Six Miles Off Course: What an Eight-Day Utah Lake Search Revealed

In early May 2020, two teenagers went out on Utah Lake to go tubing near the Knolls, on the lake’s west side, late in the afternoon. They did not come back, and the search that followed became one of the largest Utah Lake has seen.

More Than 1,000 Hours on the Water

Over the next eight days, more than 60 people from multiple agencies, including the Utah County Sheriff’s Office and Utah State Parks, worked the case. Crews logged more than 1,000 hours using more than 10 boats, 12 wave runners, and several helicopters and airplanes. When cloudy water made visual searching impossible, crews turned to side-scan and multibeam sonar.

Wind worked against them from the start. Conditions the afternoon the pair went missing picked up to 20 to 25 miles per hour, then built to roughly 50 miles per hour overnight, with the water holding at 57 degrees. Sergeant Justin Gordon, the sheriff’s office search and rescue coordinator, later called weather the hardest part of the operation. State boating safety coordinator Ty Hunter put it more simply: the lake’s 96,000 surface acres can turn “from flat glass to extreme conditions in a matter of moments.”

Found Six Miles From Where Crews Expected

Both were found the following Thursday. A fisherman came across the first body near the shoreline by the Lincoln Beach marina jetties at about 1:30 p.m. A sheriff’s office pilot located the second roughly three hours later, about 8.5 miles from where the pair had entered the water. Search coordinators had planned their effort around where wind and current should have carried two people through the lake. The bodies turned up six miles from that expected zone. “It makes no sense,” Gordon said afterward.

Officials also said neither teenager was wearing a life jacket, a detail Hunter used to repeat Utah Lake’s basic rule: wear one every time you’re on the water, no exceptions.

A Familiar Pattern

Search and rescue officials on Utah Lake have said versions of the same thing for years. The lake is shallow and exposed, with little to break the wind once it picks up, and conditions that look calm at launch time can turn dangerous within the hour. The eight-day search in May 2020 is one entry in that pattern, not an exception to it.

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Source: https://www.sltrib.com/news/2020/05/14/bodies-missing-teenagers/ (life jacket detail per https://www.deseret.com/utah/2020/5/14/21259450/bodies-missing-teens-found-utah-lake-search-priscilla-bienkowski-sophia-hernandez/)