![]() Of course the holes were part of it the drains had become easily visible with nearly no water in the lake. The managers of Mountain Lake Lodge scrambled their hotel's namesake having been reduced to a mud puddle. Scientists flocked to the lake, trying to figure out what was happening. He is currently a research geologist at the Smithsonian Institution. "So very seldom in geology can you make a prediction like that and then have it happen, not only during your lifetime, but really soon after you make the prediction," says Cawley, a biologist and geologist who has studied the lake for more 20 years. Just three years later, he was proven right. When Jon Cawley did his doctoral thesis on Mountain Lake in 1999, he warned that Mountain Lake, which had had just four completely empty periods in the past 6,000 years according to his research, was due for another low time. Now instead, a long white dock juts out from the lodge's famous gazebo, never reaching the water, while old boats sit up on dry land where the water should be. #Dirty dancing location now fullWalking its perimeter, you can still see the original basin and how high the water would be if it was at full pool. Although the lake is not what it once was, the area is still beautiful, especially in the fall, when it's flanked by multicolored trees waving in the crisp mountain air. He's been studying the lake for 10 years and has been interested in it since his undergraduate days at Virginia Tech. I first saw the lake in 2016, when I was living in Blacksburg, and revisited it in October 2019 with Radford University geologist Chester "Skip" Watts. What used to be a vacation destination for boating and swimming has had to refocuse its offerings to land-based activities, such as archery, hiking, a ropes course and "Dirty Dancing"-themed events. Today what's left of Mountain Lake belongs to the Mountain Lake Lodge, a stately hotel sitting on its south edge that played the role of Kellerman's in the film. ![]()
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