The mystery of two natural lakes in Virginia

“The Lady of the Lake” is such a romantic name that mud boots would spoil the Arthurian image, but it can’t be helped.

In search of such mystery and beauty, I traveled to Lake Drummond in Suffolk, 30 minutes west of my house, and also to Mountain Lake near Blacksburg, some five hours farther. In between, I passed numerous other lakes without stopping because they were not as interesting as these two on opposite sides of the state.

They are fraternal twins, sharing the name “lake” and the basic blueprint of water in a hole, but nothing else. One is gushingly, spewingly, overflowingly filled with billions of gallons of water, and the other, as you’ll see, is not. One is on a mountain peak, the other on the flat coastal plain. One is blue, one is brown; one is tiny, one is huge. They are altogether different, yet both have been called unique in the world and, on top of that, they are the only natural lakes in Virginia. The rest are man-made.

By way of comparison, tiny Maryland has no natural lakes. Minnesota, which is called “The Land of 10,000 Lakes,” actually has 11,842, most of them carved by glaciers. Then there is Virginia – big, but unglaciated – with two.

Imagine that. A state this large, and only two natural lakes, their shores replete with legendary firebirds and movie stars, poetry and poetry in motion.

Then imagine me and my mud boots. Because in this story, I was the lady of the lakes.

___

My guide and I set out for the Great Dismal Swamp in the cleanest car I have ever ridden in. I carefully set my boots on the spotless floor mat and tried to look neat.

The white car was owned by Harold Marshall, a professor emeritus at Old Dominion University, and he was very nice about the rubber boots, which I always carry on trips like this Just In Case.

I mean, we were headed for Lake Drummond in the center of the swamp, which has been described (not by me) as “a continuous quagmire – a filthy bog in a vast body of nastiness.” Marshall didn’t have boots. He carried only an empty jar, having left behind on his desk the lapel button that read “Algae Forever.”

Lake Drummond is accessible from the east only by small boat, paddled for about 3 miles down the Feeder Ditch and then portaged to the lake. From the west, access requires finding the ranger station, asking for the combination to a locked gate, then driving six miles along gravel roads. This is the path we took.

“That green scum you see in the ditch is algae,” Marshall said, directing my attention to the water on either side of the road. “It’s beautiful in here, though. The trees are fantastic. They’re majestic. Give you a true feeling of nature.”

In 1728, William Byrd II sent a team of surveyors into the Great Dismal Swamp while remaining safe at home himself. He referred to the swamp as a “horrible desart” with “vapours which infest the air and causing ague and other distempers to the neighboring inhabitants.”

Desert Road, now spelled correctly but still pronounced DEZ-art, runs along the western edge of the swamp. Marshall turned instead down White Marsh Road, giving a lesson as we zipped past houses and businesses.

“See how the road goes down here?” he said. “We’re actually riding on the geological escarpment here. As the ocean subsided, you had a series of these, almost like steps. It’s on one of these that the swamp developed.”

The Suffolk Scarp (short for escarpment) is an ancient shoreline formed when sea level was much higher. Now it is a ridge that directs rainwater to the east and south, toward Lake Drummond.

“There it is,” Marshall said as we approached on the arrow-straight Interior Ditch road. “Beautiful lake.” And he was right.

___

Lake Drummond is immense. It covers 3,100 acres. It is almost perfectly round. There was no mud. I left my boots in the car as we stepped out onto a gravel parking lot and strolled onto a small dock.

“Well? What do you think?” Marshall asked. “Is it majestic?”

It was perfectly quiet, except for the manic calls of pileated woodpeckers, and a slight breeze that rippled the dark water. Suddenly, Marshall belly-flopped on the dock and scooped up a jarful of lake.

“See the coloration of that?” he asked, holding it up to the light.

In the jar, the water looked like weak tea, but in the lake it looked almost black, stained by peat. A study in 1971 concluded that 25 billion gallons of water flow into the lake each year, but Drummond is no more than 6 feet deep anywhere. A little simple math, calculated by someone other than myself, indicates that the lake can only hold around 4 billion gallons. The rest spills out via the man-made Feeder Ditch into the Dismal Swamp Canal.

