ve been flocking to Lake Winnipeg. And while some are content to be day-trippers, many built a cottage, their own place at the lake.
Manitobans own more than 12,000 cottages the highest rate in Canada. It’s were they learned to swim, met new friends, and perhaps, even where they fell in love. Where they passed two enchanted summer months.
The beach offers delights for every age. Sand castles, the splash of the surf, the ever-changing water. Magnificent sunsets. Walks in the great outdoors. Winnipeg Beach, Gimli, Grand Beach, and Victoria Beach. And a dozen more scattered along its sandy shore.
For many, these are the fondest memories of childhood. Safe delightful summers spent at Manitoba’s summer playground. Join us on the south shores for a tour of Lake Winnipeg’s Paradise Beaches.
NAR: Frances Russell is a Winnipeg journalist who has cottaged in almost every beach on the lake. She has just written the The Great Lake.
FRANCES RUSSELL: The lake fascinates me because there are so many factors. One is its improbability. Here we are smack dab in the middle of North America. Right almost in the middle of the near the geographic centre of the continent. The Great Plains, you would never expect to see a lake of this magnitude right in the middle of the Great Plains.
NAR: Winnipeg journalist Val Werier is a prolific writer on Lake Winnipeg and the environment:
VAL WERIER: It’s the dominant feature in Manitoba. You look at the map, Lake Winnipeg stares out at you. Lake Winnipeg has been underrated. It’s a giant among lakes. The Cree used to call it the Ocean Lake. I sit at my cottage on the deck and I look across the lake its just like an ocean.
The lake has such a tremendous character. It’s theatre, theatre of colour. It changes constantly; you have all sorts of different weather formations. You may have a quiet day were the lake is placid. Or you may have a foggy day were it would be misty. And the horizon and the lake blend into one and you feel like as you’re in an ocean. Because the lake and the sky become one.
RAILWAY PLEASURELANDS
NAR: Manitoba’s cottage communities were built by the railroads. In 1901 Sir William Whyte of the Canadian Pacific purchased 330 acres on the west shore for $3,000. By June 1903 the first Winnipeg Beach train brought up vacationers to their new summer paradise. By 1912, 10 trains took 40,000 vacationers to the beach each weekend.
VAL WERIER: A couple of friends and I when were 15, decided we were going to go on a vacation to the lake; the lake meant Winnipeg Beach. So what did we do? We had no money. We got a bell tent and all our belongings, groceries hopped on a streetcar went to the CPR station got on a CPR train and went to Winnipeg Beach. And there we camped in a field opposite the station.
THE MOONLIGHT SPECIAL
FRANCES RUSSELL: The train was a very, very big factor in the early development of the beach community. In fact of the rhythm of beach communities circulated or revolved around the train.
There was a 7:20 train that went in in the morning and used to take the daddies into work and the same train would come back out. It was called the 5:20. It would arrive on the beaches on the west side around 7:00 at night, just in time for them to have a swim and a drink before dinner. Then there was the other train known as the Moonlight Special.
There was a Moonlight Special on both sides of the lake. It was a Saturday train that left Winnipeg about 6:00 at night. It was for the partygoers, the people that would come up to use the big dance pavilions at both Winnipeg Beach and Grand Beach.
It would leave at midnight. It would blow its whistle at 11:45 to tell everybody to get to the train station because if you missed it you were on the beach until the next morning because there was no other train coming back out.
DANCE HALL DAYS
VAL WERIER: To encourage traffic on Saturday night they had what they called the Moonlight. You’d go there about 6:30 come back at 12 and they packed them in and you’d go to the dance there. They had a fine ballroom. It was considered one of the best in western Canada. Good hardwood floors. You paid your nickel and you had your dance. And people stood around a balustrade and railing around the dance floor. People stood around to watch who was on the dance floor and who was dancing with who. And what songs were being played.
FRANCES RUSSELL: So the train was a part of the romantic era of the beaches. In between the two world wars and then after the Second World War the advance of the automobile. As the auto advanced, the train retreated. The very last trains to go virtually were the Moonlight Specials. At the same time, the dance hall craze, that faded too. And the dance pavilions the one at Winnipeg Beach was made into a roller rink, the one at Grand Beach just burned down. It was never rebuilt.
