Frame Lake is located in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada. It is an endorheic freshwater body located between the city's downtown section and a larger residential area. The Frame Lake Trail circles it, and city hall and the territorial legislative assembly building are on its shores.
Formed by meltwater after the end of the Wisconsin glaciation 20,000 years ago, Frame has been an important part of Yellowknife's history. The Dene in the area used it as a fishing spot before European settlement. In the early years of the city's growth, gold mines nearby dumped tailings in it and sometimes sewage. Later, when the city's New Town, now its downtown section, was surveyed and developed nearby, Frame offered accessible swimming and boating opportunities.
However, storm sewers diverted much of the runoff that fed it. Later development blocked the lake's only outflow, leaving it endorheicWhile the word "endorheic" has not been used to describe the lake, Woodall and Healey described it as having only seepage as its outflow, and later sources (such as Carleton) note that the 1970s construction of the causeway blocked the only outlet. and complicating the problems caused by earlier pollution. By the early 1970s it no longer supported any fish; within two decades residents had stopped swimming or boating it out of fear of leeches. Subsequent studies have shown that the lake completely eutrophied sometime in the mid-1990s. They have not, however, been able to determine whether that was due to climate change, pollution or some combination of both; the possibility exists that the lake has always been at a higher trophic state than others in the area.
Some city residents have agitated for efforts to reclaim the lake so it will once again be a destination for swimmers, anglers and boaters in warm weather. To do so, it will be necessary to reoxygenate the water to the point that fish can again inhabit its waters. This could be accomplished either by aeration or dredging, which would remove the accumulated rotted organic matter on the lake bed that currently renders it anoxic when the lake is frozen over in the winter.
Geography
Frame Lake is irregularly shaped, with a northern section and a southern section along a north-northeast to south-southwest axis approximately long, connected by a narrower central passage midway along its length where a wide peninsula extends from the western shore and an arm extends roughly to the east, curving northward. At their widest shorelines, both sections are roughly the same distance apart. Five small islands are located within the lake, three in the northern section and two in the southern section. Its total surface area is .
The lake lies at an elevation of . Surrounding terrain is gently undulating, with some of the small hills nearby cresting as high as and one of the islands rising to . Two unnamed streams drain into the lake south of the peninsula on the western side. The northerly of the two rises from drainage ditches surrounding the runways at Yellowknife Airport to the west, draining Robinson's Pond on the way to Frame Lake; the southerly has largely been channelized, draining Range Lake to the west, itself fed by a stream of similarly short length flowing into it from the west.
Surrounding terrain, as well as that of the islands, is primarily taiga forest, amid mostly bare outcrops of Canadian Shield bedrock typical of the Yellowknife area. Bare rock predominates on the shoreline, except for some shallow bays with weed beds. On the eastern shore, near the southern end of the lake, is an overgrown sandy area called McNiven Beach, after the city's first mayor.
The developed areas of Yellowknife form a "V" around the lake. On the eastern side, and the southern shore of the arm, is New Town, the city's modern downtown. Public buildings such as City Hall, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's local headquarters, and the Canadian Forces Northern Area Headquarters Yellowknife are situated along the south side of the arm, their associated lawns coming almost to the edge of the lake.
South of City Hall along the lake shore is Somba K'e Park, open space with the only totally developed portion of shoreline. Beyond it, the taiga and bedrock buffer the lake from the city, except for the dead end of residential Matonabee Road. The Frame Lake Trail, a partially paved pathway in length, closely follows the shoreline past an extensive area of forest. Just south of McNiven Beach is a recreational facility with an arena and pool, again close to the water's edge.
At the south end, another residential neighborhood comes near the lake, after which a rocky area buffers Stanton Regional Hospital. Commercial strip development along Old Airport Road also comes close, and the road itself runs alongside part of the lake's southwestern shore for . After it curves away to the west, the northwestern side and northern end of the lake are all taiga and bedrock between Frame and nearby Robinson's Pond and Jackfish Lake, with just the trail alongside.
Amid a park-like setting on the northeastern corner of the lake, and the northern shore of the western arm, stand two other large public buildings: the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre and Northwest Territories Legislative Assembly Building. The two are connected via paths and driveways through the intervening taiga and bedrock. A causeway carries the Frame Lake Trail across the tip of the arm, where the Northern Frontier Visitor Centre overlooks the lake.
History
Formed by the retreat of the glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age, Frame Lake remained a relatively pure lake even as the area was settled and modern development impinged on it. The closure of its only outlet around 1970, however, led swiftly to its decline and eutrophication. By the end of the 20th century it could no longer support fish and was not being used for primary recreational purposes. Attempts to revive it started in the 2010s.
