Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Lake Davis, CA

Lake Davis is an unincorporated census-designated place in Plumas County, on the shore of the Lake Davis reservoir in the Sierra Nevada at an elevation of 5,886 feet, about 7 miles north of Portola.

The community sits just downstream from Grizzly Valley Dam, an earth-and-rock dam 800 feet long and 115 feet high that was completed in 1966 as part of the California State Water Project.

The reservoir was named for Lester T. Davis (1906-1952) and covers about 4,025 acres with more than 32 miles of shoreline when full.

The 2020 census counted 72 residents in Lake Davis, up from 45 in 2010 and just 23 in 2000, the year the community first appeared as a census-designated place.

Only 36 of Lake Davis's 146 housing units were occupied year-round in 2020, because most of its homes are seasonal or vacation properties, and half of its 36 households were people living alone.

The lake is the centerpiece of the Lake Davis Recreation Area in Plumas National Forest, which supports boating, camping, fishing, swimming, snowmobiling and cross-country skiing.

Lake Davis was long famous as a trophy trout fishery for Eagle Lake-strain rainbow trout before illegally introduced northern pike were discovered in it in the mid-1990s.

The lake drew national attention when the state treated it with the fish poison rotenone in 1997 to eradicate the pike, and again in September 2007 after the pike population rebounded; no northern pike have been confirmed in the lake since the 2007 treatment.