On October 20, 2013, my dive buddy Eduardo Baena and me traveled 800km round trip to observe microbialites in Pavilion Lake, located on Hwy 99 about 40km North of Cache Creek.
It was a beautiful fall day with a temperature around 14 Celcius.
The lake is right alongside the south side of the highway, with access down a short slope. There are no facilities on site. There's an island about 10m offshore and the depth around the entry is shallow. It's possible to wade across to the island.
Enter the water and swim in a South-Easterly direction around the island to its Southern tip. Descend and swim toward the nearby "resort" on roughly a 330 degree compass heading. There is a gentle slope down to the 22m contour line and if you swim this contour, you'll run into some very big microbialite formations reported to be up to 11,000 years old.
Visibility was excellent, probably around 20-30m. Water temperature at depth was about 10 Celcius.
Check out the You Tube video on our Dive Sites, Videos and Resources page.
What the heck are microbialites?
We suggest that you wiki Pavilion Lake to read up on it. Here's a link.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavilion_Lake_Research_Project
And this is what BC Parks says about diving Pavilion Lake.
http://www.pavilionlake.com/pdf/BCParksPavilionLake.pdf
Finally, here's a photo gallery. You can see more and higher quality pics on Eduardo's website when he posts them.
