Horsefly Lake (Lake Only)

The lake is named after the flies. Nobody has ever dressed it up as anything else.

Horsefly first appeared on a map in 1871, in a publication by Joseph Trutch, and the name is credited simply to how many horseflies work this country through the summer. Prospectors had been on the river since 1859 and were in a good position to judge.

The lake is deeper than it looks. Six hundred and thirty two feet at its deepest and over two hundred on average, sunk into the line where the Cariboo Plateau to the west meets the Cariboo Mountains to the east. Ice followed that boundary and gouged out the trough the water now sits in.

Its northern neighbour did better still. Quesnel Lake, which Horsefly drains toward, bottoms out at 511 metres and is generally reckoned the deepest fjord lake in the world.