Huntington Lake - Fresno County, California

Visited on 5/19/2018, Jeff and our two chocolate Labradors, Summer and Skye joined me on a business trip to give Drinking Water examinations in the Central Valley of California.  We traveled in the Central Valley foothills northeast of Fresno up to Huntington Lake above our camping spot at Shaver Lake.  Huntington Lake is a reservoir in Fresno County, California on Big Creek, located in the Sierra Nevada at an elevation 6,955 feet.  This is a beautiful peaceful lake with several smaller streams that 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 surface area of 1,441 acres. 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.
 
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 mistaken 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 Hester Lake, a small body of water in a remote area not far from Huntington. Neither plane has been recovered.

The Town of Big Creek, California