Justin Cook The Roanoke Times

Tropical Storm Ida's collision with a nor'easter didn't do much for Mountain Lake in Giles County; it gained a few feet of water but is still well below full pond level.

Recent rainfall may have filled most of Southwest Virginia's lakes, rivers and streams beyond their brims, but Mountain Lake wasn't one of them.

The Giles County mountaintop lake with a tendency to fill and drain itself was an estimated 40 feet below full pond before the rain began this week. It gained a few feet as the remnants of Tropical Storm Ida collided with a nor'easter, but the water is expected to go away almost as quickly as it came.

"What we really need is a good saturation of the ground," said Buzz Scanland, general manager of Mountain Lake Hotel.

"A good, hard winter," he said, during which one snowfall is followed by another to allow water to slowly seep into the ground, would do wonders for the lake level.

One of only two natural lakes in Virginia, Mountain Lake is fed by runoff from the surrounding ridge tops and by five streams, but drains through fissures in the rock below.

Scanland likened it to a "gigantic ceramic bowl filled with cracks and crevices" and placed into a large hole dug in the ground.

"Whatever the water table is in that hole is how much water you're going to have in the bowl," he said.

This time last year, a series of droughts had caused the lake to shrink to its lowest point in decades. Except for one small pool, the lake bed was dry.

This year, it rose steadily until early June, Scanland said. At one point, it was rising nearly a foot a week.

"It was really coming up, and then all of a sudden it went down," he said.

The lake dropped about five feet in October alone, said Emily Woodall, director of the Mountain Lake Conservancy.

Scanland said he is putting together plans to turn the lake's up-and-down level into a fundraiser for pancreatic cancer research just before the hotel's season comes to an end for the year.

Mountain Lake Hotel is open only on weekends this month, then will close until the first weekend of May, with the exception of its Blueberry Ridge Cottages, which are open year-round.

One of the hotel's biggest weekends is planned for this upcoming one, Scanland said, when it will host a Patrick Swayze Memorial Weekend.

A rock used during one of Swayze and Jennifer Grey's scenes in the movie "Dirty Dancing" will be dedicated to the actor, who died of pancreatic cancer Sept. 14. Guests will be invited to take part in "Dirty Dancing" trivia games, dance lessons and a tour of areas used during filming in 1986.

Scanland said he will mark Mountain Lake's full pond height on the boat dock and collect a fee -- to go toward cancer research -- from guests who want to guess when the lake's water level will reach that point again.

"It will fill up again," he said. "We just don't know when."