Tom Angleberger

The New River Valley-based reporter answers your questions Mondays in his column, What's on Your Mind?

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Mountain Lake, or the lack of it, has been on my mind lately, so this week we'll take a break from answering questions as usual to consider this rare, but not unknown, disappearance.

First of all, let's get an eyewitness account of what the Giles County lake looks like when dry:

"A party was organized to visit the lake the next day," said Mrs. Andrew Lewis Ingles. "When we got there we walked down the ravine where the lake had been and found near the lower end a little pond or pool of water such as would be called a spring, not bigger than a room."

Mrs. Ingles was describing the lake just after the end of the Civil War. (My father, Wayne Angleberger, being a Mountain Lake history buff, recalled Ingles' account and was able to find it for me in Ivey Lewis' "History of Mountain Lake.") Having now been into the empty lake myself, I can assure you that it looks quite similar to what Ingles saw. The little bit of water that's left is in small pools at the far end, which lies a little deeper than the rest of the large, flat lake bed.

Ingles didn't mention any cracked mud, which is pretty hard to ignore today, because it covers the lake bottom in an endless, eyeball-bending pattern.

And Ingles saw more trees than I did. "The floor of the ravine was occupied by trees which I suppose were oaks, some as big as a man's body and pretty tall." These trees, which are no longer standing, suggest that at some point parts of the lake were empty for quite some time.

But in the late 1860s, according to Ingles, the lake was empty for just four years, then refilled.

The emptying and refilling of the lake has been going on for thousands of years, according to Jon Cawley. Now a Roanoke College professor, Cawley earned his doctorate by studying the lake's history.

"What I did was to take sediment cores from the bottom of the lake," Cawley told me. Because his research was done when the lake was still there, he did this the hard way, using diving equipment.

"I looked very carefully at the core, which is newest at the top and oldest at the bottom," he explained. "The first thing that I saw in the core were some bands of compressed vegetation at intervals -- under the microscope those turned out to be sphagnum or peat moss -- which doesn't grow underwater."

By determining the age of the moss, using carbon-14 dating, he was able to map out the lake's dry spells. He found six times when the lake had been at least partially empty for some time. The most recent was about 100 years ago -- this was probably the event that Ingles witnessed. Other moss layers were found from 400, 900, 1,200, 1,800 and 4,200 years ago.

He got similar results by studying the algae in the core.

"That doesn't actually mean that it was 'bone-dry' like it is now," Cawley noted, "I can say that because this week I looked at the same series in the mud now exposed in the channel in what used to be the very deepest part -- and there are no sphagnum layers in that -- only sandy layers -- saying that there was at least some water at those times."

Since 1865, the lake has, of course, been full quite often. But it doesn't stay that way for long. Another Mountain Lake historian, Fred Marland, compiled a lake level timeline by using accounts such as Ingles':

The lake was full in 1879, but went down by 20 to 30 feet in the following years. It was back to full by 1904, but only 80 percent full in 1935. It dropped from 80 percent in the early 1950s to 60 percent full in 1959. Then, after an earthquake, it filled again quickly.

Buzz Scanland, manager of the Mountain Lake Hotel, seems to have settled on a "tip of the iceberg" theory for the lake's changing levels.

I think what he means is that the water we see in the lake is just the "tip" of the mountain's vast storehouse of water. After all these dry years we've been having, it's hardly a surprise that there's less water in the ground.

Apparently, the lake has refilled rapidly in the past, and perhaps that's what we'll see if we get a change in the weather. Until then, I suppose, the sphagnum moss will have its day.

Got a question? Got an answer? Call Tom Angleberger at 777-6476 or send an e-mail to woym@yahoo.com. Don't forget to provide your full name, its proper spelling and your hometown.

Look for Tom Angleberger's column on Mondays.