LAKE WINNIPEG BEACHES
NAR: Mike Limerick is a teacher who works on beach patrol on Lake Winnipeg.
MIKE LIMMERICK: Coming from Lake of the Woods in Kenora coming from a place that I thought was one of the biggest lakes in Canada beside the Great Lakes. Coming here working on this beach has really been like being on the ocean. You can’t see the other side and I’ve been to the Caribbean and to Indonesia on those beaches and the waves here are comparable.
And at Grand Beach where I’ve worked for the last couple of years I’ve had tourists come from England and California which is surprising they end up in Lake Winnipeg and Lake Manitoba.
They actually pick up the sand and take it with them they’ll take a cup and they’ll bring it home to show their friends, they can’t believe the quality of the sand here. It’s rated I’ve heard in North America one of the top ten beaches.
WINNIPEG BEACH
NAR: Winnipeg beach is the beach where Manitoba plays. It’s the people’s playground. Located 76 km north of Winnipeg it’s only an hour from the city. For 50 years Winnipeg Beach was host to thousands of summer visitors who enjoyed the boardwalk, the roller coaster and the dance hall. Today Winnipeg beach has been reborn and feels very friendly.
MIKE LIMERICK: The park here is so beautiful. You have this green belt right behind the grass. And right behind this grass greenbelt you have this beautiful town. It offers great food and places to hang out in I think it offers so much.
The people that come to WB it’s more of a family beach. The kind of people that come here are mostly from Winnipeg. If it’s a beautiful day in Winnipeg you know its going to be a busy at the beach. It’s like a mass exodus that come out to these beaches.
Winnipeg is a small city but it offers so much. Anywhere you leave Winnipeg within an hour or 2 hours you’re surrounded by lakes you’re surrounded by cottages. You’re surrounded by all these great things so I think its a really great thing that I can drive 50 minutes and be at the ocean in the centre of Canada or almost the ocean. We’re lucky here.
GRAND BEACH
NAR: Not to be outdone, in 1914, the Canadian National Railway bought 150 acres across the lake along the east shore. And created their own summer Utopia. Grand Beach. In 1916 the resort at Grand Beach was complete and was an immediate success. Large crowds right from the beginning.
Bathing suits were available for rent and when waterlogged they added considerable weight to the swimmer. And here was the grandest dance hall in the dominion. In the early days, staying overnight at Grand Beach was not encouraged. It was designed for day-trippers. Here at Grand Beach, the beach is the attraction. And as a beach it has no equal.
NAR: Alexandra Pallicka is a naturalist at Grand Beach:
ALEXANDRA PALLICKA: Grand Beach is just marvellous. Besides the surf and the water and the sand and the dunes. We have a bunch of different other attractions that attract a lot of people. And a lot of people are here today because it’s beautiful and it’s hot out. And that is exactly why they come to Grand Beach. The water is warm and shallow and the sand is beautiful. And you can’t really go wrong with a day at the beach.
This cottage area wasn’t designed originally as a cottage area. When people first started coming to this area in the 20s when the train came out they used to be the campground. So the lots you see today are actual campground lots and that’s why they’re pretty small. Through the years they leased the land from the train company. And they started building permanent structures onto these lots and eventually it turned into the cottage area.
GRAND BEACH LOVER: I really love it on this side of the lagoon. There’s not as many people the water is beautiful it blocks a lot of the wind its just gorgeous. You can go with your boat you can go tubing you can go diving of the boat it’s beautiful. You can go for a walk down the beach if you like to sit with the people there’s tons of people you can meet people there’s the boardwalk and it seems like you’re in paradise.
THE MARSH
ALEXANDRA PALICKA: This area behind me is called the lagoon which is still attached to the main area that’s just been separated by the lake by the beach. This area acts as a buffer zone for the shoreline so during time of high water or flooding or storms, this acts as a reservoir for the water to come in and actually buffers the shoreline and protects the area.
This area is also considered a wetland or marsh and its very important for natural vegetation and the animals that we find at Grand Beach Provincial Park to have a place to call home.
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.
GIMLI
NAR: About 90 minutes north of Winnipeg along the west shore is the town of Gimli. A unique beach community on Lake Winnipeg. A town with many dimensions and a lot of history. Bill Barlow is a high school teacher and mayor of Gimli.
