Epoxy

Nimpo Lake

West Chilcotin, British Columbia, Canada

Also known as West Chilcotin, Anahim Lake, Highway 20, Chilcotin Plateauf

The bays on this lake have names because the pilots needed them.

Nimpo is called the floatplane capital of British Columbia and is the home base of the BC Floatplane Association. More than a hundred lakes, rivers and streams sit within about twenty five minutes flying time, with next to no road access to any of them, so the aircraft is the way in. Enough of them come and go that the arms of the lake are distinguished in ordinary use. North Arm at one end of the main body, South Arm at the other, and Short Arm on the east side where the floatplane base sits.

The lake runs a little over eleven kilometres with a surface of about ten square kilometres. The rainbow trout here are wild rather than stocked, and good enough that Nimpo hosted the Commonwealth Fly Fishing Championships in 1993.

Highway 20 came through in the 1950s. The hardest stretch of it, down to the coast west of here, was cut by local volunteers who got tired of waiting.

Details

Feature: Lake
Build: Epoxy
Material: Solid Walnut
Colour: Caribbean Blue
Size: 10-1/2" x 16"
Completed: December 2024

Shop this Style $350.00 CAD

How this one was made

Walnut, and not wall to wall. The dam follows the waterline about half an inch out, so the flood runs along the shore and the rest of the face stays bare wood.

Nimpo makes that a long job for a lake of its size. It is all arms. A main body running across the board, a north arm reaching up past the top corner, a short arm off the east side, and a scatter of small bays and islands where they meet. Every one of those gets dammed on both sides. The far north end thins down to a channel only a few millimetres wide, and there the two dam lines are close enough together to be most of the water.

Two colours, the water and the engraved text. The compass arrow and the two star markers are small cavities with fine outlines that cannot be dammed at that size, so they were filled by syringe before the main pour.