Walk the Heritage Trail this week and you will already see it. The water line along the cedar-shaded bank sits a few inches lower than it did in August, and by the third week of September it will have dropped by roughly six feet. Ask most people out for a jog or walking their dog why this happens every fall and you will hear some version of the same answer: the city drains the lake to clean it out.
That is not what is happening. It never has been.
The Reason Isn't What Most People Assume
The annual drawdown of Lacamas Lake exists for one purpose: dam inspection and repair. Lowering the water by about six feet gives crews access to the structure that holds the lake in place so they can check it for wear and make fixes before winter rain and runoff put pressure on it again. Any debris that gets hauled out along the way is a side effect of people being able to reach the shoreline, not the reason the city does this.
This year's drawdown was originally set for an earlier date and has been rescheduled to begin September 21. Based on the pattern from recent years, the lake typically reaches its lowest point about two weeks after the drawdown starts, stays there for roughly a month while inspections and any repairs happen, and then takes several more weeks to refill depending on how much rain falls that autumn. None of that is a guess about the future. It is simply how the last several Septembers have gone in Camas, and there is no reason to expect this year's mechanics to differ even though the calendar date has shifted.
What Six Feet Actually Looks Like on the Ground
Six feet does not sound dramatic until you have walked past the exposed result of it. Along stretches of the Lacamas Heritage Trail, mud and muck that are normally underwater become visible, and in the warmer, more stagnant sections near the boat launch area, a faint odor can show up as that sediment sits exposed to air. Paddlers and boat owners lose meaningful usability at the launch points as the water retreats from the ramps. None of this is dangerous. It is just a different lake for a few weeks than the one you paddled on in July.
The lake's water is already warm compared to most in the region and drops off quickly with depth, so the shallower fringes are the parts that change fastest and most visibly once the level starts falling. If you are used to launching a kayak or canoe from a ramp that sits comfortably in the water today, expect that same spot to look and function differently by early October.
The Infrastructure Story Nobody Tells You
Here is the part that explains why this happens every single year without fail, and it has nothing to do with algae or aesthetics.
The dam that shapes Lacamas Lake as it exists today traces back to 1883, when Henry Pittock, who needed newsprint supply for The Oregonian, had a dam built to expand the lake and feed a paper mill in Camas. For well over a century, that dam and the water rights tied to it belonged to the mill and its later corporate owners. The City of Camas did not take ownership of the dams on Round Lake until 2018, when Georgia-Pacific donated them to the city.
That transfer matters more than it sounds like it should. Before 2018, dam inspection and upkeep were a private company's obligation. Now it is a municipal one, funded and scheduled by the City of Camas Public Works department every fall as a matter of public safety, not lake maintenance for its own sake. The September drawdown you see happening now is the city fulfilling a responsibility it inherited less than a decade ago on infrastructure that predates the city government itself by more than a hundred years.
Three Weeks, Three Events, One Thread
What makes this particular September worth paying attention to is not just the drawdown. The city has stacked a run of lake-adjacent events into the same three-week window, and most residents will only notice one or two of them without realizing they are connected.
- September 13: The 2nd Annual Leadbetter Walk & Roll closes Leadbetter Road to vehicle traffic from the Lacamas Lake Boat Launch to Camp Currie, opening it to walkers and cyclists from 1 to 4 p.m.
- September 21: The Lacamas Lake drawdown begins, with the city reducing the total water level by roughly six feet to reach the depth needed for dam inspection.
- September 26: Three things happen the same day. The City of Camas and the Lacamas Watershed Council host the annual lake cleanup. The Camas-Washougal Fire Department runs its Open House and Health and Safety Fair. And downtown, RedDoor Gallery hosts the Camas Plein Air event from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.
None of these were designed as a single package, but they land in the same stretch of calendar because they all orbit the same low-water season. The cleanup in particular depends on the drawdown already being underway. Volunteers can only reach the shoreline debris that the dropping water exposes, which is the closest thing to an intentional link between the infrastructure work and the community event built around it.
This Has Already Been a Big Year for the Lake
The drawdown is not the first disruption Lacamas Lake has seen in 2026. The Leadbetter boat ramp was closed to the public on July 22 for staging and treatment operations, when contractors from Aquatechnex applied an aluminum sulfate treatment aimed at reducing harmful algal blooms. It closed again on August 21 for a second round of the same work.
Aluminum sulfate treatments bind with phosphorus in the water, which helps limit the nutrient supply that feeds algae blooms, a chronic issue in a lake this warm and this exposed to agricultural runoff from the surrounding watershed. Two ramp closures before Labor Day, followed by a scheduled six-foot drawdown three weeks later, adds up to an unusually active season of lake management even by Lacamas Lake's normal standards. If it has felt like the lake has been harder to plan around this summer than in past years, that is not in your head.
What It Means If You Use the Lake This Month
If you paddle, fish, or walk the shoreline regularly, the next few weeks call for some adjustment rather than avoidance.
Boaters and paddlers should plan lake trips before September 21 if they want full ramp access, since usability at the launch points will decline steadily once the drawdown begins and likely stay reduced into late October. Trail walkers and runners on the Heritage Trail should expect exposed mud and the possibility of odor near the boat launch and other slower-moving sections of shoreline, particularly on warmer afternoons. Anglers may find fish concentrated in deeper remaining pools as shallower water disappears, which some longtime lake users treat as one of the better windows for bank fishing all year.
None of this closes the lake. It changes it for a few weeks, the same way it has every fall since the city took over dam maintenance in 2018, and the same way it likely will again next September.
The Rhythm of Living Here
Understanding why the lake drops, and recognizing that a private mill's century-old infrastructure is now a city responsibility exercised in plain view every fall, is the kind of detail that separates someone who has lived in Camas for a season from someone who has lived here through a few of these cycles. The lake is lower right now because a piece of 1880s engineering needs a checkup, not because anyone decided the water needed a scrub. That distinction is small, but it is the kind of thing worth knowing if you plan to keep walking this trail, launching from this ramp, or watching this particular stretch of shoreline change with the seasons for years to come.
If you are already living near Lacamas Lake and thinking through what comes next, whether that is a move within Camas or a question about how a property near the water is affected by changes like this one, Daniel Treacy has spent years working this market on both sides of the Columbia. Let's Connect.
