page_title: Huntington Lake
section_title: Construction
hierarchical_section_title: Huntington Lake / History / Construction
caption_attribution_description: English: This is an archived 1912 photo of construction for the Big Creek Hydroelectric Project, photographer unknown. The card the photo came with was postmarked at Big Creek, CA on November 31, 1912, which leads one to believe that the construction pictured is of one of the three dams built between 1911 and 1913 to create Huntington Lake.
context_page_description: Huntington Lake is a reservoir in Fresno County, California on Big Creek, located in the Sierra Nevada at an elevation of 7000 ft. The lake receives water from Southern California Edison's Big Creek Hydroelectric Project, as well as the many streams that flow into the lake. Some water leaving the lake flows to Big Creek, while some is diverted to nearby Shaver Lake. The lake is home to a variety of recreational activities, including camping, horse-back riding, skiing, sailing, fishing and more. It is drained and refilled through the Big Creek dam system each year, with winter water levels often dipping below 50 percent of the lake's capacity.
context_section_description: 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 (109,575 dam³) and a surface area of 1,441 acres (583 ha). 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.  
  State Route 168 passes along the east shore of the lake where China Peak, a ski resort, is located.
  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.
caption: Construction underway in the Big Creek Hydroelectric Project in 1912.
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