Rumours confirmed of car swallowed up by Lake Minnewanka in Alberta nearly a century ago

National Post

29-05-2025

It took only a few minutes of diving time for John Ryan and his team to confirm a decades-long rumour of a car resting on the bottom at the middle of Lake Minnewanka.
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A week ago, the Airdrie resident and his companions donned wetsuits and fell off an inflatable boat to scour the Banff National Park's lake for a car that had supposedly fallen through the ice in the late 1920s or early 1930s.
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At a depth of nearly 60 metres about four kilometers from shore, the ghostly sight of an Essex sedan, possibly of 1928 vintage, emerged in the silty, grey-green murk.
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'We found it in seven minutes, which is extremely rare,' said Ryan, adding the discovery was made in water with five metres of visibility.
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'The lake is slowly giving up its secrets and we're determined to get there.'
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Ryan and fellow divers Alan Keller and Brian Nadwidny had been tantalized by stories of a Saskatchewan photographer who'd driven his car far out onto the lake's ice and had set up his camera tripod when his vehicle broke through the ice, fortunately without him.
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The trio had recently received a tip from a man who had detected what could have been the lost car while searching for a body using side-scan sonar.
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'We obviously needed to dive for it, there was no two ways about it,' said Ryan.
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Using their own sonar device on board their boat, the men pinpointed the most likely site for the car in one of the deepest parts of the frigid lake and swiftly found it resting on the lake's silty bottom, the first time humans have laid eyes on it since its disappearance, said Ryan.
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'Being the first to see this dusty old car is the reason we do it (given) all the expense and time away from home,' he said.
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The old Detroit-built car has kept its park pass — metal in those days — and white Saskatchewan licence plates bearing the red numbers 48009.
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A shovel partly buried in silt can be glimpsed inside the car that initially appears in sturdy condition, 'but you can see the years have not been good to it,' said Ryan.
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The cars aren't the only sunken human artifacts hidden by the 20 km-long lake northeast of the Banff townsite.
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The ruins of the summer village of Minnewanka Landing, which was fully inundated in 1941 with the construction of a dam.
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It's a subterranean locale known well by scuba diver Ryan, who has floated along its streets that lie 18 metres below the lake's waves.
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'You can see the ruins of a hotel (dating to 1886), a stove, lanterns, a road, tree stumps and a sidewalk,' said Ryan.
But those ruins are well-travelled by divers, he said. Other undiscovered prizes remain somewhere much further from shore than the remains of the village.
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The rumour is, there might be two other cars sitting in Lake Minnewanka glacier-fed depths waiting to be discovered, said the Airdrie man.
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