Protect

CAUSEY

Weber County
Fathom Restoration
41° 18′ 05″ N
111° 34′ 28″ WCAUSEY RESERVOIR
Donate to Protect Causey
Both access roads to this reservoir are closed until at least 31 December 2026 while eleven and a half million dollars of road and parking work goes in, and the Forest Service expects closures into 2027. Check before you drive. Every figure here is quoted from its source.
218Feet of zoned earthfill. The concrete here is the spillway, not the dam
2BThe recreation class, on a lake people jump into. Pineview downstream is 2A
42Utah waters open to spearfishing. The guidebook prints nine of them
0Condition assessments on record for this high hazard dam
0.10The share of its own bounding box this reservoir fills, the lowest in the series
Live from the South Fork
Storage has been recorded here since January 1966, a month after the monthly series began and the year the dam was finished. The flow card is the release gauge below the dam, which has had fifteen minute telemetry since September 2024.
contacting federal services
Water in the reservoirNRCS
reading the daily storage record
Of capacityReclamation
against 7,870 acre feet
The river below the damUSGS
reading the release gauge
Forecast over the waterNWS
contacting the National Weather Service
About  ·  01

Earth, not concrete, and not a state park

Reclamation names this dam in one sentence about faults alongside Lost Creek, East Canyon and Pineview. It also publishes a coordinate for it nine hundred metres from where three other agencies put it.

Causey Dam is a zoned earthfill embankment. Reclamation's data sheet calls it a "zoned earthfill structure" , its project page repeats it , its project history describes work on "the earthfill structure" , and the national dam inventory codes it Earth in both of its dam type fields . Five agency records, no disagreement.

There is one sentence that reliably misleads people, and it is worth quoting exactly. Reclamation's own dam safety office writes: "Causey Dam is an earthfill dam with an uncontrolled concrete overflow spillway" . The concrete in that sentence is the spillway. The dam is earth. Read it quickly and you come away thinking this is a concrete structure, which is exactly the mistake this page started out making.
MeasureReclamation The dam inventory
Structural height217.5 ft218
Hydraulic height193.1 ft187
Crest length845.0 ft at elevation 5,704845
Material1,410,000 cubic yardsEmpty
Spillway capacity7,570 cubic feet a second at elevation 5,698.17,600, which matches no published Reclamation figure
Outlet works8,900 cubic feet a secondEmpty
Capacity7,870 acre feet7,870 normal, 8,730 maximum

The construction record is unusually specific for a dam this size. The contract went to the R. A. Heintz Construction Company on 15 June 1962, "with plans to finish during 1965". Work began in the summer of 1962 with clearing, outlet excavation and diversion of the South Fork. It finished in 1966, a year late . The site itself had moved: "The site of Causey Dam and Reservoir on the South Fork of the Ogden River had actually been relocated from earlier plans to place it four miles downstream, after further studies regarding geology and cost showed the current Causey site to be more feasible" . No construction cost for Causey was published in any Reclamation document found.

Reclamation's Weber Basin Project history contains one sentence that names four dams and ranks them. It reads, in full :

"The most threatened of these structures is Lost Creek Dam, although East Canyon, Causey, and Pineview are also in proximity of faults which pose varying degrees of menace to the structures."

All four of those dams now have pages here, and this is the sentence that ties them together. Lost Creek is named as the most threatened, and its dam inventory record carries three modifications in 1999 for foundation, seismic and structural work. East Canyon, Causey and Pineview are the lesser three. Causey's years modified field is empty , so no equivalent work is on the public record here.

The project itself was authorised when "President Truman signed the bill authorizing the Weber Basin Project on August 29, 1949" . Causey is one of what the history calls "the six primary dams and reservoirs" of that project.

Two Reclamation pages give two different handover dates, and this page prints both. The project page says operation and maintenance passed to the Weber Basin Water Conservancy District on 1 October 1968 ; the project history says "Jurisdiction was turned over to the Weber Basin Water Conservancy District in April" of 1969 . Both are Reclamation. Neither statement is Causey specific: both describe the whole project, and this page does not present either as a Causey fact.

