Qualla: Sumas Prairie https://qualla.com/sumas-prairie en-us © 2026 Bendyline Thu, 24 Sep 2026 03:34:29 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/c/2/9/p/sumas-prairie-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Sumas Prairie https://qualla.com/sumas-prairie Sumas Prairie: Introduction https://qualla.com/sumas-prairie/ Photo credit Purpy Pupple, CC BY-SA 3.0. In November 2021 the lake returned. It filled the same shallow basin it had occupied for thousands of years, to roughly the same outline, and for a few days the satellite images of Sumas Prairie looked like photographs of a place that had stopped existing in 1924. Barns stood in open water. Highway 1 disappeared under it. The water came, improbably, from the Nooksack River in Washington State, which normally runs west to Bellingham Bay and which had decided, in a week of atmospheric rivers, to run north instead. This is the central fact about Sumas Prairie: it is not really a prairie. It is a lakebed with the plug pulled, held dry by pumps.

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Image: Purpy Pupple | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/c/2/9/p/sumas-prairie-wp/c29p-sumas-prairie-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Sumas Prairie: Sema:th Xhotsa https://qualla.com/sumas-prairie/ Photo credit Purpy Pupple, CC BY-SA 3.0. Before the canal, this was a shallow freshwater lake of about 4,000 hectares, ringed by wetlands, swelling far wider in flood season and shrinking in summer. Sturgeon, trout and salmon used it. Migrating birds bred in the marshes, and grizzlies came down to the shores. The Sema:t...

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Image: Purpy Pupple | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/c/2/9/p/sumas-prairie-wp/c29p-sumas-prairie-sema-th-xhotsa.mp3 0:06 2 full Sumas Prairie: The Engineering of an Absence https://qualla.com/sumas-prairie/ Photo credit Purpy Pupple, CC BY-SA 3.0. The great Fraser flood of 1894 made the argument, and the engineer Fred Sinclair drew up the plan. Between 1920 and 1924 the Chilliwack River was diverted into a new channel - the Vedder Canal - and the lake was drained north through the Sumas Drainage Canal into the Fraser. It w...

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Image: Purpy Pupple | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/c/2/9/p/sumas-prairie-wp/c29p-sumas-prairie-the-engineering-of-an-absence.mp3 0:06 3 full Sumas Prairie: Living Below the Waterline https://qualla.com/sumas-prairie/ Photo credit Purpy Pupple, CC BY-SA 3.0. What replaced the lake is farmland of real consequence - dairy, poultry, berries, corn - spread across a dead-flat basin between Abbotsford and Chilliwack, with Highway 1 running straight across the old lakebed. Administratively it was the District of Sumas until 1972, when it wa...

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Image: Purpy Pupple | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/c/2/9/p/sumas-prairie-wp/c29p-sumas-prairie-living-below-the-waterline.mp3 0:06 4 full Sumas Prairie: The Week the Water Won https://qualla.com/sumas-prairie/ Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Qyd assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain. The November 2021 flood became the costliest natural disaster in British Columbia's history - at least $450 million in insured damage, with total regional losses estimated in the billions. Eleven hundred homes in Abbotsford were evacuated, and ninety more in Huntingdon Village on...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Qyd assumed (based on copyright claims). | Public domain

]]> Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/c/2/9/p/sumas-prairie-wp/c29p-sumas-prairie-the-week-the-water-won.mp3 0:06 5 full