Huntington Lake

Infobox lake
lake_name = Huntington Lake
image_lake =
caption_lake =
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location = Fresno County, California
coords = coord|37|14|9.96|N|119|10|44.4|W|type:waterbody_region:US-CA|display=inline,title
type = Reservoir
inflow = Big Creek
outflow = Big Creek
catchment =
basin_countries = United States
length =
width =
area = convert|1441|acre|lk=on|abbr=on
depth =
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shore =
elevation = 2,130 m (7,000 ft)
islands =
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Huntington Lake is a reservoir in Fresno County, California on Big Creek, located in the Sierra Nevada at an elevation of 2,130 meters (7,000 ft). Several smaller streams also flow into the lake and it receives additional water from the underground tunnels of Southern California Edison's Big Creek hydroelectric project. Water from the lake flows into Big Creek, but some is diverted by underground tunnels to the Eastwood Powerhouse, which discharges into Shaver Lake.

Huntington Lake was constructed in 1912 as a part of the enormous Big Creek Hydroelectric Project envisioned by John S. Eastwood to provide power for a growing California. The lake was named for Henry Edwards Huntington, the railroad magnate who financed the earliest work to develop the Big Creek project which includes a system of lakes, tunnels, steel penstocks and power houses.

Four dams form the lake, which has a capacity of 88,834 acre-feet (110,000,000 m³) and a surface area of convert|1441|acre|km2. There were originally three dams, completed in 1913, but a fourth dam, completed in 1919, was built to increase the lake's capacity. The other three dams were raised and covered with concrete.

State Route 168 passes along the east shore of the lake where Sierra Summit, a ski resort, is located.

On December 6, 1943, a B-24 bomber with six men aboard crashed into Huntington Lake. The crew had taken off from nearby Hammer field in Fresno, California to search for a second B-24 which had disappeared a day earlier during a night training flight. Two members of the original eight man crew, a radio operator and the co-pilot, bailed out of the troubled plane and survived. Some have speculated that the pilot may have mistook the lake for a sierra meadow and tried to make an emergency landing during a snow storm. The wreckage of the plane, and the remains of its crew were discovered by a survey team in August 1955, when the lake had been drained for dam repairs. The original B-24 they had been searching for, was discovered in July 1960 in Hestor Lake, a small body of water in a remote area not far from Huntington. Neither plane has been recovered.

References

* [http://www.fs.fed.us/r5/sierra/recreation/lakes/huntingtonlake/index.shtml Sierra National Forest - Huntington Lake]
* [http://huntingtonhistorical.org/history.htm Huntington Lake Big Creek Historical Conservancy ]
* [http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cgi-progs/damMeta?dam_id=567 California Dams Database]