The Many-Humped Serpent of Okanagan Lake
Ogopogo is described as a dark serpent six to fifteen meters long that raises a chain of humps as it swims, with a head likened to a horse or goat, dwelling in the 135-kilometer Okanagan Lake of interior British Columbia. Tradition places its lair in underwater caves near Squally Point by Rattlesnake Island on the lake's eastern shore.
Before it was a tourist monster it was a sacred being. The Syilx (Okanagan) people, in whose territory the lake lies, know the spirit of the lake as N'ha-a-itk — rendered also as n'x̌ax̌aitkʷ, the sacred spirit of the water. Paddlers crossing the waters off Squally Point offered salmon or small animals for safe passage. The tradition concerns the proper conduct between people and the water, and the flattening of N'ha-a-itk into "Ogopogo the cryptid" has drawn steady criticism from Syilx communities. Settler accounts begin in the 1870s, with early colonists such as Susan Allison leaving the first written descriptions.
The comic name was lifted from a 1924 British music-hall song and attached to the lake creature around 1926, the same year newspapers reported a crowd of bathers sighting it near Okanagan Mission. The best-known footage, shot by Art Folden in 1968, has since been analyzed as likely otters or a drifting log's wake. A green Ogopogo statue stands on the Kelowna waterfront, and in 2021 the City of Vernon, which held the Ogopogo copyright, transferred it to the Okanagan Nation Alliance, returning a measure of the story to its first tellers.
