LAKE ARROWHEAD, Calif. -- Gunning the 200-horsepower engine on his Mako Marine patrol boat, Roy Wagner skims across Lake Arrowhead, churning the surface of a lake as empty as the million-dollar summer homes that crowd its shores.
At a time when the lake high in the San Bernardino Mountains should be brimming, a gritty necklace of sand marks that shore, like a ring around a bathtub 2.2 miles in length.
Pricey boats sit stranded in the dirt. Docks rise in the air, their ladders seemingly straining to reach the drooping waterline below. The lake's lone island has become a peninsula.
Three years of anemic amounts of rain and snow have left the private lake down 12 feet - and dropping.
"We'll be another 6 or 7 feet below that," Wagner, the lake's safety supervisor, predicts by summer's end.
While California overall enjoys normal levels of precipitation this year, thanks to the storms that have blanketed the Sierra Nevada with snow, the southern end of the state faces drought-like conditions and the prospect of destructive wildfires.
So far this season, Southern California has received just one-third the amount of precipitation it normally relies upon, said Maurice Roos, chief hydrologist with the state Department of Water Resources.
For most of the region, including cities like Los Angeles and San Diego, the lack of rain does not automatically mean water shortages. Water imported from Northern California and the Colorado River represents the bulk of what is used, making local conditions less of a worry.
In isolated pockets of Southern California, however, and especially those tucked high in the mountains, imported water is not readily available.
"Those are the only areas of concern," said John Gorman, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
Residents there are more vulnerable to drought since they are wholly dependent on what can be found locally in wells, behind dams and in lakes to slake their thirst.
"This is our fourth year of less-than-half-of-normal precipitation," said Dottie Saville, general manager of the city of Big Bear Lake's department of water, which supplies its customers solely with water it pumps from the ground. "It's getting pretty tight."
At the popular San Bernardino Mountains resort area 87 miles east of Los Angeles, just 5.23 inches of rain and snow have fallen since July 1, 2001, prompting strict restrictions on when residents can water. Officials are planning to sink more wells and are considering ways to ease the crunch, including the pricey alternative of buying water from elsewhere.
In normal years, precipitation is not a problem. The area should have received a whopping 19.1 inches by mid-March, according to the National Weather Service. Instead, Big Bear Lake, like Lake Arrowhead, has dropped a dozen feet as runoff from the mountains has slackened.
Since Lake Arrowhead draws its drinking water from the 140-foot deep lake itself, there is no risk of a shortage there. Still, mothers like Stacey McKay, general manager of the association that manages Lake Arrowhead, remind their children not to be wasteful.
"My kids turn on the water and I go, 'What's that?' And they go, 'That's the lake level going down,'" McKay said.
Even with a few El Nino-enhanced years of rain, the lake deficit can take two or three years to erase, as happened after the drought that ended in 1991. The dry weather has also prompted fears that fire season will come early. Mountain slopes normally blanketed in snow are already tinder dry.
"We could be looking at August-type fire conditions here rather quickly," said Jim Wright, an official of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, which has already begun adding staff and equipment in San Diego, San Bernardino and Riverside counties. "We are gearing up for the worst."