The Ancient Lake

During the last ice age, a vast freshwater lake called Lake Bonneville covered much of what is now western Utah. At its peak it was nearly as big as Lake Michigan, and its waves cut shorelines into the mountains that are still visible above the valleys today.

As the climate warmed and the great lake drained and dried, it left smaller lakes behind. The Great Salt Lake is one. Utah Lake is another. Geologists date the beginning of Utah Lake as its own lake to about 8,000 years ago.

Utah Lake is unusual. It is fresh water in a desert, wide and shallow, covering more than a quarter of Utah Valley. Rivers run into it from the Wasatch Mountains, and its only outlet, the Jordan River, carries its water north toward the Great Salt Lake.

Before settlement, the lake held thirteen native kinds of fish. The most prized was the Bonneville cutthroat trout, a fish descended from the trout of Lake Bonneville itself. Early accounts describe a lake teeming with cutthroat that could weigh fifteen or sixteen pounds.

There were suckers too, and chubs, and a fish found nowhere else on Earth: the June sucker, which lives only in Utah Lake and swims up the Provo River, right beside Vineyard, to spawn.

Each spring, fish crowded up the rivers that fed the lake. That spring run shaped the lives of the people who lived on its shores, and it is why the land at the mouth of the Provo River mattered for so long.

The people who lived around Utah Lake were the Timpanogos Utes. They called themselves Nuciu, which means "the people." The Utes gave the state of Utah its name, and the name of the mountain that rises over Vineyard, Timpanogos, comes from them too.

The lake was their pantry. Families gathered where the Provo River met the lake to catch fish in the spring, then dried them to eat later. They gathered roots and seeds from the wetlands, hunted ducks and other birds, and followed deer and elk into the mountains.

Their year followed the seasons: the lake in spring, the high country in summer, sheltered valleys in winter. No one can point to one exact camp on the Vineyard shoreline, because the Utes moved with the seasons. But this stretch of shore, with its river mouth full of fish, was part of the world they traveled every year.