BILL BARLOW: I applied for a teaching job and was interviewed and hired. Well it’s almost 32 years ago now. Once I was here, once I had this job, the reason I stayed had a whole lot to do with geography. I mean here we are on the shores of one of the world’s great lakes an absolutely remarkable body of water,
But there were other things too, I mean the story of the Icelanders scraping ashore here in 1875 and how they, in the face of really great hardship made this community a well planned community.
There’s geography, there’s the whole ethnic cultural thing. That spirit of tolerance, that progressive view of where this community is in terms of the world around us, that is extremely attractive. It’s a great place to be.
We have quite a cultural life the signal event of the year is the Icelandic festival. Islendingadagurinn, the day of the Icelander, which is celebrated on the long weekend here in August. This little town of two thousand has about 30,000-35,000 in it for that celebration.
It’s a great celebration of that cultural fact, that those people in the face of incredible hardship, established here a great foundation for a wonderful community.
NAR: Today Gimli is the lake’s largest community. It’s a full service town. And many are choosing to live and work from Gimli.
BILL BARLOW: The quality of life that is here is so attractive. People are coming to Gimli to live in the sort of 55 plus early retirement group which is a growth industry, people do find the area so attractive that the growth in that area is really quite phenomenal.
The name Gimli is certainly interesting to have a look at we know that Gimli is a place in Norse mythology where the righteous spend eternity. The fact that the early settlers in spite of having gone through a horrible winter and disease and so on still had the vision to name this place Gimli, which is a kind of paradise.
NAR: The first Europeans to settle on the lake were the Icelanders who arrived in 1875. Fleeing difficult times including volcanoes, the first arrivals liked what they saw. Their new paradise Gimli was teeming with fish. And in the woodlands game and berries were in abundance. The Icelanders received exclusive settlement right to an area of 812 sq km, and till 1877 operated as their own independent republic. While flooding, smallpox and scurvy threatened to destroy the community enough stayed.
BILL BARLOW: Today Gimli, the town of Gimli, a community of about 2000 people, permanent residents. It’s surrounded by the rural municipality of Gimli, with another 3500 permanent residents. In the summertime, of course those populations quadruple in terms of people who are summer residents.
As you move north of the harbour there’s a full kilometre of very excellent beach, which on a hot summer weekend will have four or five thousand people basking in the sun and dipping in those great refreshing waters of Lake Winnipeg.
We’re on the shores of this great lake and it’s so much a part of the history of Gimli.
We have here in Gimli one of the finest harbours that you’ll find anywhere between the lakehead and Vancouver. It’s a prairie harbour, and we have here a prairie ocean.
And I think people are always surprised when they come and can’t believe it’s in the Canadian prairie.
What you will see when you come into the harbour is Gimli’s first industry, the commercial fishing industry that is alive and well as it was when it was first established in the 1870’s. In three seasons of the year, in spring and fall and winter, our fishing fleet is on the lake, reaping the bounty of the lake.
FISHING LAKE WINNIPEG
NAR: Fishing became the first occupation of the Icelanders and today fishing continues to be Gimli’s largest industry:
FRANCES RUSSELL: It’s the largest inland fishery in Canada worth about $ 20M per year
VAL WERIER: Lake Winnipeg is extremely productive Lake. It’s because it’s shallow. It gets the beneficent rays of the sun. And the production is unusual. Last year 8 M pounds of pickerel alone from this lake. And the pickerel, I think its one of the greatest delicacies around.
NAR: Fishing is a hard life. Lena Halgren’s family have fished the lake since the early 1940s:
LENA HALGREN: I came to Victoria Beach in ‘42. We got married that year, August. My husband was fishing and we built here in 45. We were looking for land to build a cottage. At that time we got land for $1 a lot and we bought 4 lots. Just imagine. But there was nothing but bush.
When I first come, I was the loneliest person on earth no people around. Sometimes cattle come in the yard I was glad to see them.
NAR: Glen is Lena’s youngest son. For 20 years he worked with his dad Thor in the fishing trade:
GLEN HALGREN: I think my earliest memory was when I was probably 8 years old. I’d go out with my dad fishing and he’d set a few nets. I remember being out in really bad storms. There were times when I first started fishing with my dad. And we had a smaller boat. There were times the waves would washing right over the boat.
