04/01/2026
Our intrepid photographer has caught a rare sighting of “Wessie” the “thought to be extinct plesiosaur” that has been reported sporadically in West Lake as long ago as the early European settlement times of 1784.
We are all familiar with the beast reputed to inhabit Loch Ness, so is it so surprising that a similar ancient specimen might inhabit our own West Lake? And that of “Champ” in the similar Canadian geology of Lake Champlain?
Skeptics suggest that no such cold-blooded reptilian creatures could have survived the many ice ages in North America since they last roamed the earth over 200 million years ago. The climate in Prince Edward County in those primordial days was tropical, as seen by the many Ordovician fossils at West Point, and the powers of the earth to carve hidden recesses into the region’s limestone Karst topography over the past 200 million years where unknown and undiscovered species may still lurk, are still being revealed today.
And over those millennia, after the ice dams broke on Glacial Lake Iroquois, the bounty of salmon, sturgeon and whitefish found in newly-formed Lake Ontario 10,000 years ago would have easily supported such a family of behemoths.
Park Naturalist Avril Fuelis dismisses this fanciful tale… but why else would the Park warn of the hidden dangers of the sudden drop-off into the dark and foreboding waters of West Lake at Dunes Beach?
