Excerpt from Winter Sports at Huntington Lake Lodge

OR centuries snow and rain have fallen on the High Sierras of California making the rills, brooklets, streams and rivers that, through out the year, pour forth their vivifying waters into the heart of the thirsty valleys which lie toward the Western Sea. Indians have roamed over these High Sierras, have fished and bathed in these waters, and there their usefulness seems to have ended. But the resistless anglo-saxon invaded the scene, first as trapper, then as miner, cattle-man, lumberman, fisherman, lover of majestic scenery, and finally as conservator of the mountain's natural resources. Among other of these resources the greatest was found to be the potentialities of the waters for the development of electric energy. In the far-away cities of the valleys, and even of regions across other ranges of mountains were cities of rest less, energetic peoples demanding vast supplies of electricity for lighting and heating their homes, streets, stores, and markets, for driving their street cars, automobiles, machines and power plants. Modern Science saw in the Sierran streams the means of supplying these demands, hence it linked hands with Capital to wrest from these snow-born waters the electrical energy they contained. Roads were engineered and built into the mountains, sites for the erection of gigantic dams were chosen which would impound great masses of these hitherto vag rant waters and thus create beautiful lakes in the midst of scenic glories and wonders unsurpassed on the face of the earth. Busy men came and blasted great masses of granite from quarries createdby the Eternal; then the roads were lined. With steel - man's track for the iron horse, - and soon loco motives and trains of cars were carrying men and supplies for the more rapid prosecution of the work in these once unknown mountain recesses. Like magic the dams came into existence. Modern Alad dins flashed their lamps and buildings equivalent to the palaces and temples of antiquity sprang up, in which hydro-electric power-plants were stored; a large lake five miles long and a mile broad ap peared; tons of steel for towers, and tons of steel-cored aluminum cable for transmission lines were supplied to the hordes of busy men, who like never-resting ants cut wide pathways through the-trees, up and down canyons and ravines that hitherto had felt only the tread of the foot of panther, lynx, coyote or Indian. Cement bases for great towers were laid; the steel beams arose in air; the lines of cable were stretched up, down, across, ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred, two hundred and fifty miles to far-away Los Angeles, the growing metropolis of California of the South. In the mean time an 84-inch pipe, tapering down to 24 inches, built to resist nine hundred pounds pressure, was laid, reaching from the lake - whichshad already been named after the chief capitalist interested in the project, Huntington Lake - twenty-one hundred and three feet below to where the power-house stood. Here were placed on solid granite founda tions four water-wheels, directly connected with two generators of horsepower.

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