Methane bubbles frozen in stacks under clear ice, and you walk on top of them
The lake is not natural: Calgary Power, now TransAlta, put the Bighorn Dam across the North Saskatchewan in 1972 and filled 53.7 square kilometres, 32 kilometres long. It took the glacial blue of the real mountain lakes anyway, because the same rock flour comes down the same river. The thing people come for happens under the ice. Plants rotting on the bottom give off methane, the bubbles rise, and the lake freezes from the top down and catches them where they were: stacks of white discs held in clear ice, metres deep, that you walk over. It is usually frozen by late December and the bubbles show best from mid-January to mid-February. The lake carries the name of Silas Abraham, a Stoney Nakoda man who farmed and hunted this country. Wind-scoured ice is hard ice: check thickness, and do not go out alone.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
