Kalamalka Lake Visibly Low
September 25 2026 - At Kal Beach the waterline has dropped. New sandbars have appeared. Gulls are standing on mud that was recently underwater.
The new Kal pier steel pilings seem taller, a possibly clue how far the lake level has fallen.
At Kalamalka's north end, the outflow into Lower Vernon Creek appears dry, leaving the creek that runs through Polson Park draining Kal into Okanagan Lake at Okanagan Landing. appears completely dry in places as well.
Drought is not new in the North Okanagan.
The Okanagan Basin Water Board, the OBWB, which coordinates water issues among local governments in the valley, and those governments have described a multi-year drought since the early 2020s.
By summer 2026 they were calling it the fourth consecutive year.
Anna Warwick Sears, a water scientist and former head of the OBWB, has said publicly that the last three years are the most extreme since consistent records began around 1925.
Vernon precipitation records begin in 1893. Systematic snowpack measurements for the basin are more recent.
Tree-ring studies cover a much longer period.
Emma Watson and Brian Luckman used Douglas-fir and ponderosa pine from the southern Interior. Their 2004 study is not a record of Kalamalka Lake itself but it estimates whether the region had enough moisture, year after year.
The reconstruction shows wet and dry periods.
Longer dry intervals include years 1717–1732, 1839–1859, and 1917–1941.
In that research, the drought of the 1920s and 1930s is the longest in about 300 years.
Shorter dry periods appear in the 1580s, the 1600s, and the late 1800s.
In the local record, 1951 was a severe North Okanagan drought year.
Wet periods also occur. The 1980s to the mid-2000s were wetter. Conditions have been drier again since about 2015.
The Okanagan has gone years, and sometimes a decade or two, without enough water.
In late September the Okanagan was the only region in B.C. still at the province’s Drought Level 4.
The North Okanagan has lived through dry decades before. Nobody living off these lakes wants to find out they are in another one.
Kalamalka Lake Visibly Low
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