California’s Tulare Lake has been playing hide-and-seek for centuries. The giant lake formed millions of years ago, first vanished 130 years ago, and then kept reappearing. These cycles of vanishing and returning earned it nicknames like “ghost lake” or “zombie lake.” In 2023, a massive snowstorm caused flooding, briefly reviving the lake. By April 2024, the waters started receding once again, marking the fifth time it has disappeared, according to Popular Mechanics. Chasing this lake is like chasing a shadow.
Once the “largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi River,” Tulare Lake formed millions of years ago from rain and meltwater collecting in its basin, according to the Sarah Mooney Museum. Until 1878, the lake spanned 1,080 square miles—an area equal to 30 townships.
“At this time, it contained so much water that a steamship could carry ‘agricultural supplies from the Bakersfield area up to Fresno (at the heart of the San Joaquin Valley) and then up to San Francisco, a distance of nearly 300 miles,” researcher Vivian Underhill of Northeastern University explained in a press release, and added, “However, in the succeeding decades, the ‘ancestral lakes’ and connecting waterways that made such a route possible all but vanished thanks to manmade irrigation.”
Located in the lowlands of the San Joaquin Valley, Tulare Lake was first drained in the 1800s, when settlers of the Tachi Yokut tribe were forced to live on its shores. The tribe relied on the lake for food, shelter, and as a trade route, per NPR. If people could drain that land, they would be granted ownership of segments of that land. This incentive lured these settlers to dry the water body.
In 1938, pouring rainstorms nearly filled up the lake, and in 1983, the lake was rippling again. But over the past century, it has mostly been dry, appearing and disappearing again and again. In 2023, when the lake resurrected and the waters returned, Underhill called this process “reclamation.” Months after the lake’s remarkable resurrection, the wildlife returned to the area. “Birds of all kinds — pelicans, hawks, waterbirds are returning,” Underhill said, adding that “the Tachi also say that they’ve seen burrowing owls nesting around the shore.”
The waters were bubbling merrily until March 2024 when the lake was observed to be drying once again. When The Guardian’s reporter Dani Anguiano visited the lake, she found “sprouts of grass and thick mud” in the region. Before drying up, she estimated, that the lake submerged hundreds of acres of cotton, tomato, and pistachio fields, as well as homes, roads, and power infrastructure. Less than a year after its rebirth, Tulare Lake had shrunk to just 2,625 acres, according to the Kings County Office of Emergency Services. Experts proclaimed that the lake would vanish again in less than a year. “Despite the predictions, the lake is nearly gone,” said Dani Anguiano.
