The place file / Freshwater Salty
Gimli,
Manitoba
An Icelandic town on a prairie lake bigger than Lake Ontario.
A Boeing 767 once landed here with no fuel in it.
Salty Seniors place guide
Could I live here?The draw
A lake you can’t see across
The catch
January, at minus 23
The question
Is an hour from Winnipeg enough?
Named for where you go after the end of the world
In Norse mythology, Gimli is the hall where the survivors go to live after the end of the world. In 1875 a few hundred Icelanders, leaving behind a volcanic eruption and several bad years, gave the name to a stretch of shoreline on Lake Winnipeg. They called the colony New Iceland and ran it under their own constitution for about a decade.
The lake is bigger than Lake Ontario. You can’t see the other side.
On July 23, 1983, an Air Canada 767 ran out of fuel at 41,000 feet, because someone had done the arithmetic in pounds instead of kilograms. The pilots glided it down onto the old air force runway at Gimli, which was being used that day as a racetrack. Everyone lived. There is a museum.
Crown Royal is distilled at the edge of town, where about a million and a half barrels are aging in warehouses. It does not offer public tours.
Each July the film festival stands a screen in the lake, and people watch from the beach.
They arrived in October 1875. Winter arrived shortly after. Their descendants are still here.
What stays open year-round?
The town does. The beach doesn’t. About 2,300 people live here all year, so the grocery store, the pharmacy and the hospital stay open. The patios and a good many of the shops near the harbour close after Thanksgiving, when the cottagers go home to Winnipeg. In late summer check the beach reports before you swim. Lake Winnipeg gets blue-green algae, and the province posts advisories.
What will winter ask of you?
A block heater and a hobby. January averages a high of −12°C and a low of −23°C, and the lake freezes hard enough to drive on. So people drive on it. There are fishing shacks, snowmobiles, and a festival in March with car racing on the ice and a frozen fish toss.
How close is the care you need?
Gimli has its own hospital, Johnson Memorial, with an emergency department that runs around the clock. Rural emergency rooms in Manitoba have been short of staff in recent years, so it is worth knowing where the hours are posted. Winnipeg’s hospitals are about an hour south.
Could you live without a car?
In town, in summer, mostly. It is flat, small and laid out on a grid. In January, at −23°C, a ten-minute walk is a different proposal. The city is 90 km away and there is no train. You will want a car, and you will want it to start.
What does a house cost?
It depends how close you want to be to the water. Lakefront costs real money. A few blocks back costs a good deal less. For scale, the average Manitoba house sold for about $400,000 in 2026. Many of the buyers here are Winnipeggers who came for weekends and stopped going home.
How do you get there?
Drive north from Winnipeg for about an hour on Highway 8 or 9. That is the whole of it. Winnipeg has the airport. There is no train. There is a harbour, if you would rather arrive by boat.
