Lake Arrowhead Ca

Hike in the woods, go boating on the lake or spend a lazy afternoon shopping in Lake Arrowhead Village on a midweek hotel special being offered at the Lake Arrowhead Resort and Spa. The deal: $89 per room, per night, Sundays through Thursdays beginning April 1; weekends, $129. Reservations must be made by Saturday and are valid through April 30.

Column after column of dark smoke shot high above the tree line, spewing soot and ash, and Mary Salzwedel knew that each eruption signaled the loss of another home. "We watched the homes go up one by one," said Salzwedel, 58, who had just fled her own house Monday with her husband and puppy as separate fires tore through Green Valley Lake and neighboring Grass Valley, near Lake Arrowhead.

While thousands of neighbors fled the burning mountains around him, Scott Garrett ignored a mandatory evacuation order to try to save his 6,000-square-foot home on a hillside west of Lake Arrowhead. Inside: a stash of movie memorabilia, including a large winged angel statue from the Ben Affleck movie "Daredevil" and a costume from "Planet of the Apes." Garrett, 48, a semiretired movie studio art department technician, filled large buckets with water and sprayed his wood deck with fire retardant.

LAKE ARROWHEAD -- As flames ravage surrounding communities, this resort town high in the San Bernardino Mountains emerged largely unscathed, an island in a sea of destruction. The credit for that isolated victory, federal officials say, should go to firefighting tactics, shifting winds and favorable terrain -- and a sometimes controversial U.S. Forest Service effort to eliminate the tinder that fuels forest fires.

Their mission was to save Arrowbear. And although the winds had flagged Wednesday, the flames that roared out of the backcountry continued their march toward the hamlet in the San Bernardino Mountains, testing the tools, backs and lungs of the Big Bear Hot Shots, a frontline Forest Service crew that fights fires by hand. When things got desperate, when all the hoeing and shoveling could not stop the fire's advance, the team called in Chris Ivey and his dead buddy's bulldozer.

The battle over Lake Arrowhead water rights boiled down to dueling versions of arcane mountain history: whether the lake built a century ago was intended to be a reservoir for the valley below, or a swimming hole and water source for the local resort community.

For years, drought muffled the whir of motorboats zipping across Lake Arrowhead, and Rob Perrin watched his dock business sink with the water level. Perrin thought it would take years for the lake to recover from the precipitous drought, which brought the water level to 21 feet below capacity. But after heavy rains pounded the San Bernardino Mountains resort town in January, the private lake was brimming within a few months.

A Lake Arrowhead water district has illegally pumped millions of gallons from the lake to its 7,500 customers over the last three decades, harming recreation as well as water rights holders on the Mojave River, a state board announced this week. The State Water Resources Control Board found that the Lake Arrowhead Community Services District does not have municipal water rights, despite having siphoned water from the lake since 1978.

Several environmental groups filed suit Tuesday against the county and the developer of a 57-home project near Lake Arrowhead that supervisors approved last month. The lawsuit contends that the Hawarden Development Corp. project is too dense for the area's steep terrain, would destroy southern rubber boa habitat, has an uncertain water source and is at high risk for fire.

With the clock ticking on temporary housing and insurance benefits, tensions are rising among hundreds of fire-displaced residents of a Lake Arrowhead neighborhood, who still don't know if they can rebuild or whether their property will be condemned by San Bernardino County.