Grande Prairie Lakes Worth the Gas, Ranked

Every family in the Peace Country has a lake, and every family is wrong about everyone else's. This is not a problem to be solved. It is a regional pastime, like complaining about Highway 43 or pretending the second week of June is summer.

Still, some opinions are better than others. Here are mine.

Start close. Saskatoon Lake, west of the city past Wembley, is the one you can do after work. Saskatoon Island Provincial Park sits on its edge, with a campground, shade and the trumpeter swans that keep showing up on postcards. Bring binoculars. The swans are the point. The lake itself is shallow and warms early, which is lovely in June and less lovely by August, when it can turn the colour of pea soup and the province occasionally posts a sign suggesting you stay out. Swim early in the season. Walk the shoreline later. Pick saskatoons in between, if the birds have left you any.

Sturgeon Lake is the serious one. It is about an hour east, near Valleyview, big enough to have weather of its own and moody enough to show it. Young's Point and Williamson provincial parks both sit on its shores, and on a calm July morning the water goes flat and silver and boats slide out after walleye, pike and perch. On a windy afternoon it goes grey and choppy, and the people in small aluminum boats start to reconsider their life choices. It is the closest thing the region has to a proper lake holiday: sandy edges, a long horizon, the smell of sunscreen and two-stroke exhaust. Worth the drive. Book the campsite before you think you need to.

Moonshine Lake, northwest near Spirit River, is smaller, tidier and stocked with rainbow trout, which makes it the best place to take a child who has never caught anything and needs to, badly, before they lose interest in fishing forever. The provincial park is well kept and calm. It is not dramatic. That is its whole appeal.

Bear Lake, just northwest of town, gets mentioned mostly by people who live near it. It is shallow and reedy, better for birds than for swimming, and a perfectly honest place to watch a sunset without committing to a weekend.

Then there is Two Lakes, far to the south down a long gravel road that rewards patience and punishes low-profile tires. It is quiet, cold and properly wild, ringed with spruce, the kind of place where you can cast for trout without hearing anything but a loon and your own bad technique. Nobody goes there by accident. Bring everything, including a spare. Cell service is a rumour.

A few notes from experience. Peace Country water stays cold longer than your optimism does. The first truly swimmable week tends to arrive in July, and it sometimes leaves without saying goodbye. Fishing rules change, sometimes lake by lake and year by year, so read the current Alberta regulations before you wet a line rather than trusting your uncle. Mosquitoes are not a phase. And September, with the crowds gone, the bugs knocked back and the poplars going gold along the shore, is better than August at nearly every one of these places. Hardly anyone believes this until they try it.

If I had one day and one tank of gas, I would go to Sturgeon. If I had one evening, Saskatoon Island, for the swans lifting off the water at dusk with that low, brass-section call. If I had a week and a good spare tire, Two Lakes.

And if you disagree, you are welcome to your lake. Mine still has the better sunset.