Four agencies publish a coordinate for this dam or the gauge on it. Three of them agree to within about thirty metres. The fourth is Reclamation's.

SourceLatitudeLongitude
The national dam inventory 41.29830-111.58720
The water survey lake gauge 41.29855-111.58687
The soil conservation service station 41.29827-111.58692
Reclamation's own facility page 41.290189955885644-111.5829849243164
Reclamation's point is about nine hundred metres from where the other three put its dam, and it is published to fifteen decimal places, which is a precision no survey produces and every web map click does. The map above uses the dam inventory's coordinate and carries Reclamation's as a separate pin, so you can see the gap rather than take it on trust.

The name, at least, is unambiguous. A nationwide search of the dam inventory for every dam whose name contains the string ausey returns three: this one, and two Alabama farm ponds in Hale County called Kenny Causey #2 and Ronnie Gausey, both about ten feet high and both named after their owners . The second one only matched because the search string sits inside the middle of the word. Unlike the last three reservoirs in this series, Utah does not hold a second dam of nearly this name.

Utah runs forty five state parks, and Causey is not one of them . That is a real distinction, because East Canyon, Echo, Lost Creek, Rockport, Willard Bay and Yuba all are.

Reclamation says who does run it in one sentence, and names four of those parks in the same breath :

"Administration for Causey and Pineview Reservoirs is provided by the Forest Service of the United States Department of Agriculture, while the Utah Division of Parks and Recreation is responsible for Rockport Lake, Willard Bay, East Canyon Reservoir, and Lost Creek Reservoir."

So the arrangement here is three layered and clean. Reclamation owns and operates the dam . The Weber Basin Water Conservancy District has had operation and maintenance of the project since 1968 . And the Forest Service administers the reservoir and its recreation, through the Ogden Ranger District of the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest . Day use is free: the Forest Service states, verbatim, "No fees are required for this site" .

And there is a second absence worth noting. Reclamation's Provo Area Office page names twenty six dams it manages, including five Weber Basin dams: East Canyon, Echo, Lost Creek, Pineview and Wanship. Causey is not on that list . It is presumably counted among the office's minor dams, but no page says so, and the dam safety subpage names no individual dam at all.

The national inventory record for this dam, UT10116 :

FieldWhat it says
Hazard potentialHigh
Condition assessmentNot Available, and the assessment date field is empty
Last inspection16 August 2023, on a four year cycle
Emergency action planThe prepared flag is empty and the last revised date reads 26 September 2023
PurposesIrrigation, and nothing else
Years modifiedEmpty
Core type, foundation, dam volume, outlet gatesAll empty, on a dam Reclamation specifically describes as zoned, which is a statement about its core
An emergency action plan cannot be revised on a date if the record does not say one exists. That contradiction has now appeared on every federal dam in this series. So has the empty condition assessment: this is a high hazard, federally regulated dam that was inspected in August 2023 and carries no published condition rating . The inspection happened. The result is not in the public inventory.

Two smaller defects in the same record. Its hydraulic height reads 187 feet where Reclamation, the agency the inventory names as its own source, publishes 193.1 . And its maximum discharge reads 7,600 cubic feet a second where both Reclamation and its dam safety office publish 7,570 . Thirty cubic feet a second, unexplained. The congressional representative field names someone who left that seat in January 2021 and is not printed here.

Science  ·  02

A tenth of its own bounding box

The emptiest outline in this series, a recreation classification a tier below the reservoir downstream, and a storage record that stops five days before the dam changed hands.

The shape at the top of this page was traced by hand for a print, then measured against the USGS water body extent , converted from web map metres to true metres by the cosine of the latitude.

MeasureTraced outlineFederal polygonGap
Proportion, width over length0.8030.7724.0 percent
Area, matched on length155 acres161 acres4.1 percent small
Area, stretched to fill on both axes149 acres161 acres7.8 percent small
Area, matched on width143 acres161 acres11.4 percent small
This reservoir fills a tenth of its own bounding box, and nothing else in this series comes close. The federal polygon covers 0.100 of the rectangle that contains it; the traced outline covers 0.092. For comparison, Electric Lake came out at 0.14 and Lost Creek at 0.15. Causey is a narrow Y of drowned canyon: 1.81 miles top to bottom, 1.40 miles across, and almost none of that rectangle is water.