Marshall tried to pick out the entrance to the Feeder Ditch on the far side of the lake using binoculars, but the forest was too thick, so thick it is hard to get through but easy to get lost in.

Some claim that compasses go awry here, which is usually followed by the mysterious statement that a magnetic anomaly has been found northeast of the lake. The U.S. Geological Survey says that means only that granite or similar rocks may lie underneath and suggests that hikers failed to recalibrate their compasses regularly.

Why there is a large, round hole in the swamp is also a matter of conjecture. One theory says a meteorite formed the lake bed, and an Indian legend tells of a bird that hurled fire from its eyes and mouth to light the way to its nest in the center of the swamp.

The most accepted origin theory is a slow-burning fire in the peat, maybe started by lightning, which is not very romantic. But reality can be prosaic, and last summer, nearly 5,000 acres of the swamp burned when logging equipment created a spark. Peat fires burrow deep and smolder sometimes for years. The 2008 fire lasted only a few months, thanks to firemen and rain, but the black scar clearly shocked Marshall, who couldn’t keep his eyes off the burned patch right next to the dock.

“All that beautiful forest gone,” he murmured. “That’s gonna take awhile to recover.”

In 1803, the Irish poet Thomas More concocted a tale about another grieving man, this one looking for his dead sweetheart, who had “gone to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp, where all night long, by firefly lamp, she paddles her white canoe.”

Two fishermen wearing mud boots arrived in a truck, towing a small boat. They launched in search of some of the 32 fish species that live in Lake Drummond. Marshall said that some of the fish have cataracts, but he didn’t know why. The lake is under a mercury contamination advisory.

Marshall also said that a tall man could pretty much walk across Lake Drummond, but I am too short to attempt that. I can’t even go for a stroll around the shore, because there isn’t one. There is forest, then suddenly there is lake. A few cypress trees with their knees poking from the water try to stitch the landscape together.

“It’s so tranquil,” he said, looking around. “I think that describes this very well. It is unique because of the water quality and its origins. That is enough to make a biologist happy.”

Marshall kept the jar of water when we left. He cast about for someplace to put it, where it wouldn’t roll around in the car, and finally tucked it into his hat, which he placed on the back seat. In retrospect, I could have offered a boot, as they were not being worn.

Perhaps they would be more useful at Mountain Lake.

___

Mountain Lake is the little blue jewel you saw in “Dirty Dancing,” the film in which Patrick Swayze lifted Jennifer Grey above his head in the final dance number, and she floated gracefully, suspended high in the air.

Much of the movie was filmed at the massive Mountain Lake Hotel, built from the local sandstone, itself sitting high in the air at around 4,000 feet, near the summit of Salt Pond Mountain.

For many years, the movie was the resort’s big draw. But a few years ago, something strange happened, something that grabbed the headlines away from Hollywood. Mountain Lake began to disappear.

The lake is just over half a mile long. One is tempted to insert “normally” at the beginning of that sentence, but Mountain Lake isn’t normal, and the sandstone is the reason why.

On the way up the mountain, my guide, Bruce Parker, had pointed out to me different rock layers, starting with limestone at the base. On top of that is shale, and on top of that is something so unusual that Parker said he knows of nothing like it anywhere else in the world: “I don’t think there is another lake that is six-tenths of a mile long that sits on three different rock formations.”

We parked near the hotel, and Parker, a biologist retired from Virginia Tech, proposed that we walk around the lake to look at rocks. I glanced over where he was pointing and saw boats stranded on dry land, and a dock surrounded by grassy meadow. Without hesitation, I abandoned the mud boots, because if there is one place in the state where there is no mud, it is – alas – Mountain “Lake.”

Parker pointed with his cane at a gray rock.

“Now here we have the first formation that’s underneath the lake. This is the Martinsburg shale.”

The shale is soft and crumbly, and it holds fossils of sea creatures such as clams. It is just slightly acidic, with a pH of 6, and it lies under the southern third of the lake bed.

“You’re going to see a change when you get around the corner,” Parker said. “The hemlocks like an acidic soil. Look ahead. See the hemlocks? That’s where the shale ends.” He picked up a reddish rock. “We are entering a younger formation called the Juniata sandstone. This deteriorates into soil about 5.5 pH, but it’s still not as acid as Coca-Cola. That will come.”

