This stop on our walking tour welcomes you with a hand-made wooden pier, perched high above the water, stretching out into this vast inland sea. In fact, these piers are the signature landmarks of Winnipeg Beach. Every spring for over a century, the builders painstakingly pound saplings into the sandy bottom of the lake to build these piers. And every fall, they take them down again, well before four feet of ice forms on the lake.
The point of the piers is to carry swimmers out to deeper water, over the few rocks that sometimes dot the shallows. The end of the piers offer a place to sit, contemplate jumping into the um, er, refreshing water, dry off or simply contemplate life while gazing over the lake. More than that, they look absolutely stunning in sunset photos, especially when the moon is on the rise.

Don Suposki whose family have been building the piers on lake Winnipeg for more than 100 years (Don himself for 62 years) said: “It takes about a hundred poles for each pier. The poles are pounded into the ground about two ­to­ three feet and then topped off nicely so they’re even across the top. For the farthest out poles, they need to be 16 or 17 feet long about four to six inches in diameter, and straight.” “When you build a pier, you pound in the poles, cut them to level, and then you put in the planking. The seating platform at the end of the pier is 16x16 feet. “There used to be a lot more piers. My crew and I used to put up 14 private piers and 13 public ones. Cottagers are very attached to their pole piers, and have been for a very long time. They are a way to get out past the rocky shoreline and out to the sandbars and deeper water for swimming. “It’s also about getting away from the mosquitos. Out on the lake, there aren’t any bugs.” He said he’s not sure when the people first started constructing the pole piers in the beach community, but his father was building them when he was a young man. “That’s got to be a hundred years ago or better.” One story is that the first piers were much smaller structures built by cottagers so they could walk out to their sailboats, which had to be moored beyond the sandbars in the shallow waters on the southwest shore of Lake Winnipeg.”

Revealing the many moods of the lake, the piers have been photographed and painted for over 100 years by summer residents as a record of their time at the beach.

Source for Don Suposki : The Manitoba Woodlot / writer Sheila Jones