Fishing was such an enjoyable thing. You’d bring in the fish. You sell it to the marketing board. Every week you’d get a cheque.
Then I fished for about 15 years. Then I started to get rheumatoid arthritis which wasn’t the greatest thing for fishing. So I got into the publishing of the Cottager magazine. It’s our tenth anniversary. Now we are very proud of it. It’s something we really enjoy doing.
We sold our house in November Kathy and I moved into my mum and dad’s house. It’s just a different type of feeling. Coming home and just I don’t know. I think opening up the windows and you’d wake up in the morning. And you’d hear the waves splashing up against the rocks.
LAKE WINNIPEG
NAR: This is a very special lake. 4th largest freshwater lake in Canada. 11th largest in the world. The lake literally throbs with energy and abundance. A source of fish hydro electricity, and recreation. As the reservoir for the Manitoba Hydro electric system it generates $200 M annually.
It’s a lake of immense proportions. It’s 425 km long and 40 km wide at the south basin, covering 24,500 sq km. Its shape, an inverted teardrop. It’s 4 1/2 times the size of Prince Edward Island. It looks like an ocean.
The lake is ever changing. Sometimes angry. But mostly placid. In 5 minutes the lake can go from calm to a terrifying storm. Explorers called the lake The Old Woman for how quickly and violently a storm could blow up.
FRANCES RUSSELL: It’s the intrinsic danger of it too because of the shallowness and its propensity for violent summer storms. There hasn’t been a year since 1900 when they started keeping records that there haven’t been multiple deaths on the lake.
NAR: The lake is thousands of years old. Thousand of years in the making. It seems it will be here forever. Four or five generations have enjoyed its pleasures. But how many more? Will the lake as we know it be there for future generations? Can we continue to enjoy its gifts endlessly? There are increasing concerns about its future.
VAL WERIER: Its significance is this. It’s a microcosm of what happens to the environment and how we treat it. Lake Winnipeg drains a huge watershed starting at the foothills of the Rockies to within 80 km of Lake Superior. How people use their pesticide or how they use the land manifests itself on Lake Winnipeg.
THE MANITOBA COTTAGE LIFESTYLE
NAR: Despite these concerns a lakeside property on Lake Winnipeg has never been in greater demand. The man they turn to for their dream at the lake is cottage realtor Jim Hall.
JIM HALL: Everybody in Manitoba talks cottage I think this would have to be the central spot in the world where everyone is cottage oriented. Part of it may go back to their childhood. Most of the people that I sell to have cottaged all their life. They want to recapture those memories that they had in their youth.
They talk to me about I can remember being with my grandfather he took me out on the pier and we fished on the pier till early morning were we could see the mist over the water. They try to recapture what they feel they are missing. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t
NAR: Jim finds three types of buyers.
JIM HALL: There’s the young family that wants the beach area and the use of the lake. There’s the middle-aged family that is looking for getaways, using it for escape. They have high profile voltage jobs and they want to get away for even a few hours.
Now were in an area that is in transition and were getting a lot of requests for retirement homes or trying to find cottages that can be converted into year round living.
Sometimes people fall in love with a cottage on first sight. And it usually happens with the wife and her eyes pop. I know the guy is dead. He’s going to be buying it whether he likes it or not because she’s fallen in love with it.
The happiest cottagers tend to be the families that enjoy playing together. People in this area don’t even care if it rains it gives them an afternoon to read.
NAR: Like in the city ethnic groups found their own place on the lake
JIM HALL: What you would find at Traverse Bay is Albert Beach that is a very French community. What I kind of enjoy out of it when you go the stores and the people are talking French it kind of reflects on Manitoba and Canada as a whole.
YVETTE: There was a time here that you had to French and Catholic because its the Catholic diocese that used to own the land here. You had to be French Catholic then they changed that. And when they did that we put an Irish sign in front of our cottage we because we’re Irish.
VICTORIA BEACH
NAR: In areas like Winnipeg Beach and Victoria Beach cottages are handed down from generation to generation. About an hour and a half north of Winnipeg along the east shore is Victoria Beach.