An honest note on the method. Every previous page in this series ran the shoelace formula over the federal ring as a self check on the arithmetic. The geometry service timed out on five consecutive requests for this polygon, so this comparison uses the published extent and the published area instead . That removes the simplification error the last two pages had to declare, and it removes the self check with it. Traced from OpenStreetMap geometry under the Open Database License, and that credit travels with any public use of the shape.

The surface area has four published answers. 136 acres from Reclamation and the dam inventory , 161 from the federal water body dataset at high resolution and 171 from the same dataset at medium . That is a spread of about a quarter. Reclamation's figure is an operating one and the polygon figures are digitised at whatever shoreline the imagery caught, so they are not measuring the same thing. No maximum depth, mean depth or shoreline length is published by any agency. What can be said from an agency source is that the dam has a hydraulic height of 193.1 feet , so this is a deep reservoir for a small surface.

Utah's classification table for Weber County holds two entries, and they are not classified the same way .

WaterClassesWhat the difference means
Causey Reservoir2B, 3A, 42B is protection for infrequent primary contact and secondary contact recreation, "where there is a low likelihood of ingestion of water or a low degree of bodily contact with the water", with wading, hunting and fishing as the examples
Pineview Reservoir1C, 2A, 3A, 41C is domestic supply after treatment. 2A is frequent primary contact, where ingestion or submersion is likely
The reservoir people cliff jump into is the one with the lower contact classification, and it carries no drinking water class at all. That fits what the dam is for: the national inventory lists Causey's purpose as Irrigation and nothing else , and Reclamation describes it as providing "supplemental irrigation water for mountain valley lands near Huntsville and Eden" . Class 4, agricultural use, is the one that matches the dam's job.

A sourcing caveat this page has to make, and it is a real one. The classification above rests on one reproduction of the rule , not two. The federally hosted copy of Utah's standards was fetched successfully and contains the rule, but the Weber County lakes and reservoirs table did not surface in it and Causey could not be found there. Every other page in this series has been able to check this against two independent reproductions. Treat the class string as reported by that reproduction rather than as confirmed twice, and note the reproduction is not itself an agency.

QuestionAnswerHow it was checked
Any approved total maximum daily loadNoneCausey does not appear on the state's approved list, and neither does the Ogden River. Pineview does, eleven miles downstream
Any fish consumption advisoryNoneTwelve Utah waters are on the current list and Causey is not among them
Quagga or zebra musselsNot listedThe wildlife division states the confirmed infestation "is currently limited to Lake Powell"
Current impairment listingCould not be establishedUtah's 2022 impaired waters list was approved federally on 8 March 2022 and the page carries no waterbody detail
There is a state page about this reservoir's water quality and it cannot be read. Utah's environmental department maintains a Causey Reservoir recreational water quality monitoring page, and it sits on a path that is closed to automated reading. That is the page that would carry any algal bloom history, and it is almost certainly the source of the depth figures that circulate for this reservoir. Causey is not mentioned anywhere on the department's general harmful algal blooms page , but that is not the same as saying it has never had a bloom, and this page does not say so.

The nearest advisory belongs to a different water and must not bleed onto this one. The twelfth entry on the state's current list is the Weber River, for brown trout . Causey is on the South Fork of the Ogden, which reaches the Weber only far downstream and below Pineview. There is no fish consumption advisory of any kind for Causey Reservoir.

Two agencies hold a record numbered 10137290 for this reservoir. One of them stopped a long time ago.

RecordWhat it holdsStatus
USGS lake site 10137290Reservoir storage, 1 January 1966 to 26 September 1968, 860 daily valuesInactive for fifty eight years
NRCS station 10137290:UT:BORReservoir contents in acre feet, daily from 1 January 1966 and monthly from 1 December 1965Active. This is what the live card reads
Note the date the water survey stopped: 26 September 1968. Reclamation's project page gives the date operation and maintenance passed to the water conservancy district as 1 October 1968 . That is five days later. The two dates sit next to each other and no document connects them. This page reports the coincidence and does not claim it is a cause.

