Huntington Lake
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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 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.
California Highway 168 passes along the east shore of the lake where Sierra Summit, a ski resort, is located.
