Buena Vista Lake
If you were standing here and looking south 100 years ago, you would see before you the great Buena Vista Lake.
Buena Vista Lake was the second largest of several similar lakes in the Tulare Lake basin, and was fed by the waters of the Kern River. The Kern River's flow went into Buena Vista Lake southwest through the site Bakersfield via its main distributary channels or south through the Kern River Slough distributary into Kern Lake and then into Buena Vista Lake via Connecting Slough.
In times when Buena Vista Lake overflowed it first backed up into Kern Lake making one large lake. When this larger lake overflowed it flowed out through the Buena Vista Slough and Kern River channel northwest of Buena Vista Lake through tule marshland and Goose Lake, into Tulare Lake.
As the City of Bakersfield continued to grow and the agricultural expansion of the San Joaquin Valley continued, the annual flooding of the Kern River from the Sierra Nevada snow melt became too expensive to endure. Modern progress necessitated the changing of the central valley forever. Buena Vista Lake dried up after its tributary river waters were impounded in Isabella Dam (finished in 1953) and for agricultural irrigation and municipal water uses.
Please see the Kern Historical Society's "THE LATE, GREAT, BUENA VISTA LAKE" for a great read on the history of this lake.
Today Lake Webb and Lake Evans occupy the lakebed of the northern shore the former Buena Vista Lake.
Sources: Wikipedia: Buena Vista Lake
The Earthcache
In order to mark this cache as found, please send me a message answering all of the questions below.
1. What is the name of this Earthcache?
2. How many people are in your group?
3. When water flowed from the Kern River, which lake (Buena Vista Lake, Goose Lake, Kern Lake, Tulare Lake) did the water flow into first? Second? Third? Fourth?
4. What two man made objects now mark the north and west boundaries of the old Buena Vista Lake?
5. What colors of crops do you see in the old lake bed? Why are they these colors?
6. What caused the demise of Buena Vista Lake?
Photos are encouraged, but not required of you and your GPS at GZ.
Be sure to also check out the Tulamniu II Geocache over on the southern edge of the old lake bottom for some more interesting historical facts.