Hell Hole Reservoir

Hell Hole Reservoir is an artificial, crescent-shaped lake in the Sierra Nevada mountain range 10 miles (16 km) west of Lake Tahoe in California, United States. The lake is about 3.5 miles (5.6 km) long when at full capacity. The lake was created in 1966 with the completion of Lower Hell Hole Dam across the Rubicon River, a major tributary of the Middle Fork of the American River. Hell Hole is named for a deep canyon which is now under the waters of the lake. How the canyon came to be named Hell Hole is a combination of folklore and speculation. An early author, George Wharton James (1858–1923), visited the canyon in 1913. He imagined that one of the miners seeking riches in the 1860s, in what was then called "Squaw Valley", now Olympic Valley must have thought it "a hell of a hole to get into or out of", but admitted his source for the place name was more speculative than the anonymous miner's chances for riches in the area. James' guide for the 1913 camping expedition to Hell Hole was Bob Watson, a well-known camping guide who operated in the Lake Tahoe Region from the 1880s into the first decades of the 20th century. Watson may have been the source of the story as he sought to entertain and edify his paying clients with tales of local history. James attributed much of the local lore to Watson. The United States Board on Geographic Names attributes the first use of the name "

Reservoir data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).