Short Stuff: Disappearing Dirty Dancing Lake

The lake from one of the all-time great movies (search your feelings, you’ll find that it’s true) is turning into a dried up mudhole. Turns out it has some unusual features.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck.
Jerry's over there. This is short stuff. Getty up now,
I've and the time of our lives. That's pretty good.
I can't even sing that without thinking of the great
Simpsons jokes. Same here the halftime of Our Life with

(00:25):
Dolly Parton and Snoopy. Oh that's right, yeah, so the
good one. So we're talking about Dirty Dancing and specifically
uh Mountain Lake outside of Blacksburg, Virginia, where that was
the location of Kellerman's lodge. Mountain Lake Lodge doubled as
Kellerman's for the eighty seven classic film Dirty Dancing. It

(00:49):
did um and that lake actually was a character in
the film because they practiced. In a little bit of foreshadowing,
Johnny Castle and Baby practice their dance move where he
lifts her up over his head, which is basically the
thing that brings the whole house down in the movie.
It's like the climax of the movie is this dance

(01:10):
move and they practice it in the lake. That's right,
quick shout out. Jennifer Gray is still around in great
She was in that TV show that I've binged, red Oaks.
That is so fantastic that our buddy John Hodgman is
and she's she plays the mom and she's wonderful. That's great.
I gotta check that show out. Patrick Swayzy has leftist R.

(01:32):
I P Yeah, he was wonderful man. Hell of a dancer,
great fighter. It's pretty good actor, great singer, She's like
the wind. Okay, I thought it was a good so
I get chills every time I hear it. Still, well,
I say, I know this is a short stuff, but
I'll rank it as dancer, fighter, actor, singer in order

(01:55):
of his best you know, his talents. I won't do
spute that order. But it's just a spectrum of greatness. Okay.
I loved him in He's great, So that's what I say.
So the actual name of that lake, like you said,
is Mountain Lake. Um. And the actual name of the

(02:16):
resort that's that was supposedly Kellerman's resort, which I think
it was supposed to be in like the Poconos, wasn't
it not Virginia? But um there's the resort is actually
in reality called Mountain Lake Lodge. And the people who
own Mountain Lake Lodge and the people who are investors
in Mountain Lake Lodge. They're not very happy about things
these days because Mountain Lake keeps draining, and it keeps draining,

(02:41):
and what was once a lodge and a resort that
was based on fun and the sun on this lake
in Virginia is now turning to things like archery and
horseback rides and telling guests exactly why the lake is
about at thirty five pc of its normal capacity. Yeah.
If you just google dirty dan Sing Lake today or
gazebo or boardwalk and you will see that that gazebo

(03:04):
and doc boardwalk um or then in the middle of
the field. Yeah, it's really creepy. Yeah, it's very weird.
And we're gonna tell you why right now. Uh. Mountain
Lake is one of two only two natural lakes in Virginia.
Georgia has zero. They have to in the southern Appalachian Mountains.
And over the years, and we're talking every few hundred years,

(03:30):
this lake empties and fills back up again naturally. Yeah,
which is kind of weird. And over the course of
the six thousand years that this lake has been around,
which I just find that so fascinating, don't you that
a lake has only been around for six thousand years. Yeah, yeah,
I love that. But anyway, the six thousand years it's

(03:52):
been around, it's actually empty three different times, chuck like
completely emptied. Yeah. So there's two guys that figure heavily
and sort of why the uh Mountain Lake is like
it is. There's this one guy, what's his named Chester
Watts Chester Skip Watts Skip is derivative of Chester obviously,
so he's a geologist and he knows a lot about it.

(04:12):
And there's this other guy, John Collie c A. W. L. E.
Y that wrote his doctoral thesis on Mountain Lake in
and they have explained that Mountain Lake has holes that
has little holes on the bottom, a lot of them
that continually drain this water out. And they've done die test.

(04:32):
I think Watts did the die test and found that
this water is coming out about a mile from here
and it's been doing this for six thousand years. They
literally got to the bottom of it. So, um, that's it.
I mean, that's the mystery holes. But the thing is
is the people over at Mountain Lake Lodge want to

(04:53):
know why is it getting worse? Like why would this
if if these holes have been here for all six
thousand years. First of all, why didn't we start to
notice this until like two thousand two? And secondly, like,
why isn't it filling back up? Why does it just
keep going down and down and down? And so how
I think was it Cowley who explained it as a

(05:15):
water budget. Yeah, he said, if you think of it
like a bank account, you got you got money coming in,
you've got money coming out. You want more money coming in,
so that bank account gets bigger. And it's the same
with this lake. You have inflow and outflow, and at
various times throughout the history of this lake, there's been
more outflow than inflow, right, And so there was a

