Diving in Glacier National Park July 2009

[DetectorGuy]

We got home from our trip last night. I only got in 5 dives during the trip out of 9 tanks I had with. (I hate having four more full tanks that are sitting here not being used but it is kind of a long term plan to keep some tanks around just in case...)
The first dive: Horse Thief Lake (mentioned earlier).
The second dive: Lake Mc Donald (mentioned earlier).
The third dive: Lake Mc Donald (mentioned earlier).
The fourth dive was at Upper Waterton Lake in Alberta Canada. This was on a 100' long by 18' wide paddle wheeler that had been scuttled in 55' of water just west of the Prince of Wales Hotel in Emerald Bay. It was raining this day, but there was a nice shelter to suit up in to keep the weezle wear dry. The vis was about 20' down to a depth of 40' but then it deteriorated rapidly. Colder mountain streams bring the colder mud to lower depths I found out. I took 43 minutes of video on this dive and no still photos under water. ( I will post links to these later...) The wreck was missing the paddle wheel, but it was a very impressive dive. The hull is intact and the wood "superstructure" that supported the paddle wheel. The two steam pistons were intact as were the long wood connecting rods that pushed the paddle wheel at the stern. The vertical "splash wall" in front of the paddle wheel was about half there. most of the deck boards were missing. Most of the cabin above the deck was missing also except for the starboard side wall. This was a shallow draft boat made to draw only 10" of water so it could navigate between upper and lower Waterton lake in high water. There was a school of Mountain White Fish swimming around the stern (I wanted them to be trout, but they were just white fish). I got down to 52' and the vis was was not conducive to good video so I went back to the stern at 35' deep. I really liked this dive! The mule deer here have infested the town of Waterton, and there are numerous signs warning that they will attack dogs to protect their fawns. I took several above water photos of these deer around the dive site.

The fifth dive was near Banff, Alberta at a lake called Minnewanka (probably called this because of the effects of diving in cold water  ;D). The dive was on an old submerged dam that was built in 1912 in what was called "Devils Gorge" This dam when it was built raised the lake 16' higher than the natural level. In 1912 there was a small town just upstream about a mile that was on the banks of this newly elevated lake. It contained about 4 blocks of houses and a hotel and a bar. These are reduced to just foundations I was told so I concentrated the dive to the old submerged dam only. In 1941 a new earthen dam was built to raise the level of the lake another 65' above the 1912 dam. Using a penstock to control the water level on this 1941 dam the depth to the top of the 1912 dam was 42' deep. The 1912 dam was about 100' long and 10' thick. The structure of this dam is plank and whaler walls separated about 10' from each other and then filled with dirt and rocks. At each end of the dam there were wing walls on the down stream side. The wing wall at one end was made of plank and whaler, and the wing wall at the other was made of logs. The visibility here was about 30' down to a depth of about 30' and then it got worse as I went down. (Again, I think these mountain lakes are affected by the colder run off from the rivers carrying mud sinking to the lower depths). I got down to 55' deep and the vis was getting pretty bad for a solo dive. I did not want to inadvertently find the breech in this old dam, and spend the rest of my life there. I took video of this whole dive also. This dive made me smile the whole time too  ;D.

So of the 5 dives: two of them were above 5,000 feet. One was above 4,000 feet, and the two at Lake McDonald were at about 3,600 feet above sea level. No adverse affects using two computers and checking the elevation dive tables that Grumpie gave me. The one thing that I was constantly watching during this trip was my GPS showing me elevation of where I was and where I planned to be in the next 12 hours following a dive. (taking the gondola in Banff from 5,000' up to 7,125' would have messed me up if I wasn't paying attention to my dive/sight-seeing schedule) I would usually plan my dives in the evening after our camp was set up and then my 12 hours of "no fly time" would have expired by the time we moved the next day.

We stayed at a different campsite every night of the 14 day trip and we saw a lot of cool stuff both above and below the water. I took photos of two big bull elk swimming across a river toward me. We saw a couple cow elk with calves, rocky mountain sheep and tons of white tail and mule deer. We did not see any bear but we did not go into "Many Glacier" where it is almost a guarantee to see them.

If anyone is planning a trip out there, give me a jingle and I can let you know what little bit that I know about the area. Getting the 10 tanks (including the pony bottle) into and out of Canada was no problem at all. I did run into a few divers out there and they all had the same question for me: "what agency did you get trained from that condones solo dives?"  I told them that none of the agencies that trained me condone solo diving but that some times "you gotta want it!" They rolled their eyes and quickly packed up their gear and left before anything happened to me. I will post links to the videos and photos after a bit.