Bear Valley Dam: Built for Oranges, Used for Skiing

The dam at the east end of Big Bear Lake was not built for you.

It was built in eighteen eighty-four by a developer named Frank Brown, and its purpose was agricultural, not recreational. The idea was to capture snowmelt from the San Bernardino Mountains in a reservoir high above the valleys and then pipe that water downhill to orange groves in the flatlands below. The citrus boom that the Parent Navel Orange Tree had launched a decade earlier in Riverside required water, enormous quantities of it, reliably delivered through a dry season that the Mediterranean climate of Southern California made structurally unforgiving. Brown proposed to solve that problem with a mountain reservoir.

The dam was one of the earliest large-scale irrigation dams in Southern California, a direct ancestor of the water infrastructure that would eventually make not just the citrus industry but the entire urban sprawl of the Los Angeles Basin possible. A larger dam was built just downstream of it in nineteen twelve to increase capacity.

The recreation economy around Big Bear came later, as a second use layered over the original agricultural purpose. The ski resorts, the summer cabins, the lake houses, they came when automobiles made the mountains accessible to valley residents looking for a weekend escape from the heat. The citrus groves the dam was built to water are now subdivisions. The irrigation canals have been covered or repurposed. The reservoir that Brown intended as agricultural infrastructure is now a destination.

The dam still sits at the east end of the lake. You drive over it on the highway. It is one of the older pieces of water engineering in Southern California, and its original purpose is not marked anywhere on the road.