Salvation for Laurel Bed Lake

It appears that Laurel Bed Lake is going to be around for a while longer. If you follow this blog, you will remember a post a while back, mentioning the the soon coming demise of Laurel Bed Lake in south west Virginia. Once again, via the Roanoke Times outdoors section comes this headline: "Resurrected Laurel Bed Lake Still Charms."

It appears that due to public out cry, the DNR some how managed to find the $2,000,000 need to repair the dam at Laurel Bed Lake just outside of Saltville, Virginia. It is amazing what the government can find just laying around when given the motivation to look for it. Oh! Look we just happened to find two million dollars stuck behind a filing cabinet! Maybe we can fix that dam.

The only down side is that the lake will remain a smallmouth lake. Back in what some would have considered the glory days, the lake held some rather large brook trout. Today, due to rising water temperatures and some fool stocking rock bass in the lake, no brookies can be found there. Sadly they more than likely will not be found there in the near future either.

If your into smallmouth fishing in a quite and high elevation area you should check out Laurel Bed Lake. There are some regulations on the lake. The first is no gas powered boats, so a john boat or a canoe is ideal for traversing the lake. Also there are some special catch and release rules for the lake, which were suspended during the draining of the lake but have been reinstated.
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