Lacamas Lake Is About to Drop Six Feet. It Has Been Doing This Since 1883.

Walk the Heritage Trail in early October and you will see it before anyone tells you: the dock ladders stand taller than they should, the shoreline mud stretches out where there was water a week earlier, and the lake that filled every kayak launch photo all summer looks like someone pulled a drain plug. Nobody did, exactly. But someone did open a valve, and they have been doing it every fall for longer than anyone currently paddling that lake has been alive.

This year the city of Camas has scheduled the drop to begin Monday, September 21. Public Works will lower Lacamas Lake and Round Lake by roughly six feet, the same reduction the city has run every autumn for years. If you already live near the lake, you have probably absorbed this as background noise, the thing that happens right around when the leaves turn. What most residents have not connected is why a public utility crew is still following a schedule set by a 19th-century newspaper baron's paper mill.

Why the Water Actually Disappears

The most common guess, and the wrong one, is that the city drains the lake to clear out trash and debris before winter. That is a byproduct, not the point. The real reason is dam inspection. Two dams sit at the south end of Round Lake, the smaller of the two connected lakes, joined to Lacamas Lake by a narrow channel that runs under the SR 500 bridge. Lowering both lakes by six feet gives crews access to structures that are underwater the rest of the year, so they can check for damage and make repairs before winter rain raises the level again on its own.

The dams themselves predate the city's involvement by more than a century. The original dam was built in 1883 by Henry Pittock, the publisher behind The Oregonian, to expand the lake and supply water for the paper mill he built in Camas. That mill is still standing and still operating, now under Georgia-Pacific, a Koch Industries company. For most of the lake's history, the mill controlled the dams and set the schedule for lowering the water, because the mill's operations depended on it. That changed in 2018, when Georgia-Pacific donated the two dams on Round Lake to the city of Camas. The physical ritual residents see every fall, the six-foot drop, the mud flats, the exposed dock legs, has not changed. What changed is who is legally responsible for keeping the infrastructure safe. City Public Works now runs an inspection calendar that a private paper company used to run on its own terms.

That handoff is worth sitting with if you use this lake regularly. The rhythm of your fall walks, your last kayak trip of the season, your kid's fishing spot, is still being set by a decision a mill owner made almost a century and a half ago to keep his printing presses supplied. The city inherited the infrastructure. It did not get to change the physics.

Not the Same Disruption You Saw in August

If the Leadbetter boat ramp felt off-limits earlier this summer too, that was a completely different event, and conflating the two is the single most common mix-up among people who use this lake. In late August, contractors from Aquatechnex closed the Leadbetter ramp for a day to apply an aluminum sulfate treatment aimed at reducing phosphorus levels that feed harmful algae blooms. That is a water quality intervention, timed to warm-weather bloom conditions, and it has nothing to do with dam mechanics.

Here is the distinction, side by side:

The two events sometimes get blamed on each other. A boater who sees a closed ramp in July and then hears about a "drawdown" in September can walk away thinking the city drained the lake because of algae. It did not. The drawdown happens whether the water was clean or clouded that summer. It is a structural maintenance requirement, not a response to conditions.

What Six Feet Actually Looks Like on the Ground

Six feet does not sound dramatic against a lake that runs 60 feet deep at its center, but the visible effect concentrates almost entirely in the shallow margins where people actually spend time. The lake's edges, where the Heritage Trail runs closest to shore and where both boat launches sit, are exactly where a six-foot drop turns into exposed lakebed. Past drawdowns have left mud and muck visible along stretches of trail that are underwater the rest of the year, and the two small kayak and canoe launch areas near Heritage Park become harder to use as the shoreline retreats from the ramp.

Based on the pattern from the last several years, the lake typically reaches its lowest point about two weeks after the drawdown begins, so this year that would put the minimum level around the first week of October. That window, from late September through early October, is when access is most limited and when the shoreline looks the least like the lake you remember from July. Anglers should also expect the fish that do live in Lacamas Lake, mostly bass, crappie, bluegill, and perch, to behave differently as their available water shrinks and warms further in the shallows.

Past drawdowns have also coincided with temporary water quality dips. Public Health has previously noted that lowering the lake's water level tends to worsen conditions that already favor algae, since less water means less dilution and often less circulation. That does not mean this year will produce an advisory. It means the odds of one go up during the low-water weeks, so if you are the type who checks the county's toxic algae monitoring page before a paddle, this is the season to keep doing that.

The Cleanup That Rides Along With It

For close to two decades, the low-water weeks have doubled as an opportunity for the community to do something about all the trash a full lake normally hides. Volunteer groups, including the Watershed Alliance of Southwest Washington working alongside the Camas Ivy League, have run shoreline cleanup and ivy-pull events timed to the drawdown in past years, typically gathering at Heritage Park with gloves and waterproof boots to haul out what the retreating water reveals. The city has not yet posted this year's specific cleanup date as of this writing, so if pulling on boots and hauling out someone else's forgotten tackle box sounds like your kind of fall Saturday, keep an eye on the city's parks calendar over the next few weeks.

When the Lake Comes Back

Refilling starts later than most people expect. In recent years the city has waited until the last week of October, sometimes as late as October 28, before beginning to bring the level back up, and the process itself takes several weeks and depends heavily on how much rain falls that fall. A wet October means a faster refill. A dry one stretches it out. Either way, do not expect the lake to look normal again until sometime in November, and do not be surprised if your favorite dock is still sitting on exposed mud well after the leaves have finished changing.

The Point Worth Remembering

None of this changes what Lacamas Lake is for most of the year, which is one of the better reasons to live in Camas rather than just visit it. But the next time you notice the water looking strange in October, you will know you are not looking at neglect or a maintenance oversight. You are looking at the last visible trace of a decision a 19th-century mill owner made about his own water supply, still being carried out by the city that eventually inherited his dams. Few small towns have a piece of daily infrastructure with a paper trail that long, and fewer residents know it is there until the mud shows up under their feet.

If you are the kind of person who wants to understand a neighborhood down to the reasons behind its odd seasonal rhythms, not just its listing prices, that curiosity tends to serve you well here. We cover this kind of local detail regularly, including what else changes around Lacamas Park this time of year, and you can browse more of what makes this part of Clark County tick in our Camas neighborhood guide.

And if all this lake-watching has you thinking about what it would take to actually live closer to it, DPC Homes is always happy to talk through what a move to this side of the Columbia River really looks like, drawdown season and all.