San Bernardino National Forest: Big Bear, Old Fire 2003, and the Lake That Should Not Exist

Big Bear Lake is an artificial lake at sixty-seven hundred feet in the San Bernardino Mountains. It exists because a bear valley was dammed in eighteen eighty-four, backed up a creek into a reservoir to supply water to the citrus groves of Redlands and the valley below. The dam was built under difficult conditions and lasted about a decade before being replaced by a more substantial structure. The current dam was completed in nineteen twelve. The lake it created, which is seven miles long, is the largest reservoir in the San Bernardino National Forest and the centerpiece of a year-round resort economy.

The forest that surrounds it is approximately eight hundred thirty thousand acres, extending from the edge of the Inland Empire to the high desert north of San Bernardino and east toward the Coachella Valley. It includes the San Gorgonio Wilderness, centered on San Gorgonio Mountain at eleven thousand five hundred three feet, the highest peak in Southern California.

The Old Fire of October two thousand three burned over ninety-one thousand acres across the San Bernardino Mountains in nine days, driven by the Santa Ana winds that turn the Southern California fire season into an annual emergency. The fire destroyed nearly a thousand homes in the communities of Waterman Canyon, Devore, Crestline, and Running Springs. It overlapped with the Grand Prix Fire in the foothills below, and together the two fires were part of the worst fire week in California history up to that point. Six people died, most from stress-related heart attacks during the evacuation.

The communities rebuilt. The forest regrew. The Santa Ana winds return every autumn. This is not a problem that has been solved. It is a seasonal condition that Southern California has decided to live with.