Q&A: Divers locate car that sank to bottom of Lake Minnewanka over 8 decades ago

CBC

5 days ago

A car that's been sitting at the bottom of Lake Minnewanka for more than eight decades has finally been located and photographed by a group of divers.
It's believed the car sank about 85 years ago and has been sitting 55 metres below the surface ever since at the popular lake in Banff National Park. The lake is a big draw for scuba divers because a dam built in 1940 forever submerged the summer village of Minnewanka Landing.
Three divers from Alberta and B.C. recently made the journey to the lake's dark and icy depths and took some spectacular pictures of the car.
Calgary's Alan Keller is one of the divers. He chatted with Loren McGinnis, host of CBC Radio's the Calgary Eyeopener, on Thursday.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What do you know about the car, how did it get there?
They don't know much about the car other than the legend or rumour about the car that the guides share about it. That a gentleman was on the ice. He wanted to take a picture of his car with the backdrop of the mountains, and he's setting up his camera and as he's turning around, his car fell through the ice.
Glug, glug.
Glug, exactly.
Do you know how old the car is?
We estimated it's a 1928 Hudson Essex Saloon, based upon images that we can match with it on the internet.
How did you find it?
We found it because there were people in the lake a few years ago doing some searching for other purposes. And so they came across this target. And of course with the world being a small place and scuba divers being a small community, they shared that information with us right instantly. And so then we went out and gathered our resources and then did the dive.
Take us to the moment when you saw it. What was it like when you first encountered it?
There was a lot of stuff going on initially when we found it. So when we got down, we didn't see it right away because we weren't that lucky. We had to do a little bit of searching. So we did a spoke pattern and then about the third time that we went out, my buddy Johnny saw it and he was the first one to lay eyes on it.
And I was, of course, the second. But it was a state of like, "Holy cow, we actually found it." That's very lucky to be able to find something so small on a first go, but also to be the first people to lay your eyes on it after 85 years was pretty spectacular. And just the condition of the visibility, that sort of thing, to be able to see it properly and take proper images of it it all — it all worked out.
How did you prepare for the dive? Because 55 metres — that's no joke.
Behind the scenes, there's a lot of training behind it … like estimating how deep it's going to be. So we have the estimate from when they were out on the lake, but then we had estimated based upon where the lake level is now, because it's an active reservoir. And so they'll manage the lake level for the spring runoff, that sort of thing.
And then it's just a matter of, OK, it's this deep. Now we need to plan what our gases are that they're going to be breathing, and how are we going to be co-ordinating the dive teams, that sort of thing. And then how are we going to mitigate any risks, like, what if something goes wrong.
How long did it take you to find it?
When we were doing the dive, about seven minutes.
Oh, that's amazing.
Oh, we had really good information. So the information we had was really good and then we also interpreted the information as well.
How has the reaction been in the diving circles that you run in?
It's pretty cool. It's just something, because it's a lake that a lot of local people dive, just to have something new out there. A lot of people aren't going to be able to dive it because of its depth, but just that there was something actually new to find and there's other stuff out there.
What else do you figure is out there?
One of the images that I saw looks like a box car from a mine — there was lots of mining activity there.
Are you now going to spend some time in Minnewanka trying to find out what else is in there?
Yeah, definitely. Now that we've been successful with what I'm probably going to say was the most challenging one to target, just because of the depth and where it's at in the lake, we definitely want to tackle the other ones.
Is this discovery going to attract more divers to this site?
Oh yeah, everybody's just like, "Hey, next time hit me up."