Canada’s Spotted Lake is quite a delight to the eyes of all the viewers. It is situated near the glorious and popular city of Osoyoos, which is in British Columbia. This wonderful lake attracts tourists from different corners of the world. Yes – there are a lot of people who visit the city just for the sake of witnessing the beauty of this lake.
Wondering what’s so special about this lake and why people go GAGA over its beauty?
This lake has a high concentration of various minerals like sodium sulfates, magnesium sulfate and calcium. It has a high concentration of 8 more minerals too, like small doses of titanium and silver.
Pretty impressive, isn’t it?
The Spotted Lake:
Even though the lake looks splendid during the other seasons of the year, summers are really special. Most of the water evaporates during summers. When the sun sucks water from the huge spots of minerals, the lake appears spotted and that’s what makes it so special. The color of each spot depends upon the mineral composition. You get to see pale yellow spots, blue spots and even green spots depending upon the minerals gathered in different pits. All the spots are made of magnesium sulfate. During summers, magnesium sulfate is bound to crystallize and turn harder to form ‘walkways’ around all the spots in the lake. You notice tourists taking a round around different spots and enjoying the view.
The History:
Ammunitions were manufactured from the minerals of the lake, during the First World War. According to the Chinese laborers, a ton of salt was skimmed up every day from the lake’s surface. This salt was then shipped to various factories in the eastern sections of Canada. But that’s nothing but History now.
Okanagan Valley:
By now you may have already seen pictures of this beautiful tourist attraction. This wonderful lake is called Kliluk by the Okanagan Valley natives. It is quite important to all those who know more parts of the lake’s History. The waters of this lake have always had therapeutic quality. Most of the Native Indians used the water as well as the mud of the lakes to heal their wounds and get rid of their pains. A story about two warring tribes signing a truce, where both the parties were allowed to heal their wounds in this Spotted Lake, is quite popular to the local people in this location.
Earlier, Ernest Smith Family owned this lake for around 40 years. In the year 1979, Smith was enjoying his spa at the lake when the natives reached out to him to buy it and keep it as a cherished and sacred site. It took Smith 20 years to get convinced for the deal and finally, he sold 22 hectares of his land for an amount of $720,000 out of which $150,000 was paid by The First Nations and the rest of the amount was paid by The Indian Affairs.
Currently, a fence around the lake keeps people away from visiting it, but most of the people see it from the highway.
