Lake Gregory Regional Park offers a great place for visitors to escape the summer heat of Southern California. The lake's surface is at an elevation of 4,550 feet and the ridges around the lake climb up to a thousand feet higher. Summer temperatures are often 20 degrees cooler than in San Bernardino, which is only 14 miles away by car. Unlike Lake Arrowhead, which is private, visitors can swim, boat and fish in Lake Gregory.

In summer, many visitors from the urban areas of Southern California come to Lake Gregory, where they can swim, ride on the lake's two 300-foot waterslides, and rent paddleboards, rowboats, paddleboats, sailboats and water cycles. Outside of the swimming area, anglers will find excellent fishing for trout, catfish and bass.

The lake is also an excellent place to exercise in the cooler mountain air whether you run or walk. There is now a state-of-the-art fitness trail with all-new exercise stations along the scenic path around the lake.

The dual waterslides at Lake Gregory are popular with bathers. The lake's swimming area includes sandy beaches, rest rooms, two snack bars, grills, picnic tables, picnic shelters, sand volleyball courts and more. The grill and picnic areas may be reserved for large gatherings, where visitors can combine swimming, picnicking, watersliding and an outdoor mountain barbeque. The Crestline Chamber of Commerce is sponsoring five fishing derbies this year at the lake. These will be held on the following dates: April 30, May 28, July 2, Sept. 3 and Oct. 1. For more information, click here to go to the Chamber's trout derby page. For more information about Lake Gregory Regional Park, call the park directly at 909-338-2233, orclick here to go to the Lake Gregory Regional Park Web site.

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From http://la.curbed.com/

The San Bernardino Mountains could soon see the reopening of the long-shuttered, totally awesome Santa's Village theme park, but don't get out your ugly Christmas sweater just yet: it will look and feel a little different, reports theDaily News. The park will be transformed into an "an outdoor-oriented adventure park" and be rechristened Skypark, says the man behind it all, a Lake Arrowhead real estate broker named Bill Johnson who's "directing" the overhaul on the 153-acre site. The rationale is that the old Santa's Village, while really fun for kids, was boring for most everyone else, so the new park will have activities with a wider appeal across ages: flyfishing, mountain biking, zip lines, bouldering, a climbing wall, and an outdoor ice skating rink. Santa's going to get extreme.

Santa will still be around at Skypark, but as more of a mascot than a central figure. The "woodsman" element will be played up, so that red-and-white suit will probably fall by the wayside in favor of a kind of LL Bean-type ensemble, or at least some flannel. (He will remain "jolly," says Johnson.) Santa 2.0 will have a best-friend dog named Scout and both will appear on all the merchandise for the new attraction.

Santa's Village, when it was open, could theoretically have been a real home to Santa—who totally exists. It was surrounded by tall trees, the air sometimes got chilly, and everything looked like it was ripped from a cartoon drawn by a child who'd eaten way too much candy. Located in the town of Skyforest (fittingly fantastical), the park opened to enormous crowds in 1955—almost two months before Disneyland—but interest waned and it closed down in 1998.

Johnson is planning to reopen the park on August 1, which he admits is pretty ambitious, given that he still requires approval from multiple state, federal, and county agencies before proceeding. The park, if opened, would employ more than 200 people.