Cameron Lake Monster Expedition
Posted by: Loren Coleman on September 18th, 2009
What lies beneath the surface of Cameron Lake?
An important expedition takes off on Friday to conduct a search of Cameron Lake, in response to a number of recent sightings of a long, slender eel-like creature.
Then, all day on Saturday, Sept. 19, 2009, the expedition members will have a chance to explore the lake, which is located about 20 kilometres east of Port Alberni.
“Our organization has received reports coming from Cameron Lake since 2004,” said John Kirk (above), co-founder of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club (BCSCC) and author of In the Domain of the Lake Monsters.
“Witnesses have been describing what looks like a dark creature in the lake,” Kirk said.
Kirk, Adam H. McGirr (above), and the crew of researchers are traveling to Cameron Lake to look for scientific evidence of the creature. The team will spend the large part of the weekend traversing the lake in a boat, attempting to lure the creature to the surface and get a visual sighting.
They have been planning to explore the lake since a 2007 sighting by Bridget Horvath, who noticed a strange wake in the water and three objects or creatures going in a circle.
“British Columbia is number one in the world for lake monster sightings,” Kirk said. “There are 39 lakes in B.C. where some type of creature has been seen.”
In 2004, a woman and her father reported to Kirk’s organization that they had seen a very large, long black creature in Cameron Lake. The creature swam along the lake near Highway 4 and the two were able to see it from their car until the highway veered away from the lake.
The BCSCC, truly today an international organization, was founded in 1989. Elusive creatures, such as lake monsters and Sasquatch, are known as cryptids and their study is called cryptozoology, from the Greek kryptos for “hidden” combined with “zoology,” the study of animals.
Kirk spent time on Okanagan Lake during the summer of 2009, in search of Ogopogo, one of many expeditions conducted by his organization. Kirk is also chairman of the Crypto Safari Organization which sends investigators around the world, and has traveled to Africa as part of research teams in search of living dinosaurs.
Besides numerous sightings of the Cameron Lake monster, Vancouver Island has been the location of Sasquatch sightings, and a film and History Channel program based on the elusive animal, as well as home to specialists in the field.
Details of the expedition have appeared in many Canadian newspapers. Here is a link to one.
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Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
What are the dimensions of this lake? And how deep is this lake? I seem to recall Cameron Lake being really, really shallow.
It’s a good sized lake, and yeah, looks kind of shallow in comparison to other lakes characteristic of the region which was recently, geologically speaking, under the influence of glaciation, and which are fjiord-like. This lake, which is very easy to spot using google earth (30 miles west of Pt Albiernie on Vancouver Island), was probably modified to hold more water by logging operations which dominated the region, and so it is probably heavily sedimented and contains a fair number of sinkers and waterlogged tree sections, which on occasion can re-surface in a mysterious fashion, not to mention more recent logs which could have been washed into the lake during flooding events. It is connected to the ocean (which is home to some very large creatures such as the giant pacific octopus) through its outlet and so the possibility of something anadromous or catadromous making it up into the lake and finding the cold dark mud a suitable place to spend a part of its presumed life-cycle would be an interesting prospect…eels, y’know.
If you inspect the lake using Google Earth you’ll notice there are quite a few nice pics of the lake. Typical second growth cascadian setting…very nice…but then lakes are particularly subject to atmospheric illusions like fata morgana and of course wakes from boats or waves, which in the right condition look very sinuous on the surface as they move with an almost serpentine fluid motion, naturally enough.
My thoughts are that if this were a particularly large eel or lamprey or hagfish or some other mud-lovin’ critter of unusual size, it’s likely doing what they are sometimes noted for doing in the oceanic realm, which is waiting in the dark cold mud using minimal energy until the environmental signals which tell it that it’s time to feed, fight, flee or..uh,..reproduce, stimulate them. I hope those examing the lake have a good time, good weather and good luck. It’s a beautiful time of the year as the vine maples that are typical along the lake shores there become brilliant red.
Rainier,
This Cameron Lake on Vancouver Island is about 6 km long and averages 1 km wide, and has a max depth of 43 metres.
There is another Cameron Lake in BC which is West of Arrow Lake, just 35 hectares in size, with a mean depth of 4.2 m and max of 12.5m; and there is at least one other Cameron Lake in Canada. W