Lake
Lake Kashagawigamog (an Anishnaabeg name meaning “lake of long and winding waters”) has been used by people for centuries. It was an important passageway for First Nations travelling to traditional hunting grounds and for early European settlers who arrived on the lake in the late 1800s. It was a chosen transportation route for lumber to be delivered south during the early lumbering years. Lake Kashagawigamog and adjoining Canning Lake were also the first waterway links between the villages of Minden and Haliburton before the primary roads were completed in 1868.
Lake Kashagawigamog may be separated into two or three distinctive sections: the west or south basin and the east or north basin, which can then be separated beyond the narrows to an area to the north known as Grass Lake. Lake Kashagawigamog has a surface area of 2,019 acres; its maximum depth is 130 feet with a mean depth of 42.5 feet; its shoreline length (perimeter) is 34.4 km plus another .8 km around Puffer Island; and is 13 km in length.
Lake Kashagawigamog is part of a five lake chain within the Drag Lake watershed. Drag Lake represents the headwater basin in the watershed with waters flowing from Drag Lake to Head Lake and then to Lake Kashagawigamog through its northern basin known as Grass Lake. The final lake in the chain, at the outlet of Kashagawigamog is Canning Lake where its waters enter the Burnt River. From the Burnt, waters flow to Cameron and Balsam Lakes and on to the Trent Severn Waterway. Water levels in the Drag Lake Watershed are controlled at two points; through a Dam at the southern end of Drag Lake, and therefore affecting inflows to Lake Kashagawigamog, and through a dam at Canning Lake (the outflow dam) known as Scotts Dam, which more directly influences the water levels of Lake Kashagawigamog.
The Drag Lake watershed size is approximately 1,300 km2 and lies within the northern portion of the ecotone or region known as The Land Between. An ecotone is a transition zone between two distinct ecoregions: the watershed and Lake Kashagawigamog itself are found in this contact zone between the lakes of the Canadian Shield that are primarily of igneous rock and the lakes of the St. Lawrence Lowlands that are primarily of sedimentary rock. The meeting of these bedrock types influences the chemistry of the lake as the contact zone lies centrally across the Kashagawigamog lake basin.
As a result of the chemical processes that occurred at the contact zone, the wide band of igneous rock was slower to cool resulting in the formation of crystals within the rock, such as orthoclase, feldspar, mica and quartz. The extreme physical pressure as the two rock deposits pushed against one another resulted in some metamorphosis (i.e. change in chemistry and structure) of the sedimentary rock from limestone to dolomite, diorite and quartzite and, ultimately, to the production of minerals, such as copper, galena and pyrite.
Source: Kashagawigamog Lake Report, Lake Kashagawigamog Organization, 2012
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