(05:36):
drought that actually started in the nineties, um that that
led to this this lower inflow and which meant that
there was more outflow, which explains it partially, but it
doesn't fully explain it. We'll get real really, like reveal
what's going on with this mystery? After these messages just

(05:56):
up starts so much. Okay, chuck. So there was a drought,

(06:20):
which means that there's more water going out than this's
coming in. That's great because the drought ended. But the
people at Mountain Lake Lodge said, well, the drought ended everybody,
and this lake is still not filling up. What is
the deal? They actually were so upset about this they
paid Jerry Seinfeld to come get on the phone and
ask what the deal was about it. That was a

(06:41):
lot of money too, but it got everyone's attention. So
he said, there's a few reasons. Uh, he said, it's
not just one thing. You can't say it's even these
two things. It's sort of Multifaceted's three, it's only three.
So you've got the drought, which did not help. You've
got um when Mountain Lake Lodge was built, a conference

(07:02):
center above the lake, and to comply with building this thing,
they had to construct stormwater management basins. And they said,
you know what will probably happen is I don't know
if they said that, but what they assumed. I guess
what happened was that water would still get to the
lake as groundwater. But they found out that wasn't happening.

(07:24):
It was going to a creek. Yeah, is that what
you say? You call it a creek. It's a creek. Boy,
you just threw me off. Some people say creek though,
right sure. I think you know country country folk who
say warsh exactly. So um, that was kind of a
big surprise that that water wasn't going where they thought

(07:45):
it would because it's I guess these things are fairly
close to the lake, and since it's above it, they
just assumed to trickle down. So that's a big problem, right,
And so the geologists are saying, well, I guess one
thing you could do is plug the holes if you want,
and then hopefully uh rainfall will kind of raise the levels.
But you want to plug these holes one at a time,

(08:06):
and Mountain Lake Live said too late, and they plugged
them all at once, and he stared to scared the
Jesus out of the geologists. Well, and the reason they
did this was because they knew that one of the
other facets of why it was draining was the sediment cycle.
And it's just like something gets stuck in your sink, drain,
it's gonna drain slower. And at various times throughout the

(08:27):
history of this lake there might be things either stuck
in or not stuck in. So it just happened that
after dirty dancing that was not much stuck and so
it was draining out a lot quicker than it normally
might have. Yeah, Jennifer Gray was like, thank god, Patrick
Swayzy wasn't alive to see this shameful thing. So how

(08:47):
did they plug these holes? M While at first and
the first apparently they were aware, I don't know if
they lost memory of it or thought it was an
anomaly or thought it would just go away. But in
the first half of the twentie entry, at some point
the Mountain Lake Lodge used mattresses to stuff into the holes.
How big are these I tried to find it. I
I don't know. Um, I'm not sure how big they are,

(09:10):
but from what I understand, there's more there than they thought.
So one few mattresses isn't going to help. But also,
like what poor bell Hop did they send down there
to drag a mattress down to the bottom of a
lake and try to stuff it in a hole, because
you know, you know, that's who did it, of course,
So that was it. That was their first attempt, um,

(09:32):
and the second attempt was much more technologically advanced. They
stuffed dirt and clay into it. Yeah dirt, Uh clay?
Is that what what the bent tonight is? Yeah, it's
like expanding clay. Yeah, that makes sense. They should have
got some of that foam stuff that you spray in mouseholes.
They basically just sped up the great stuff. They basically

(09:55):
just sped up the sentiment cycle. But they they overdid
it because the lake said nature will find a way
and just started popping new holes. Yeah, it's crazy. This
reminds me of the Exploding Lakes episode way back when.
But yeah, the water level never got to full pond
or for a full pool is what you can call it.

(10:17):
That full pool, and they there is water there. There's
more than there was in two thousand eight. Like if
you look at pictures from two thousand and eight, that's
when it was literally a field. Uh there's a little
bit of water, but you can't canue or anything. You
can't swim. It's kind of sad, to be honest, to
look at it. But there's something to be said for

(10:37):
archery and horseback riding. Sure, yeah, especially orchery. Archery on horseback.
Oh wow, yeah, you get some you can level up
if you do that stuff. Yeah, they comp your room
for the night. But what said that, You know what,
they could redirect water from another local watershed just gravity
feed it down in there. He said that would probably

(10:59):
do it. But you've got to be really careful because
like we've seen, like the domino effect when you start
messing with nature like that. But he said that would
probably work if they want to explore that. I don't
know if they are or not, but we'll see. I
don't know. The Mountain Lake Lodge board clearly does not
bow before nature. It does not know. Well, that's it.

(11:23):
I guess we'll have to revisit this in a few
years to see what happens to Mountain Lake. Hopefully it'll
come back, not just for Mountain Lake Lodge, but for
the culture as a whole, the culture that loves dirty dancing.
That's right. Uh, that means everybody that short stuff is out.
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(11:44):
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