By Patric Hedlund, TME

The lovely little pond at the heart of Frazier Mountain Park became the center of a mystery this month. Fiesta Days was unable to hold the town’s annual fishing derby August 7 because the water level in the pond has become too low to stock with trout. Suddenly the question “Why is this happening?” is being asked everywhere. And everyone is now a detective.

Patrick Hirst says he walks his dog around the pond every evening. He thinks that drilling the new $500,000 well in the Frazier Park Public Utility District (FPPUD) yard is draining the pond. New Well #6 went online August 1. Tommy Hastings came to the water board meeting August 11 to say he takes his son fishing at the pond every day. He wants to know why the water is disappearing. Terre Ashmore was there to ask the same question. “The fish are dead and ducks are suffering,” she said.

Jim Kane, who was on the FPPUD water board in the late 1980s, said what is happening at the park is a warning about the plan to annex Lake of the Woods. He worries that trucking water to LOW this summer had an impact on the pond.

But Jonnie Allison, general manager for FPPUD, says the water being sold to keep LOW’s supply tanks full this summer is all from Well #5, which supplies water to the east side of Frazier Park. It is far downstream from the pond, closer to Juniper Ridge than to Frazier Mountain Park.

Now an alert has gone out on social media that the pond area is dangerous for unsupervised children. Facebook is filled with speculation and growing alarm. Mona McCabe said her grandson ran after his ball onto what appeared to be dry dirt in the pond bed.

“He thought he was just taking one step into the dirt. He instantly sank almost 18 inches. Had he not been supervised, he might have drowned,” McCabe wrote. Other children and two dogs were reportedly trapped in the mud.

Many believe the pace of the pond’s draining has accelerated since Well #6 began pumping as the principal source of water for Frazier Park. Old Well #3 was dismantled.

Tommy Hastings told the board the pond water has actually been receding since June. A supervisor at a mining operation, Hastings estimates the water level in the half-acre pond has receded 33 inches, about 400,000 gallons.

FPPUD’s civil engineer Dee Jaspar told the general manager last week that the pond is fed by a natural spring and the new well is not having an impact. He said the drought, not the well, is the problem.
He also observed that the pond water goes back into the aquifer, because the bottom is not lined with clay. Evaporation in this summer’s heat wave and the drying of local springs from the drought are factors.

Meanwhile, Bonnie Kane (historian for the Ridge Route Museum) said there have been drought events in the past without the pond going dry.

Last week Hastings told the water board he had seen a news clipping from The Mountain Enterprise long ago in an old file at the water company. The news story (from the 1980s, he thought) told about FPPUD installing pipes underground to the pond.

Did turning off old Well #3 somehow cut a source of water to the pond? FPPUD board members said they knew nothing about such pipes.

The Mountain Enterprise invited Hastings to come search its archives to find the news report. The newspaper’s 50th birthday is coming up, but so far only the last 10 years of issues have been digitized for online searching. Tommy put on white gloves to carefully examine newspaper issues that are 30 years old.

He looked through issues from 1982 and 1983 without finding the report.

A call to Kitty Jo Nelson, former co-owner and editor of The Mountain Enterprise, yielded another clue. Nelson, who was named Honorary Mayor for this year’s Fiesta Days, told some intriguing stories about fierce winds and a drought-related sandstorm followed by gigantic floods that floated a bridge and a house down Cuddy Creek in 1979.

Then she said, “Call Mike Parker. He was on the water board in the 1980s.”

Michael Parker was also a wealth of information. In a phone interview while watching his grandchildren, Parker said he has not seen the pipes himself, but he recalls that in the late 1980s and early 1990s an FPPUD water manager named “Tex” found that a pipe from the spring (in the marshy area just north of today’s veterans’ memorial) had been crushed by big vehicles passing on the dirt road above it. The pipe feeds the pond, Parker was told.

“Tex was knowledgeable and cared about the community. He fixed the pipe,” Parker said.

So FPPUD restored the pipe from the spring to the pond and may have placed another pipe to help irrigate the park grass with pond water.
“The pipes are probably old and dry now,” Parker said Monday evening, August 15.

During the August 11 board meeting, FPPUD Director Lisa Schoenberg expressed concern about the pond’s decline. Board Chair Brahma Neyman said the district does not have funding to fill the pond.

“Maybe it depends on how much the town values its pond,” Terre Ashmore said. Hastings said the pond is important for recreation and fire protection.

On the morning of August 16, FPPUD General Manager Jonnie Allison searched the district’s files and finally found the two clippings from The Mountain Enterprise. They were actually from July and August of 1994. The parallels reported then with the current pond decline are remarkable.

In 1994 the water started to recede in June, just as it did this year. By July the town was concerned that it would not be possible to hold the Fiesta Days fishing derby. By August the pond was seriously altered, but then the FPPUD contacted Kern County for permission to fix the pipe from the spring. The county agreed, and the pond was restored. That held steady for another 22 years, until today.

If water is the source of life, it will always also be a source of anxiety in a time of drought. Mystery grows from uncertainty, and the ongoing saga of Frazier Mountain Park’s pond reminds us of the links between water, safety, beauty and the duty to conserve today.

Photo captions:

August 2013—Fiesta Days at Frazier Mountain Park pond south shore

August 2016—at FMP pond south shore

August 2013—Fiesta Days at Frazier Mountain Park pond north shore

August 2016—Frazier Mountain Park pond north shore

The Robison family, three generations of fisherfolk, at Frazier Mountain Park for the 2013 Fiesta Days Fishing Derby.

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This is part of the August 19, 2016 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.

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