Mountain Retreats Evolved From Reservoirs to Playgrounds

Lake Arrowhead, dubbed “The Beverly Hills of the Mountains,” and Big Bear Lake, “The Jewel of Bear Valley,” are about 15 miles apart but share a common history. They also share a vulnerability to wildfire, as recent events demonstrate.

First came Big Bear Lake in 1884, then Lake Arrowhead in 1915. Both were built to irrigate the thriving citrus empire in Redlands and San Bernardino. But almost as soon as the lakes were filled, tourists showed up with fishing poles and boats. Water skis and snow skis came later, changing the mountaintops’ identities from reservoirs to playgrounds.

Nestled 6,200 feet high in the San Bernardino Mountains, Big Bear was named by Benjamin Wilson, a future Los Angeles mayor, who tramped up the mountain in 1845 in pursuit of a band of cattle-stealing Paiute Indians.

At the crest of the mountain, Wilson and his 22 men found a deep, lush valley around a shallow, swampy lake. There, they lassoed 11 grizzlies and called the place Bear Valley.

Mormons established the colony of San Bernardino in 1851 and built the first road to the summit, developing a lumber business. Highway 18, the Rim of the World Highway, follows this trail.

In 1860, adventurer Billy Holcomb tracked a wounded grizzly along a hillside above Bear Valley. He spotted placer gold and, within a year, Holcomb Valley had turned into a rowdy settlement with 2,000 miners. Today, it’s a bucolic community.

The gold eventually ran out and adventurers turned to a liquid variety. In 1884, Redlands land speculators dammed much of Bear Valley to create a reservoir for thirsty orange groves and towns below. The lake was first called Bear Valley Reservoir, then Pine Lake and later Bear Lake. It became Big Bear Lake in the late 1890s because developers farther down the mountain had created a smaller lake they called Little Bear. Little Bear Lake would become Lake Arrowhead.

Lake Arrowhead takes its name from a natural 7 1/2-acre rock formation shaped like an arrowhead about seven miles southwest. According to a Native American legend, it was burned on the mountain by an arrow falling from heaven to show the tribes where they could be healed at the hot springs below.

The Mormons had their own story about the landmark. San Bernardino was, they believed, the location of the Garden of Eden. When Adam and Eve were expelled, the arrowhead was placed on the mountain so that the spot would be known throughout eternity.

Science has its own version of the arrowhead’s origins. The white quartz and light-gray granite of the arrowhead permit only short white sage and weeds to grow there -- not the dark green chaparral and greasewood surrounding it.

Each time the area is swept by fire, the arrowhead becomes indistinguishable. But when the vegetation grows back, the arrowhead reappears.

The arrowhead points to natural hot springs below its tip. For hundreds, possibly thousands, of years, travelers used it to find the more than two dozen cold and hot springs and steam caves nearby. Finally, a frail Ohio mystic and carnival huckster put Arrowhead Springs on the map.

In 1857, David Noble Smith, who called himself “doctor,” somehow gained title to the desert springs he named Arrowhead. Within a decade, he built a hotel, bathing rooms, sanitarium and small lake for those seeking the healing waters for arthritis and other ailments. Hundreds of patients began visiting his Hot Springs Infirmary, with its view of the granite arrowhead.

Smith’s hotel burned down in 1885. It was replaced that year by a bigger hotel, whose proprietor began bottling and selling the water to guests. That bottled-water enterprise became Arrowhead Mountain Spring Water.

The second hotel burned in 1895, when a Fourth of July celebrant started a fire. A third hotel went up in 1905; it burned in a November 1938 wildfire.

A group of Hollywood celebrities built another one at a cost of $1.5 million. The new six-story, Georgian-style hotel opened in 1939. Rudy Vallee, Al Jolson and Judy Garland were among the opening-night entertainment.

In 1950, Elizabeth Taylor and her first husband, hotel heir Nicky Hilton, honeymooned there -- where he battered her, she told Barbara Walters in a 1999 interview. Many of Esther Williams’ swimming classics were filmed in the extravagantly designed cabana pool.

