You Don't Know What You've Got Til It's Back; Log Cabin Sundays June 1, 2025
A Defense of Utah Lake
“No one should be discouraged, Theaetetus, who can make constant progress, even though it be slow.”
That’s one that Plato told some guy (Theaetetus, if context clues are to be believed) that I have often told myself since I first heard it. I’m one of those late bloomers. It took me a long time before I felt like someone that somebody else might want to meet and hang out with. A *long* time.
In junior high when we picked teams once, I was last pick. This wasn’t particularly new to me, because even though I played a lot of little league baseball, and a lot of whatever little league basketball was called, I was very skinny and my glasses were quite thick. The surprise was that I wasn’t called by name. The annoyed team captain just picked me as, “kid in the corner, I guess.” So for the rest of my junior high and high school life my friend called me kid in the corner.
I did have friends, though, and while they teased me they also knew that they were the one picked right before me. It could have been worse, for sure. I could have been the cipher in the snow. For those who may not have been exposed to this particular horror movie, it was a BYU classic that Mormon kids watched a lot when our seminary teacher was too tired to teach.
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I never once got off of a bus and straight beefed it out of sheer loneliness, but I was a dork to be sure. I’m still a dork today, but in a way that is kind of charming, if instagram comments are any indication.
It’s hard to live down that reputation, though. I attended a couple of high school reunions and was surprised at how quickly everyone slipped into the old roles. The first one I attended there was a pavilion with picnic tables underneath it, and it was bustling with boisterous adults talking about their accomplishments and kids. And there were benches surrounding it where I sat and watched them. I felt like this meme:
Perhaps that’s why I have a soft spot for another late bloomer, Utah Lake. I lived in Northern Utah so I never encountered the ignominious vestige of the noble Lake Bonneville until I was sent to the Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah. You could see the lake from the top floor and it was oddly green. I was told by others how poisoned this lake was. Nobody wanted to be anywhere near it. On the shoreline was once the old Geneva Steel Mill and who knows what other toxic sources.
That reputation persisted in my head for the next 20 years. And it’s still in a lot of people’s today. It started to change for me when I was a new biologist for the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources and started attending meetings about what was being done to fix both the lake and its reputation. I think I made an off-hand joke about how gross it was, thinking my audience would be as amenable to it as everyone else in the county seemed to be. The joke did not land and I started learning.
Utah Lake has suffered, like any other body of water located alongside a rapidly growing series of communities. It’s where a lot agriculture run-off ends up. It was full of invasive species that were introduced when Mormon pioneers overfished the lake to the point of their starvation (this is after the lake supported indigenous populations for 12,000 years) and introduced the fast-growing carp to compensate. Only one of the 13 endemic fish species known to live only in Utah Lake remained, the june sucker. June suckers were once listed as endangered, then were downlisted to threatened.
But a lot of its reputation comes from its uniqueness. Utah Lake is shallow. At its deepest it reaches 14 feet with an average depth of just 9 feet. That means it’s warmer than many lakes. It also means that sunlight can travel deeper down the water column, resulting in a lot of nutrients. Eutrophication, or the accumulation of nutrients to the point that so much algae that it chokes out other life, is generally considered a negative in most bodies of water. But in Utah Lake, some eutrophication is normal. It’s just how it is. The murky water is also attributed to the bottom-feeding activities of carp, who turn up the soil constantly.
PR for Utah Lake has always been an uphill battle, and it was made worse recently by a proposal to dredge the lake and pile the sediment in islands throughout the lake. The largest of these islands was to be an actual city. Many of them would be connected by roads. At one point the developers estimated that the city may host as many as 500,000 people. All on a series of islands in the middle of the third largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi.
I don’t have the space to get into this whole debacle, but it was pretty intense. A BYU professor who spoke out against the island was sued for $3 million dollars. Some government officials resigned in disgrace. I found this to be a pretty good summary of both the history of the lake and the history of this project.
This is why we need to speak up for Utah Lake. Because its reputation, some earned, but also one that is consistently improving, almost spelled the end of a resource that a member of the Dominguez-Escalante’s party once called “the most pleasant, beautiful and fertile in all New Spain.”
The reason I’m talking about all of this is because on Saturday I attended the Utah Lake Festival. There were booth with all of the agencies who had worked on it, and the local activist groups, and birders and kayakers and more. And it made me reflect on the progress I’ve seen just in the ten years that I’ve lived near it. The big one is the Provo River Delta, which I talk about here:
And here:
The Provo River delta is a massive wetland and stream restoration project that creates spawning habitat for the June sucker, along with tons of new bird and fish and plant habitat. It rules.
That’s not to mention the carp removal program, invasive phragmites removal, water rights purchases, stream restoration projects, and recreation amenity improvements.
The hardest thing to recover, though, seems to be the lake’s reputation. Here’s a very silly ad they recently released. I think it’s fun and funny and informative, but one only need to quickly glance through the comments to see how badly people still want Utah Lake to be a joke. I don’t understand it. Why not be proud of something in your own backyard?
For me by the end of high school I was starting to be more socially adept. I went on a lot of dates and had friends in every social group. But there were some kids who simply would not let me do that. They seemed intent on making sure that my new friends knew that I was a dork. They were not buying the New Howie Campaign. I could ignore it, though, because we were having fun. And if they wanted to, they could have had fun, too.
Wherever you live you probably have an amenity like this. It could be the town’s historic stream, the one all the coffee shops are named after. Except the stream was buried under concrete decades ago. That stream can get a second life. Or it may be a little pond tucked away and forgotten that could be a city park. Maybe it’s a literal park in disrepair, or a coastal estuary, or maybe it’s the whole ass Hudson River, or The Seine. Whatever it is, it can get better. You gotta believe in it, though.
Meantime, look how cute this lake is:
Here’s the weekend rundown.
Saturday, before the festival began, we went yard-saling. I had one goal, and I found it at the first place where we stopped.
It was made in 1974, is in really great shape, and works like a charm.
We went to the festival, got sunburned, and we swam in the neighbor’s pool.
Sunday I took a long nap, hung out in the backyard and kept an eye on the cats, made a big meal of grilled chicken souvlaki, rice pilaf, and Greek salad. Then we watched Back to the Future and when it was cool enough, went for a walk.
Records listened to:
Shakira, Donde Estan Los Ladrones
Tracy Chapman, Self-titled
An untitled Roger Miller, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis compilation
I played Castlevania: Symphony of the Night for a while but had a lot of unsaved progress lost when I died and it reminded me of how brutal games were back then. Will be back, but I was pretty mad and turned it off.