A lake full of fish
When Father Escalante saw Utah Lake in 1776, the first thing he wrote about was the fish. The people who lived around it, he noted, lived on them. For a long time before that, and for decades after, the fish of Utah Lake fed everyone who came to its shore.
The lake held thirteen native kinds of fish. The Bonneville cutthroat trout was the prize, a descendant of the trout of ancient Lake Bonneville, and early accounts describe trout of fifteen or sixteen pounds. There were suckers and chubs too, and one fish found nowhere else in the world: the June sucker, which lives only in Utah Lake and swims up the Provo River, beside Vineyard, to spawn.
Feeding the settlers
When the pioneers arrived, the fish saved lives. In the hungry early years, settlers organized fishing companies, and seines and fish traps pulled huge catches from the lake and its rivers. Fish were sold across Utah Valley and the Salt Lake Valley. Within about thirty years of settlement, overfishing and poor care had badly cut the number of trout.
The carp
People went looking for a replacement. In the early 1880s carp were brought to Utah County, considered at the time a superior food fish, and they soon reached Utah Lake, where they flourished. Within about a decade, wildlife managers had soured on them. Carp stir up the bottom and cloud the water, and they crowded out much of what was left.
The lake had hard times. Dams, diversions and droughts changed its water. In the 1930s a severe drought shrank the lake badly. The last Utah Lake cutthroat were taken in the early 1930s, and the lake form of the fish is gone. Carp became the most common fish in the lake.
A fish that lives in only one lake on Earth still lives in Vineyard's lake.
The last of its kind
The June sucker held on, but barely. Dikes and channels at the mouth of the Provo River had turned it into a stagnant ditch where young fish could not survive their drift to the lake. In 2002, only 139 adult June suckers were observed in the Provo River spawning run. The fish was listed as endangered.
The comeback
Then people decided to save it. A recovery program raised June suckers in a hatchery, removed huge numbers of carp from the lake and kept more water flowing in the rivers. In March 2020 work began on the Provo River Delta, a 260 acre project to give the river a natural mouth again, with channels, ponds and wetlands where young fish can hide and grow. More than 150,000 native plants went in. In 2023 the river was turned into its new delta.
It worked. On January 4, 2021, the June sucker was moved from endangered to threatened. In 2022 more than 5,000 tagged June suckers were recorded traveling up the Provo River. The delta opened to the public in October 2024, with new trails beside it, and that year 3,785 tagged June suckers were detected spawning in the new delta.
A fish that lives in only one lake on Earth still lives in Vineyard's lake. After more than a century of loss, the water beside the town is coming back to life.
