Boater’s Business Shrinks With Lake

Nearly five years ago, Ken Peery refinanced his house and put up more than $65,000 to take over a little waterfront store and boating concession at Littlerock Reservoir south of Palmdale.

Today, the 47-year-old former aerospace worker is out looking for odd jobs. His rowboats are stacked in storage. His bait and tackle shop business has all but disappeared, and he struggles to keep blowing dust from getting into his cabin.

Peery is just one victim of the state’s fifth year of drought, the overseer of “a very large mudhole” where an expansive reservoir full of water once stood. And the future isn’t very bright. “I’m looking at another gloomy year if I don’t see some rain,” a discouraged Peery said Friday.

Where water backing up behind the historic Littlerock Dam has in the past covered an area at least a mile in length and up to 90 feet deep, the drought has left only a four-foot-deep puddle about 200 yards long.

The dam was built in the mid-1920s to catch runoff water flowing out of the nearby San Gabriel Mountains along local creeks. A rustic getaway called the Littlerock Lake Resort was once located along the shores of the reservoir. All that is left today is Peery’s cabin-style country store. The store still bears the name of the resort, but Peery, ever more appropriately, just calls it the “Dam Store.”

As recently as the spring of 1988, Peery said, water was spilling over the top of the 170-foot-tall dam. But then state officials insisted that water levels be kept down because of concern that the structure might not be safe in an earthquake. The continuing drought has made the earthquake danger moot.

As the streams that feed the reservoir have dried up, so has Peery’s business. On a good weekend day, he and his girlfriend, who works the cash register, might take in $150, much less during the week. Most of their income now comes from selling beer to dirt bike and off-road vehicle enthusiasts who kick up clouds of dust racing along the dry banks of the reservoir.

As a result, Peery is wondering how long he can hold on to an agreement with the U.S. Forest Service, which controls the area, to operate the reservoir concession. Trying to stay afloat, he recently applied for an electrician’s job on the new state prison being built in nearby Lancaster.

“People are wondering how in the hell I’m staying alive out here,” he said. “It’s a waiting game right now. If the drought continues and the dam don’t get repaired, I don’t know how long I can last.”