How the Lake Was Built.

The Lake in the Desert

I'd been skiing competitively for years — national championships, Canadian records, the whole circuit. But I'd always skied on natural lakes. You take what the wind gives you, you work around the weeds, and you hope the surface holds for your run. Every serious skier in Canada knew the same frustration: we didn't have what the Americans had.

Then I went to California.

A friend told me about a man who had built a private ski lake near Barstow, out in the Mojave Desert. I drove out to see it — Horton's Lake. And there it was — a purpose-built lake, carved out of nothing, sitting in the middle of dry scrub and sand. Perfect water. No wind. No weeds. No shoreline development pushing waves into the course. Just a man-made lake designed for one thing: waterskiing.

"I can do that."

— Ken Nelson, standing at Horton's Lake near Barstow, California

That was the moment. Standing at the edge of Horton's Lake in the desert, I looked at what he'd built and thought: I can do this in Alberta. I didn't know where. I didn't know when. But I knew I was going to build a lake.

Years of Looking

What followed was years of searching. I'd had a previous ski site in Alberta — a place where I trained and coached — but it was reclaimed for resource development. Gone. So I started over.

I worked for Alberta Environment, which meant I had access to aerial photography of the province. I spent hours studying those images, looking for land with the right topography — flat enough to hold water, sheltered enough to block wind, close enough to Edmonton that people could actually get there. I found plenty of sites that looked right from the air. But most of what would have suited simply wasn't available. Wrong ownership, wrong zoning, wrong timing. Year after year, the lake stayed in my head and nowhere else.

Winter. A White Landscape. "I Think This Is It."

One property had stood out from the aerial surveys — a piece of land southwest of Edmonton, down in the North Saskatchewan River valley. I'd flagged it. It had the right shape, the right shelter, the right proximity. But I hadn't seen it in person.

It was winter when I finally drove past it — I had my son Mark in the car, on our way out to Rabbit Hill for snow ski training. Snow covered everything. You couldn't see the ground, couldn't see the contours, couldn't see the two small ponds that sat on the property. Just white.

But I knew what was under that snow. I'd studied the aerials. And standing there looking at it, even in winter, I could see the lake. I could see the shoreline, the dock, the course. Years of searching, and I was looking at the answer.

An Abandoned Gravel Pit

The property turned out to be a former gravel pit. It had been inactive for ten years — no equipment, no activity, nothing. The company that owned it had gone under, and the bank had foreclosed on the land. Forty-two acres sitting in the North Saskatchewan River valley, doing absolutely nothing.

I bought it from the bank.

That summer, Mark and I walked the entire property together — every corner, every slope, every depression. The two small ponds left over from the gravel operation were nowhere near big enough for a competition lake. But the topography was right. The soil was right. The wind protection from the valley walls was exactly what I needed. I could see 2,100 feet of still water where other people saw mud and cattails.

Excavators, Dump Trucks, and the Alberta Environment Department

Building a lake in the North Saskatchewan River valley doesn't happen by just digging a hole. The river valley is environmentally protected. Every plan, every grade, every cubic metre of earth had to be drafted, submitted, and approved by the Alberta environment department. It took time. It took patience. It took a stack of paperwork that would have discouraged most people before the first shovel went in the ground.

But I'd waited thirteen years. I could wait a little longer for a permit.

When the approvals came through, the heavy equipment moved in. Excavators. Dump trucks. We took those two small gravel ponds and began transforming them into a single competition-grade lake — 2,100 feet long, with a shaped shoreline designed to reduce wind chop and wave rebound. I'd studied lake design. I'd studied what made Horton's Lake in California work. I knew that the shoreline geometry mattered as much as the water itself.

The lake filled by the following summer. Clean water. Still surface. The first time I stood on the dock and looked down 2,100 feet of glass, I knew every year of searching had been worth it.

The Hundred-Year Flood

Within months of the lake being completed, the North Saskatchewan River flooded. Not a minor spring swell — a hundred-year flood. The river rose and swallowed the entire property. The lake, the dock, the shoreline work, the course — all of it was underwater. Everything I'd built was gone beneath the brown, churning river.

I stood on the bank and watched.

When the water receded, the damage was severe. Sediment everywhere. Shoreline eroded. Equipment buried in mud. We cut a channel in the bank to drain the standing floodwater off the property, and then we went to work. Repairs. Cleanup. Rebuilding what the river had taken.

Some people would have walked away. I'd spent thirteen years finding this land and a year building this lake. I wasn't going to let a river take it.

Barefoot Championships

Within a couple of months of the flood — the lake cleaned up, the dock rebuilt, the course reinstalled — Shalom Park hosted its first tournament. The Canadian National Barefoot Championships. The first competitive event ever held on this water.

Think about that. A piece of land that was an abandoned gravel pit a year earlier. A lake that had been swallowed by a hundred-year flood weeks before. And now, the best barefoot skiers in Canada were competing on it.

That was 1986. The lake has hosted the Junior World Water Ski Championships, Pro Tour events, the Canadian Open, Canadian Nationals, and the U21 World Championships since then. My grandsons Sean and Evan both won World Championship medals on this lake in 2019 — on the same water I'd seen from a highway in winter, covered in snow, when nobody else could see anything at all.

"It has been my mission for the past 40 years to share the joy of water skiing with all who are willing to give it a try."

— Ken Nelson

More than 3,000 people have learned to ski here. Five-year-olds. Seventy-five-year-olds. Corporate groups who've never touched a rope. Families who come back every summer. The lake that started as a vision at the edge of the Mojave Desert and almost died in a flood has become Canada's premier waterski facility.

And we would love to have you come and play with us.