Kamloops Lake in British Columbia, Canada is situated on the Thompson River just west of Kamloops. The lake is 1.6 km wide, 29 km long, and up to 152 m deep. In prehistoric time, the lake was much longer, perhaps 20x, with adjacent silt cliffs defining ancient lake bottoms 100 meters higher than present water levels. At the outlet near Savona, a large tumbled rock, gravel moraine indicates the toe of a glacier once melted away here. The community of Savona is located at the west end of the lake, near the Thompson River outlet. The city of Kamloops is located a few miles east of the head of the lake, at the confluence of the North and South Thompson Rivers. The name, Kamloops, derives from a local Indigenous word, Tk’emlúps, meaning a meeting of waters. The lake is bounded on all sides by steep hillsides, with level areas found only near creek deltas and around the inlet. On these hills, fresh, green grass feeds herds of Mule Deer and Rocky Mountain Sheep in the Spring. The Canadian National Railroad runs along the North shore, and the Canadian Pacific Railroad along the South shore. The surrounding land is mostly dedicated to Beef cattle ranching. It is classified as dry belt interior grasslands, Semi-arid desert, as it is in the rain shadow of the Coast Mountain Range, averaging only 10 inches of total precipitation a year. Vegetation is mostly bunchgrass and sagebrush, with pockets of Douglas fir, Ponderosa pine and spruce. Kamloops Lake is a widening and deepening of the Thompson River, which enters at the east end and exits at the west end. The limnology of the lake is controlled by the Thompson River, which has high fluctuations in annual flow, with over 60% occurring in the early summer during freshet (May to July). Lake levels rise naturally, as much as , on average, from winter lows till late June. Infrequent flood years have brought it up another 5 to 10 feet (2 - 4 m). Consequently, rare sandy beach areas expand by as much as in the summer as lake levels recede in July and August. Bulk residence times (the time it takes for the water in the lake to be replaced with new water), are very short, ranging from 20 days to 340 days, with a mean of 60 days. Because Kamloops Lake is fed by both the