But the fourth hotel was a financial flop, as air travel broadened vacationers’ horizons. It served as a naval hospital during World War II. Afterward, hotel baron Conrad Hilton and others tried to make a go of it, but failed.

The resort sat vacant from 1959 until 1962, when it was purchased for $2 million as the headquarters for Campus Crusade for Christ. The crusade moved to Florida in 1991 but kept the property as a conference center; today it’s for sale.

Last year five outbuildings were unintentionally burned during a fire-training exercise. Two more outbuildings burned in the most recent fires.

But Arrowhead Springs is not Lake Arrowhead, that swanky community with the celebrity cachet. Lake Arrowhead sits about seven miles northeast of the springs and about 15 miles west of Big Bear.

In the late 19th century, a San Bernardino city engineer became inspired by Big Bear Dam and suggested tapping the Mojave River’s underground waters.

A group of Cincinnati capitalists, including soap king James Gamble of Procter & Gamble, backed the idea. They incorporated as Lake Arrowhead Reservoir Co. in 1891 and began to turn an existing pond and 6,000 acres into a reservoir.

Over the next 22 years, they spent $7.5 million on a dam and 6 1/2 miles of tunnels. But several small landowners along the Mojave River sued over water rights and won in 1913.

The capitalists decided to make the lake a private fishing preserve, but public pressure to use it was unrelenting. When fishing season opened in 1915, hundreds lined the 1 1/2 miles of shoreline and started building cabins. The next season, 2,000 anglers showed up, even though the dam was only 80% complete.

The 101-mile Rim of the World Highway opened in 1916.

In 1921, a syndicate of Los Angeles millionaires headed by J. Benton Van Nuys and Morgan Adams bought the acreage for a mere $625,000 and changed its name to Lake Arrowhead.

By 1922, the 184-foot-high dam was complete. The syndicate opened Lake Arrowhead Village Inn and Lodge, a replica of an Alpine village that was jokingly called “the poor man’s Switzerland.”

Among the celebrities who built homes near the 14-mile shoreline were Myrna Loy, Buster Crabbe and Jack Benny. Many played canasta every Saturday night as Hoagy Carmichael played the piano.

Other celebrities came for weekends and parties. In the 1930s, Groucho Marx complained of being so cold that three blankets and a chambermaid couldn’t keep him warm.

The Depression and World War II gas rationing pushed the syndicate into bankruptcy. In 1946, the Los Angeles Turf Club, operators of Santa Anita racetrack, purchased the lake and much of the surrounding property for $2 million.

In 1960, Jules Berman, who made his fortune importing Kahlua from Mexico, purchased the lake, village and 3,200 acres for $6.5 million. He commissioned a master plan, refurbished the village and began to transform it into a “Resort of Four Seasons.” He built a ski slope, a country club and an 18-hole golf course where Bob Hope, Frankie Avalon and Conrad Hilton often played.

Berman merged with Boise-Cascade Corp. in 1967. That, some residents contend, is when community cachet began to fade.

Then, in 1971, the Sylmar earthquake damaged Arrowhead Dam. Homeowners impatient with the pace of repairs formed the Arrowhead Lake Assn., bought the lake and financed a new dam by 1975.

Property sales boomed and real estate agents pointed to celebrities’ lakefront homes as evidence of the stars’ return. Famous part-timers in the 1970s included Dennis Weaver and Liberace -- who lined his boat dock with decorative piano keys.

Recent celebrity residents have included Roseanne Barr and Beach Boy Brian Wilson.

The old Alpine village was burned in a 1979 fire-training exercise, making way for a new Alpine village, shopping center and grand hotel. The very next year the Panorama fire destroyed 250 homes and killed four people in the area, but the village was unscathed.

This season’s fires also spared the village, but not the mountain communities. Six deaths have been attributed to heart attacks suffered during the Old and Grand Prix blazes, which charred more than 150,000 acres and destroyed more than 1,056 buildings in the area. The community of Cedar Glen, on the eastern side of the lake, was devastated.

As for Big Bear, it was threatened but untouched.