Blue Lake (Alaska)
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Blue Lake is a three-mile long lake/reservoir located near the town of Sitka on Baranof Island in Alexander Archipelago of Southeast Alaska.
Blue Lake, as its name suggests, possesses a deep blue hue to its water which has also come to be known as some of the purest water in the world. Blue Lake's watershed comes exclusively from snowpack and small glaciers from the Blue Lake valley. Currently, at the Sawmill Cove Industrial Park, there is a small water bottling operation utilizing the copious amounts of water that originate from the watershed (especially with Sitka's extremely high rainfall) and two other companies retain rights to export of the water in the future. Blue Lake was dammed by the Blue Lake Dam in the '50s greatly expanding the lake's size and also making it possible for large amounts of water to be piped quickly to bottling facilities. The Blue Lake dam, along with the Green Lake Dam, combine to make Sitka's mainstream power sources exclusively hydroelectric.
There is also about a mile-long road that accesses Blue Lake allowing residents to put in kayaks and canoes thus allowing peaks further up the Blue Lake valley, most notably Clarence Kramer Peak, to become more accessible. There is also the Blue Lake Campground which is located about two-thirds the way to the lake. The road itself is very dangerous often winding above cliff ledges, and in 2003 a young girl drove off of the road in a recently stolen vehicle killing herself. There are also many avalanche chutes located along the road which can block it in wintertime and also pose a hazard.
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