After California’s severe drought resurfaced a historic settlement from the depths of Lake Isabella, the ghost town of Whiskey Flat has once again returned to the water.
Whiskey Flat, once known for gold mining and wild west movies was covered again by the previously drought-stricken lake in central California, SFGate reported. Lake Isabella’s water levels had been low for years until this winter’s onslaught of rain, highlighting the toll the climate crisis has had on the reservoirs and lakes that serve crucial roles in the state’s water system.
The town had most recently re-emerged in September 2022 amid a three-year drought that brought California’s lakes and reservoirs to record low levels and fueled wildfires and megablazes. Then came California’s historically wet and cold winter that left the state with a massive snowpack.
As Lake Isabella, in the southern Sierra Nevada mountains, filled with melted snow, Whiskey Flat disappeared. In addition to filling the lake and covering Whiskey Flat, the snowpack has led to destructive flooding. The recent deluge of water from the mountains into the flatlands of the state was “the latest example that California’s climate is becoming more extreme”, Karla Nemeth, director of the department of water resources, said in an April press release. Experts have called the alternating extremes in the state “weather whiplash”.
At the time Whiskey Flat emerged in September 2022, Lake Isabella was at 8% capacity, according to SFGate.
The occasionally underwater town was originally home to the Big Blue Gold Mine on the Kern River, where those hoping to make their fortune in gold converged upon in 1860. Liquor was not allowed at the mine but one man found a way to get it to miners, earning the town the name Whiskey Flat, according to Sierra Nevada Geotourism. It was renamed Old Kernville in 1864, to not be associated with “demon rum”.
Old west movies starring the likes of John Wayne and Gene Autry were filmed on Whiskey Flat’s Movie Street in the 1930s through 1950s. But by 1953 the town had been buried under the newly built Lake Isabella reservoir.
• This story was amended on 18 July 2023 to correct that Lake Isabella is in central California, not the Central Valley area of California.