Prehistory–1934: Before European settlement
Like many of the lakes in the Northwest Territories (NWT), Frame is glacial in origin. During the Wisconsin Glaciation, the last ice age, glaciers covered almost all of today's Western Canada. As they retreated about 20,000 years ago, they left large lakes of meltwater behind. One, known today as Lake McConnell, covered almost all of the western NWT as well as adjacent regions of what is now Alberta and Saskatchewan. By 8,000 years ago, it had drained and evaporated to the point that only small remnants were left, such as Athabasca, Great Bear and Great Slave Lakes. Along with those larger lakes were smaller lakes like Frame, where fine sand that accumulated in depressions formed the lake bed.
Human use of the lake began with the Dene, the First Nations in the region, whose ancestors settled there around 7,500 years ago.Frozen Ground, 5 The Yellowknife band, who would later give their name to the city, found the lake abundant with pike, suckers and whitefish. While they did not settle on its shores, they established a fishing camp there.
1934–1992: Growth years and lake decline
The descendants of European settlers began coming to the area of the lake in the early 20th century, first using it as a staging area for bush pilots flying to mining camps and settlements further north. In the mid-1930s, abundant gold deposits in the area triggered the establishment of Yellowknife as a permanent settlement. While at the time development was concentrated on the peninsula extending into Great Slave Lake's Yellowknife Bay, an area known today as Old Town, later analysis of lake sediments lends some support to accounts from that time of Frame Lake being used for the disposal of tailings and sewage from outlying mines. The lake took its name from Bill Frame, an early miner who owned part of the city's bus and taxi franchise.
Yellowknife's growth was briefly interrupted by World War II, but when it resumed afterwards, the higher ground closer to the lake was chosen for expansion. The area just east of the lake became New Town, today the city's downtown. McNiven Beach, named after the city's first mayor, was developed with facilities for swimming; sometimes floatplanes landed nearby as well. Residents also went boating on the lake.
At the same time, runoff from storms carried increasingly nutrient-rich waters into the lake. In colder months when the lake surface was not frozen over, the city dumped plowed snow into the lake, adding even more nutrients. Sewage dumped into nearby Niven Lake, heavily used for that purpose for almost 35 years of Yellowknife's postwar growth, may also have flowed into Frame, offering more nutrients.
By the early 1970s the lake's decline had been noted. A later study by the earth science department at Carleton University concluded that the 1970 construction of the causeway across the end of the lake's eastern arm was the "tipping point" for Frame Lake. It cut off the stream between it and Niven Lake to the north, the only outlet the lake had had during human habitation of the area. With the lack of water throughput, nutrient levels in the water column rose, nurturing aquatic plants during the summertime. In the winter, however, when the lake froze over and snow cover blocked much of the limited sunlight available,Due to its high northern latitude, Yellowknife receives as little as four hours of daylight during the weeks around the winter solstice. those same plants died off for lack of ability to photosynthesize. The decomposed plant matter began accumulating on the lake floor, steadily deoxygenating its waters.
In a 1973 limnological study of seven lakes in the Yellowknife area, including Frame, for a possible experimental fishery, scientists from the Fisheries Research Board noted that Frame was the only one in which they were unable to catch any fish for study.Woodall and Healey, 14. Over the preceding winter, they also observed that the lake had "become rapidly anoxic".Woodall and Healey, 6.
As the lake declined, development came closer. Yellowknife built its current city hall by the lake edge in 1975, and the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre, the territorial museum, followed nearby four years later. Sometime later that decade, the number of swimmers at McNiven Beach declined sufficiently for the city to remove the facilities there, as the beach itself began to grow over with grass.
Residents were still swimming and boating in the lake in the early 1980s, but in smaller numbers. Some were scared off by reports of leeches that had in one instance supposedly covered an entire child. A local journalist recalled in 2015 how he had had to watch his step to avoid deep, malodorous deposits while catching tadpoles in the shallow waters near his home at that time. Later the Frame Lake South area was developed for residential and commercial use as the city grew. Storm sewers installed for these projects diverted the runoff that had once fed the lake, increasing the concentration of nutrients in the water.
1993–present: Reclamation attempts
The Northwest Territories Legislative Assembly moved into its new building, designed to preserve as much of the original shoreline and vegetation as possible,Frozen Ground, 35 on the north shore of the lake in 1993. By then, all recreational use of the lake itself had ended. Many residents were too leery of leeches, which thrived in the lake in the absence of fish preying on them, to enter the water. Instead, the lake became the focus of the Frame Lake Trail, a partially paved path around the entire shoreline, which soon became popular for walking and jogging.