The Juniata sandstone underlies the middle of the lake bed. It was easy to see the color change where shale met sandstone on the dry edge of the lake. We walked on.

“Now look at this,” Parker said, tapping a pale gray rock. “This is the Clinch sandstone. That’s a hard rock that weathers to form a soil that is about pH 4.5.”

We were, by this time, at the north end, where a small pool of water had gathered, the last remnant of Mountain Lake. When the lake is full, this pool is 110 feet deep. But at the bottom of it is a pile of rocks, and at the bottom of that is some sort of passageway, because Mountain Lake leaks, and reappears about half a mile away as a stream called Pond Drain.

The rocks may have slowly crept down the slope to dam the stream, or they may be part of a fault line that eroded to become the lake bed. Normally – if I dare use that word – erosion would have channeled through the dam and re-created the stream, which may be what happened to Virginia’s other natural lakes, if it ever had any. But the holes in the bottom of Mountain Lake are so large that extra water went down and out, instead of over the top of the natural dam.

And why does the lake level fluctuate, you ask? Because earthquakes are common in this region. Just little earthquakes, but those who have studied Mountain Lake believe that the joints between the sandstone formations are loose and that they shift to open and close the drain at the north end. On top of that is a 30-year trend of declining precipitation, which affects the 60 springs that feed the lake, many of which pop up between the Martinsburg and Juniata formations, on the south end.

“In order to keep the lake full,” Parker said, “you have to introduce two-and-a-half to three times the water that a lake this size should need.”

That doesn’t always happen.

Christopher Gist, the first European to see Mountain Lake, recorded its dimensions in 1751 as three-fourths of a mile long by one-fourth wide, with “a fine Meadow and six fine Springs.” When settlers arrived 17 years later, they found only a meadow. At some point, the lake re-filled. But between about 1885 and 1910, it was nearly -or maybe completely – dry again.

Parker knows this because as the lake shrank recently, it exposed a dead tree, roots still in place, which had grown in the lake bed during a dry spell. The tree had 25 annual growth rings. Parker also found another tree in the lake that had 22 growth rings. It had grown there sometime in the 1600s.

An eyewitness told Parker that the lake was about half full in 1959, when an earthquake rattled the hotel, cracking the stone mantel over the fireplace and springing all the door jambs. The next day, the lake was full.

Now the lake is nearly gone again, but the crack in the mantel remains, and Parker traced it with a fingertip while I was there.

“It went from half full to full overnight,” he said. “So that is the tenuous nature of this lake.”

___

Led by Emily Woodall, director of the Mountain Lake Conservancy, we made our way from rock to rock across the dry lake bed, then hiked the perimeter, past hemlocks and rhododendron. Once, we squished across a little spring that tumbled over the Clinch sandstone on its way to the nearly empty lake.

Mountain Lake has fish when it has water, and Parker suggested that perhaps some of them make their way up from Pond Drain via the hole to repopulate the rehydrated lake, but no one really knows.

“It’s been 40 years that I’ve been studying this lake, and I’ve never seen it like this,” Parker said. “Of course, the hotel is really unhappy about it, but I love it! Because I’ve lived to see it. The last time it did this was 1900.”

A whiteboard at the resort’s bike rental office said, “No lake? No worries. We have something exciting to do.” There is also always the chance that something naturally exciting will happen and the lake will refill quickly. In fact, a small earthquake recently shook the region, and Woodall reported that the lake was refilling, but she thought it was just because of the spring rains.

The mud boots were where I had left them. Parker and I got into the car and drove back down the mountain to Blacksburg, to a Lebanese restaurant where all the tables – unlike the lake – were full. Parker plunged cheerfully into the crowd and asked a birthday party if we could sit with them. They scooted over, a little skeptically, and Parker leaned in to the mom and confided: “We’ve just come from Mountain Lake.”

She didn’t quite know what to say.

“Not Smith Mountain Lake?” another partier asked.

“Mountain Lake,” Parker corrected. “But there’s no water now!” He was positively gleeful.

The mom was clearly doubtful of this information. It did sound unbelievable, but I knew it to be true. She would have known it, too, if she had walked awhile in my boots.

Diane Tennant is a former Virginian-Pilot reporter.

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