The Past 12 Months

 

Here is a brief summary of some of the events and happenings in the past 12 months. For more in depth information on any of these subjects, please delve into our growing list of webpages.

 

Listening to you, our neighbours, we were disturbed to hear of a local wetland where large equipment was used to install culvert pipes to presumably drain the wetland.  By checking carefully and assembling all the facts available we are able to write this story, as we understand it be. You will read about how our neighbours were successful in registering a complaint with our Bylaw office and what happened as a result. This information appears at the end of our existing web page, “Wetland”, in which we previously covered the pressing world-wide issue of trying to preserve wetlands and even create new wetlands.  We also created a new page called “Draining a Wetland”.

 

In November of 2022, a front page story appeared in the Coast Reporter concerning elevated arsenic levels in treated domestic water pumped from a local well.  A “do not use” notice was subsequently issued by Vancouver Coastal Health.  This is not the first nor is it likely to be the last time that reports of high arsenic levels in some sources of drinking water emerge in such a public fashion. Every time this issue surfaces, we are all faced with the same question: what’s going on?  As always, our response is to gather information and share it with you here in the hope that we can better understand this potentially serious health issue. We created a new page called “Arsenic”.

 

We updated our page: “Common Loon” which included worrisome information that we have not seen a mating pair of Loon’s on Hotel Lake during the past 11 years. This year we had a number of adult Loon sightings but sadly no mating pairs and no young chicks were seen.

 

Reni Ducich shared a stunning photo of a Rosevelt Elk taken in January on Sinclair Bay Road.  By coincidence a female (cow) elk was also caught on camera beside Beaumont Road in the early morning of January 15th. We plan to do a page on this species in the future.

 

Babesiosis: new tick-borne disease similar to malaria called babesiosis was reported in Canada.  It is a parasite called babesia that is transmitted primarily through the bite of black-legged ticks and it infects human blood cells. We added this information in an update on our “Tick and Lyme Disease” page.

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On May 13 we received word that the long-awaited peamouth chub spawning event was happening late that afternoon at the mouth of Hotel Creek. This information is published on our “Fish and Fisheries” page.

 

On May 22  Jim Little, on the south shore, alerted us to a pale grey bio-mass (looked like large rice noodles), each about 6 inches long and about 3/4" in diameter and with a jelly-like consistency, growing on a dock rope. A new webpage “Dragonflies and Damselflies” shed light on this subject.

 

Early in July we were visited by UBC Professor Evgeny Pakhomov, and his associate Dr. Florian Lüskow. That visit was essentially a training session on land and on the lake to qualify six local volunteers to take samples and record data about jellyfish in Hotel Lake. Between July and September, seventeen sample/data operations dubbed “stations” were carried out on the lake by the volunteers.

 

Hotel Lake wetland:  In late in August, after a long period of dry weather, the water table and the lake level were both very low.  Similarly affected was the wetland at the east end of Hotel Lake along with it’s associated creeks, which were dry. Inland these dry watercourses are about a half-metre wide and approaching the lake shore they widen to about a metre and have a boggy bottom and, in the last few meters before the lake, they cradle shallow lake water at the mouth. We added an updated depiction of this wetland along with photos on our page titled: “Wetlands”

 

Roads: Unresolved concerns about our road infrastructure are ongoing. These roads are narrow and, in most places, lack pedestrian walking space. The Mixal Lake curve has cause great concern. Also our roads seem to be plagued with subsidence issues and sink holes (remember: Great Hotel Lake Sinkhole). Recently, these narrow roads have also been used by some as lakeside campgrounds. The unregulated recreational use of road allowances as campgrounds, will put even greater pressure on these already-stressed public roadways, not to mention the road-side/lake-side riparian areas and the wildlife that live in and around Hotel Lake.

 

Following the UBC Jellyfish project, we saw how the efforts of local volunteers made a great contribution to further scientific understanding.  We published a new page:  "UBC Study of Freshwater Jellyfish",  which covers this volunteer-enabled project.

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Over the past year we documented the steady decline in water level in Hotel Lake.  As our data shows, at the end of September, the lake was considerably lower than usual.  This might be a good time to build on the experiences of volunteers working with UBC to see if a system of routine observation and  testing of Hotel Lake water is feasible. As you will read below, such an opportunity exixts!