BALDWIN LAKE, CALIFORNIA

'Baldwin Lake' is a natural watershed of the San Bernardino Mountains, San Bernardino County, California. It is named for Elias J. "Lucky" Baldwin, whose name is also found on the City of Baldwin Park, and Baldwin Avenue which runs from his estate in Arcadia, California to the San bernardino (10) Freeway. Baldwin had come to the Big Bear and Holcomb Valley in 1876 when he purchased the famed Gold Mountain Mine. Though the former name is still preserved in historical accounts, it was renamed the Baldwin mine.
Baldwin Lake was originally discovered as a natural wildlife reserve in 1845 by Benjamin Davis Wilson who was tracking marauding Indians through the mountain passage that was to lead him to the upper desert near Lucerne. The reserve was teeming with black bear, and Wilson had his 22 men pair up in hunting parties. At this location they took 11 bear pelts, and on the return to Jurupa (Riverside) they took another 11 pelts. Wilson named the Lake "Big Bear" and the area Big Bear Valley.
Baldwin Lake is a vast land area denuded of trees and brush due to its quartz pebble terrain. During the wet seasons the lake gathers an abundance of water, but due to its shallow pan, not much more than 25 feet at its deepest point, and broad open surface, it is tending to dry up in the summer. The linear measurement of the lake pan varies in several direction from several hundred feet to more than a mile across.
When a dam was erected down the valley, the resulting reservoir was named Big Bear Lake, and Baldwin was given to the older one. Today Baldwin Lake is part of the Baldwin Lake Ecological Reserve which supports unique forms of flora and a host of fauna including the Bald Eagle.

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