Lake Lagunita
Stanford students call it Lake Lag, and the name carries a hint of irony. Lake Lagunita is a lake the way a stage set is a building -- it plays the role convincingly during the wet months, but for much of the year it is a dry basin of cracked earth and scattered grasses. Created originally to irrigate Leland Stanford's Palo Alto Stock Farm, the artificial lake was once filled each winter by diversion from San Francisquito Creek to a depth of three meters, allowing students to sail and swim. Since the late 1990s, it has not been artificially filled. The diversion dam was removed entirely in 2019. Now the lake fills only when the rains are heavy enough to do the work themselves, as they did in January 2023.
From Farm Irrigation to Frat Pond
The lake began as infrastructure, not amenity. The Stanford family's stock farm needed water, and San Francisquito Creek could supply it. When the university replaced the farm, the lake transitioned into a recreational feature -- a place where student housing clustered around its shores, including the Lagunita residences, Roble Hall, and various fraternities and row houses with names like Enchanted Broccoli Forest and Narnia. In its filled state, the lake offered a pastoral counterpoint to the academic intensity of the campus, a rare flat expanse of water in a landscape dominated by hills and buildings. Its unfilling marked the end of that particular campus tradition.
Salamanders Underground
What replaced recreational boating was arguably more interesting. The dry lake bed became a drainage basin dotted with vernal pools during winter and spring -- temporary wetlands that support a fragile ecosystem. California tiger salamanders, classified as vulnerable by the IUCN, breed in these pools. The Lagunita population faces particular risk because migrating salamanders are frequently killed crossing nearby Junipero Serra Boulevard. In 2001, the university installed a $100,000 system of migration tunnels under the road, creating safe passages for amphibians moving to and from their breeding grounds. Western toads and Pacific chorus frogs also use the lake basin. Great blue herons, great egrets, and mallards visit when water is present.
A Campus Within the Campus
As of 2020, Stanford began constructing a steel-stake and plastic-mesh fence around the dry lake, raising concerns about the barrier's impact on native wildlife including jackrabbits, coyotes, ground squirrels, and voles. The lake occupies an unusual position in the Stanford landscape: too dry to be a recreational feature most years, too ecologically significant to be developed, and too central to be ignored. Dormitories and fraternities line its edges. Runners loop its perimeter trail. On the rare occasions when heavy rains fill it, students gather as if witnessing a natural phenomenon -- which, in a sense, they are. Lake Lagunita is Stanford's accidental nature reserve, a place where the university's ambitions yielded to the simpler logic of rainfall and species survival.
From the Air
Lake Lagunita is at 37.42°N, 122.18°W on the western side of the Stanford campus. When filled, it appears as a small lake surrounded by campus buildings. When dry, it is an open basin. Nearby airports: Palo Alto (KPAO), San Jose (KSJC). Best viewed at 2,000-4,000 ft AGL.