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Ultimately, the water level never returned to full pond, which was a disappointment to the hotel. While the lake did fill quickly after the patch-up job, new holes formed higher up from which water still escaped.
Instead, the patching was completed all at once, with a mix of dirt and materials scraped from the side of the lake along with some bentonite, which is a swelling clay. "You can't say the lake disappeared because of x, y or z." "All these things are complex," Cawley says. That sediment difference changes over time. Sometimes the sediment can get stuck in the system and make the "pipe" where the water drains out smaller, and sometimes it washes away, and the water flows out more quickly. It could also be due to the sediment cycle, he says. Given that this construction was in 2001, right before the water levels began to drop, Watts says that it's likely that the basins are at least partly responsible for the lake shrinking.Ĭawley also points to other local components: houses, the University of Virginia biological station and the hotel. Much of it had been flowing underground to a nearby creek instead. But a few years later when his students did a project modeling Mountain Lake's groundwater profile, they determined the water being diverted by the basins wasn't going into the lake after all. When he learned of it, he assumed that the water would still get to the lake as groundwater. This was standard practice and probably not a lot of thought went into it at the time, Watts explains. In order to comply with state regulations, the Lodge constructed stormwater management basins. So as long as your inflow is bigger than your outflow, it's going to get bigger until it's at full pond." But in 2008, the outflow was clearly outpacing the inflow.Īt the same time, Mountain Lake Lodge was building a conference center on its property above the lake. "You have your losses, the outflow of the lake in this case, but you also have an inflow. "You want your bank account to get bigger and bigger," he says. He says to think about the water budget like a bank account. People wondered why the lake had emptied out so completely this time and if there was anything that could be done about it.Īccording to Watts, the timing of the lake's emptying can be explained by its water budget. Of course the holes were part of it the drains had become easily visible with nearly no water in the lake. The managers of Mountain Lake Lodge scrambled their hotel's namesake having been reduced to a mud puddle.
Scientists flocked to the lake, trying to figure out what was happening. He is currently a research geologist at the Smithsonian Institution. "So very seldom in geology can you make a prediction like that and then have it happen, not only during your lifetime, but really soon after you make the prediction," says Cawley, a biologist and geologist who has studied the lake for more 20 years. Just three years later, he was proven right. When Jon Cawley did his doctoral thesis on Mountain Lake in 1999, he warned that Mountain Lake, which had had just four completely empty periods in the past 6,000 years according to his research, was due for another low time. Now instead, a long white dock juts out from the lodge's famous gazebo, never reaching the water, while old boats sit up on dry land where the water should be. Walking its perimeter, you can still see the original basin and how high the water would be if it was at full pool. Although the lake is not what it once was, the area is still beautiful, especially in the fall, when it's flanked by multicolored trees waving in the crisp mountain air. He's been studying the lake for 10 years and has been interested in it since his undergraduate days at Virginia Tech. I first saw the lake in 2016, when I was living in Blacksburg, and revisited it in October 2019 with Radford University geologist Chester "Skip" Watts. What used to be a vacation destination for boating and swimming has had to refocuse its offerings to land-based activities, such as archery, hiking, a ropes course and "Dirty Dancing"-themed events. Today what's left of Mountain Lake belongs to the Mountain Lake Lodge, a stately hotel sitting on its south edge that played the role of Kellerman's in the film.
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