More on the Kootenay Lake Monster

 

Kootenay Lake Creature

“Kootenay Lake is  located in British Columbia, Canada. It is part of the Kootenay River.

Its  65 miles (104kms) long and approximately 3 miles (5 kms) wide.It varies in depth from 33 feet (approx 10 metres)    to a maximum of 490 feet ( 160 metres) . Large enough to house a few monsters. In  October 1900 a Captain WJ Kane reported seeing a lake monster in the lake. He described it as being large and bulky.  A 12 year old boy also saw something on October 10th 1900, on the shore of Kootenay Lake, George Goudereau saw a 12ft ( 4 metres) creature that looked like an alligator  crawl  out of Crawford Bay and made its way towards a pile of rubbish on the shore. George watched  as it used its  claws and its snout to search through the pile. After a while it went back into the lake leaving a trail of tracks of  webbed feet. The creature  became known as the Canadian Alligator.

The area also has another prehistoric creature ,Big Bertha,a 10-foot Kootenay white sturgeon that weighs over 350 pounds. However sturgeon don’t normally come out of the water to forage.”

Since writing this I have discovered more information. Another  sighting “The monster…is ten feet long, six inches in diameter at the largest part and has a most hideous head.” Dec. 1900, George Graves and son, of Nelson.

In July 1937 Naomi Miller and family saw something :

“We…were barely out of sight of Kaslo…a black head reared followed by at least one hump above the water some eight feet behind… We sat hypnotized until the ‘Ogopogo’ dived….”

Then in 1953 two men from Boswell reported a sighting “The visible part about twenty feet long, showed brownish in the sunlight, and the surface looked rough like a tree trunk with moss growing upon it.”

Naomi Miller stuck to her sighing and when interviewed in 2015 wrote:

“My alternative thought is that the “thing ” that I saw may have had the form of a dinosaur . (We did not have pictures of dinosaurs when I was a child.) The water monster beside our boat turned in front of us toward shore, Had it long enough legs proportionate to its length it might have walked a few steps before diving under!”

The local indigenous people have a legend that in ancient history there was a sea monster Yawunik that ate the local livestock and was chased up the river and back to the lake. It was eventually killed by a giant.

So the lake has a history . As for the large sturgeon:

The story of Big Bertha, a monster of a sturgeon who calls Kootenay Lake home! https://kootenaymountainculture.com/koogopogo-super-sized-sturgeon/

How ever most of the sightings do not sound like a fish but something amphibian. The mystery remains.