Gone Before Sunset: A Kayaker Lost at Echo Reservoir
The call came in on a Tuesday evening in late September. A man had gone out on Echo Reservoir in Summit County and had not come back to shore. His adult son made the report — his father had last been in contact with family around 4:30 p.m., and by 5:30, nobody could reach him.
Summit County Search and Rescue launched immediately. Teams worked into the night, covering the reservoir by boat, scanning the surface, and eventually locating the man’s kayak drifting without its paddler. His life jacket was recovered separately. The search continued through darkness until approximately 1:30 in the morning, when divers located the body of Steven Marc Gines, 56, of Salt Lake County, beneath the surface.
The recovery took the better part of a night. It took resources from multiple agencies, volunteer search and rescue personnel, and hours of coordinated effort in cold, dark water. And at the end of it, a family received the worst possible news.
Echo Reservoir sits along Interstate 80 in Summit County, tucked against the hills east of Coalville. It is a reservoir that most Utahns have driven past hundreds of times, watching the water glint from the highway. Fewer have stopped to use it recreationally, which in some ways makes it feel like a quieter, lower-risk body of water than Pineview or Jordanelle. That perception is dangerous.
Water does not distinguish between busy and quiet reservoirs. A kayaker alone on Echo faces the same physics as a kayaker on any lake in the state: if conditions change suddenly, if a medical emergency occurs on the water, if a capsize happens far from shore, the outcome depends entirely on what safety resources are immediately available. Echo Reservoir, like most of Utah’s mid-tier recreational lakes, does not have the kind of standing water rescue infrastructure that its larger counterparts do.
The death of Steven Gines joined a long, quiet list of reservoir drowning fatalities in Summit County going back decades. Echo has claimed lives in motorboat collisions, in swimming accidents, and now in what appears to have been a solo kayaking incident that turned fatal without warning. Each one is different in its details and identical in its outcome: a family changed permanently, recovery crews working through night and cold water, and a reservoir that keeps its own counsel about what happened.
We cannot prevent every accident on Utah’s water. But we can ensure that when someone goes missing, the recovery capability is there — not hours away, not dependent on volunteer availability, but present, trained, and ready. And we can work toward a broader awareness of what these reservoirs hold, what accidents they have witnessed, and why taking water safety seriously on every body of water — not just the famous ones — matters.
Echo Reservoir is worth knowing by name. It deserves the same respect and the same safety resources as every other lake in Utah. The people who use it deserve that too.
Fathom Restoration is a Utah nonprofit dedicated to recovering submerged vehicles, vessels, and debris from Utah’s lakes and waterways. Donate, volunteer, or report a submerged vehicle at fathomrestoration.org.
