Dried Meat Lake, Tillicum Beach

In early August, we went to try our luck at Dried Meat Lake. While it looks like you could DIY an entry at the north and south ends, we opted for the boat launch at Tillicum Beach, halfway down the eastern edge.

The launch is pretty good, with a cement ramp that get deep pretty quickly as well as a dock and a gravel beach beside it. There is lots of parking and up the hill behind, you can find pit toilets and a playground (and garter snakes!). The end of the launch has a sharp drop off.

We went south down the eastern shore. The "beach" part of Tillicum Beach is pretty overstated. There is a sandyish part just south of the boat launch but the water was way too weedy to swim in (thick weed beds up to 100 feet from shore).

The weed beds were a real drag and we ended up paddling fairly far off shore to avoid them. The lake is 20km roughly north-south and even a modest breeze meant we had some good waves. The width varies from 500m to 1 km. We went south off the launch towards what looked like an estuary.

The eastern shore basically looks like this: rocky edge with a mix of forest and fields.

We went about 2.5km south to the opening of the creek. There were some birds. The creek itself was pretty weedy and we didn't get very far before we gave up.

After a quick snack, we ferried across to the western shore to try and get out of the wind for the grind back north. Again, the weeds made it very hard going and we ended up pretty far off shore fighting the wind (which was better than fighting the weeds).

Overall, a pretty so-so paddle and I probably wouldn't go back. To the west is Coal Lake and to the south and southwest you can find the Chain Lakes, Lacombe Lake, and Buffalo Lake, all of which offer a better paddle.