Residents Buoyed as Lake Hughes Hits Upside of Rise-and-Fall Cycle : Wildlife: Rains have revived recreation spot after years of drought. Old-timers say it comes and goes depending on the weather and has vanished four times in 30 years.

Michaela Harris walked to the soggy shore with a bag of stale bread in her hands. It is 10 a.m. and the mallards know it is feeding time. Five of them honk and scramble out of the water toward Harris as she crumbles bread. From about 50 feet across the bluish lake, five more swim over and fight with the others for breakfast.

Harris seemed as happy as the ducks. “I love it out here,” she said, looking out over the sunlit waters.

Lake Hughes is back.

Not too long ago, baseball games and country music concerts were being held right where the mallards skim gracefully over the water.

Longtime residents say that Lake Hughes is the fullest it has been since 1984, thanks to about 41 inches of rain. Two years ago, the 135-acre lake was more of a mud puddle.

Then it dried up entirely.

“It’s like an empty saucer when it’s dry,” said Don Arnett, who has lived in the small mountain town of Lake Hughes nestled in Angeles National Forest, 20 miles above Santa Clarita, for 17 years.

But now the lake is alive, and its rebirth has delighted residents and wildlife alike. “When the lake first started to fill up, all you would see were duck butts,” said Lue Foster, owner of the private Hughes Lake Shore Park Campground. “There must be some good eating down there.”

But the only good eating in the lake right now is worms. There are no fish, and the rural community of 800 residents is debating whether to restock the lake. Business people want it for revenue. Lakeside residents hate the city people who come to fish in the lake.

“They are like a bunch of animals,” Arnett said. “I never understood why they come and graffiti the toilets and leave their beer cans and dirty diapers in the lake.”

Other homeowners say they want the fish because they cut down on the mosquitoes and other bugs.

Years ago, the state Department of Fish and Game use to stock the lake with fish, said John Damann, a fire prevention officer with the U.S. Forest Service. But as the lake became contaminated over the years from seeping septic tanks, the agency stopped supplying trout, catfish, bluegill, bass and other fish to Lake Hughes.

A sewer system was installed in 1990 to stop the pollution. Oddly enough, it was completed around the time the lake dried up--leaving the last of the lake’s fish rotting in the summer sun.

In other storm seasons, floods would carry fish into Lake Hughes from two nearby bodies of water--Elizabeth Lake and a small private lake in American Adventure, a campground.

But it did not happen this year.

Foster has contacted wildlife officials about getting some fish for Lake Hughes. She said she expects to hear from them soon.

Although Lake Hughes remains fish-free, Elizabeth Lake is full of water and fish. In fact, some people say they have a new problem this year--too much water.

On a recent morning, a tractor labored in a pool of mud near Lake Hughes, its wheels spinning. Jack Harris, caretaker of the Hughes Lake Shore Park and a longtime resident, watched as the tractor driver struggled to free his rig. Underground springs have erupted throughout the area, leaving the campground a muddy minefield of ditches and trenches.

“We’ll get it prettied up in the next week or so, if we can drain the water out,” Harris said.

No one is sure whether the springs are a result of the heavy rains, or if the San Andreas Fault, which runs through the area, is the cause. In fact, a hydrologist and geochemist from the U.S. Geological Survey recently visited the area to investigate. The study was called off because the government turned down the agency’s request for $22,000 in emergency funds.

Most townspeople do not worry about where the water is coming from. They are spending a lot of time cleaning up the mess that the rains left.

Foster motioned toward five neatly arranged piles of dried reeds, which once lived underwater and had washed up on the muddy shore. They looked like elongated, bamboo-like cornhusks.

“That’s where the babies (ducks) like to hide out,” she said. “All this stuff is debris from the dry lake. We saw a telephone pole floating down the lake after the rains. I tell people, if you’ve lost (anything on the lake) it will probably wind up here.”

Before the county installed the sewer system, all kinds of foreign objects found their way to the lake.

The lake has come and gone many times. “It takes about 35 inches of rain to fill the lake,” Damann said. The fire prevention officer said Lake Hughes and Elizabeth Lake empty periodically on a 10-year cycle, and both have been dry four times in the 30 years he has patrolled the area.

But with each reincarnation of the lake, the old-timers say they notice a difference.

“The lake has changed over the years,” said Josephine Williams, 82. She lives in a house that her grandparents built in the 1890s.

She said that as a young girl she remembered “swimming in the lake, and then going over an area that was icy cold” in the places that were really deep.

“The lake goes dry because there is no inlet. It’s a natural catch basin for rain because it’s low,” she said.

“We had a forest fire in 1956, and when the rains came, the hillsides ran off and all the silt went into the lake. Now the lake is not as deep as it used to be. It looks pretty good now, but when I was a kid it was a deeper blue, and colder.”

The people in Lake Hughes accept the rise and fall of the lake as a fact of life. The rising of the waters may have its minuses but plenty of pluses.

“The lake being full will bring more people up,” said Bob Hamilton, a realty agent. But if city residents are going to enjoy the lake, he will too.

“I’m gonna get a little aluminum fishing boat and take my grandkids out on the lake.”