FRANCES RUSSELL: Victoria Beach is absolutely beautiful It’s the most gorgeous physically in terms of its environment of all the beaches. It attracted a very upper class group of cottagers to begin with that had their own private club, They operated it not as a municipality but as a club. They had restrictions on who could buy and who couldn’t buy. That was quite off putting for a lot of other people.
NAR: Victoria Beach was advertised as everything Winnipeg Beach and Grand Beach were not. No boardwalk, no dancehall, no amusements and no day-trippers. Planned like little English town Victoria Beach has a grocery store, a library, a bakery, a community club, tennis courts, a golf course and the Moonlight Inn.
For the many that found a cottage at Victoria beach life was idyllic:
LORNA OBRIEN: I remember coming quite young to visit an aunt of mine and after that we pestered our parents that we had to go to VB every summer and we did keep coming.
In those days of course there was no road to Victoria Beach so we had to come on the train. And we packed like mad I came at the first of the year and packed a trunk full of food because we knew you didn’t get out again you stayed all summer.
Most husbands came on weekends but the families stayed all year. In the beginning when we bought our cottage in 52 we came in the summer of 53. There was no running water no power no roads we had coal oil lamps and I had to carry the water in pails from the pump. And that was a tough life with little children to do their laundry with the water you had to carry you know. But it was fun we never thought it was tough and of course I had to chop wood I never knew how to wield an axe but I learned in a hurry.
Now it’s a very strange thing that happened to us about our cottage. In 1952 my husband was poring over the advertising for a house. He saw in the paper the ad for this cottage. It was a friend of his that was advertising it. My husband gave him a $100 deposit and we were owners of a cottage, still no house. We came and stayed…and the kids loved it so much.
I’ve gone to a lake since I was 2 and if you’ve gone to the lake all your life you have this thing that you like to live in the outdoors. And to be able to come here and live in the outdoors. And the beauty of this place is no cars the little children can run in the streets. The biggest problem is bicycle accidents. Coming to the beach is different for me now my children come. And so long as they keep coming I have a lovely time.
NAR: Victoria Beach is like a time a machine. You enter under the sign and leave today behind. For all you know it could be 1960, or even 1930. All is the same. Trish Rathwell and her family have enjoyed endless summers at their Victoria Beach cottage.
TRISH RATHWELL: I’ve been coming to Victoria Beach since I was a little girl and I just loved it. And I just love passing it on to my own children. And watching them all do the fun activities that I did as a child. What I love about this beach is the walking the tennis the golf. It’s a totally physical beach. You come out in just wonderful shape in the fall.
I think my very favourite time is Friday night about 6:00 o clock sitting down on the beach with my husband who is swimming. And my kids are all around. And we’re just watching the sunset it’s absolutely gorgeous. And you can hear the lake and see the seagulls overhead. And all the stress of the week is gone.
My dad turned 80 last summer and came down to the beach and has been here since he was a little boy himself. And he said it never changes and that’s the beauty of Victoria Beach.
BEACH POEM
Our Lovely beach is a place unique
For rest and quiet it’s the spot to seek
To spend a long, dreamy summer’s day
It’s the perfect vacation in every way
Down a shady path to the beach you go
Where billowy waves waft to and fro
The pure white sand is so clean and bright
You bask in the sun with complete delight
Join with the bathers so carefree and gay
In the cool of the lake they swim and play
In your ears are the echoes and shrieks of glee
These afternoon hours are happy and free
Then as the sun slowly sinks in the west
Comes the time of day we all love the best
As the last beams dip down into the lake
The heavens now glow and the sky comes awake
CREDITS
LAKE WINNIPEG‘S
PARADISE BEACHES
Producer Writer and Narrator:
George Siamandas
Videographers:
Travis Jensen
George Siamandas
Editor:
Travis Jensen
Production Manager:
Randy Cadwell
Executive producer:
Bob Dambach
Still Photos:
George Siamandas
http://www.siamandas.com/
© Prairie Public 2001
To order a videocassette
of the above production
Phone Prairie Public at 1-800-359-6900
Or order online
http://www.prairiepublic.org/
Script: Courtesy: Prairie Public Television ©2001
The above document is copyrighted. It may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the permission of the author.