Qualla: Lake Whatcom

Lake Whatcom: Introduction

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Feedmepaperr, CC BY-SA 4.0. On a windy afternoon, Lake Whatcom tilts. Steady wind down the ten-mile trough piles water at one end, and when the wind drops, the whole lake rocks back - a seiche, the slow sloshing that big narrow lakes perform. What makes it more than a curiosity here is what moves underneath. Deep in the lake's southern basin sits a layer of frigid, nearly oxygen-free water, and when the lake rocks, some of that water can slop over a submerged ridge called the Strawberry Sill into the basin where the city of Bellingham pulls its drinking water. More than 100,000 people in Whatcom County drink this lake. Its internal weather is not an abstraction to them.

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Image: Feedmepaperr | CC BY-SA 4.0

Lake Whatcom: Loud Water

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Robert Ashworth from Bellingham, WA., USA, CC BY 2.0. The name comes from a Lummi word meaning loud water. Long before it meant a reservoir, the south end of the lake held a Coast Salish village occupied by the Saquantch; around 1800 the Lummi pushed them out, and by the 1850s the first settlers of European descent had arrived. One ...

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Image: Robert Ashworth from Bellingham, WA., USA | CC BY 2.0

Lake Whatcom: Three Lakes in a Trench

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Feedmepaperr, CC BY-SA 4.0. Lake Whatcom is really three lakes that happen to touch. Basin 1 at the north end, the Silver Beach Basin, bottoms out around 100 feet and is ringed by houses. Basin 2, the Geneva Basin in the middle, is the shallow one - 40 to 60 feet at most - and it is where Bellingham's intak...

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Image: Feedmepaperr | CC BY-SA 4.0

Lake Whatcom: The Lake Breathes Once a Year

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Feedmepaperr, CC BY-SA 4.0. Lake Whatcom is monomictic: it mixes top to bottom just once annually. From late spring into mid-autumn the sun warms an upper layer that floats on colder water below, with a sharp temperature drop between them. Oxygen from the air barely reaches the bottom layer, and sediments c...

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Image: Feedmepaperr | CC BY-SA 4.0

Lake Whatcom: Living Upstream of Your Own Tap

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nightskywest, CC BY-SA 3.0. The EPA added Lake Whatcom to its 303(d) list of impaired waters in 1998 for low dissolved oxygen, which traces directly back to phosphorus. Most of it arrives diffusely: stormwater running off roofs and roads, lawns and gardens, aging septic systems in the watershed. In 2005 pho...

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Image: Nightskywest | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lake Whatcom: Everything Downstream

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dicklyon, CC BY-SA 4.0. Nearly 78 percent of the lake's outflow leaves through Whatcom Creek, past control gates at the head of the creek in Whatcom Falls Park where the city meters the level - balancing storage, drinking water demand, and enough flow to keep threatened Chinook salmon moving. Water also...

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Image: Dicklyon | CC BY-SA 4.0