The active record publishes three durations and all three return data, which is not something this series can take for granted :

DurationRecord beginsWhat a value object containsFlagged as derived
Daily1 January 1966date and valueNo
Monthly1 December 1965month, year, value. No dateYes
Semimonthly4 October 2017month, monthPart, year, value. No date, and monthPart is a string where the others are integersYes

The monthly record begins a month before the dam was finished. Storage is recorded from 1 December 1965 on a dam completed in 1966 . That is consistent with the reservoir starting to fill during final construction, which is ordinary, but no source explains it and this page does not pretend one does. The card at the top of this page reads the daily series, which is the one the service does not flag as derived.

Below the dam there is a live gauge, which is a change from the last two pages. USGS 10137300, South Fork Ogden River below Causey Reservoir, draining 92.30 square miles . Its daily discharge record nominally runs from 25 January 1966 to now, but holds only 1,307 values across sixty years, so it is long and very broken. The fifteen minute telemetry is what makes the card work, and it only started on 18 September 2024. There is no gauge above the reservoir at all.

And there is one snow station in this drainage. Nine sit in the Lower Weber basin . Only Lightning Ridge, at 8,200 feet in the South Fork Ogden sub basin, is actually upstream of Causey. The Ben Lomond pair index Pineview's basin, and Parleys Summit, Thaynes Canyon and Hardscrabble belong to the East Canyon and Rockport side of the divide. Do not read nine and think nine.

Recreation  ·  03

Where everything is

Seven places, one of them the same dam twice, and both roads in are shut.

The whole reservoir
Midpoint of the USGS National Hydrography Dataset water body extent, GNIS 01448239, reach code 16020102001196, derived rather than published
Seven places, and one of them is the same dam twice.
Check this before you drive. Forest Service closure order 04-19-26-726 closes Causey Dam Overlook Road, forest road 20016, and Skull Crack Road, forest road 20019, on both sides, from 13 May 2026 through 31 December 2026 . The reason, verbatim: "Purpose of the closure is for public health and safety while crews and equipment are improving roads, improving and installing parking lots and an emergency boat ramp." The reservoir's own recreation page says "Closures will be in effect during construction" and puts that construction into December 2027 .

What is being built, and who is paying. A 2022 memorandum of agreement with four signatories, the Federal Highway Administration's Central Federal Lands division, Weber County, the Forest Service and the Bureau of Reclamation, sets out 11,450,000 dollars of work . Its scope, verbatim: "resurfacing, restoration and rehabilitation (3R) improvements on Causey Road, Skull Crack Road and Wheat Grass Canyon Road, along with associated drainage, safety, and parking lot improvements." The purpose is to "improve access to Causey Reservoir" and to address "parking and safety".

RoadWork
Causey Road1.65 miles of resurfacing, plus replacement of the Beaver Creek Bridge
Skull Crack Road0.43 miles of resurfacing
Wheatgrass Road0.63 miles of resurfacing

There is no conventional boat ramp yet, and the one coming is not for motors. The Forest Service says "A boat ramp will be constructed at the Skull Crack parking lot that will be restricted to pedestrians and non-motorized watercraft", to "improve accessibility to visitors with paddleboards, kayaks, and canoes" . The closure order calls the same thing an "emergency boat ramp" .

Causey is "located 15 miles northeast of Ogden, just off SR-39" . No fees are required for the site . The memorandum notes that "Causey Road has landowners on both sides whereas the USFS owns most of the land adjacent to the Wheat Grass and Skull Crack roads" , so part of the approach runs past private ground. No agency statement on winter road maintenance or a seasonal gate could be found, although the fishing guidebook confirms ice fishing happens here .

Two current Forest Service pages describe the boating rule at Causey, and they are not the same rule.

SourceWhat it says
Closure order 04-19-526 It is prohibited to be "Operating any boat/watercraft/vessel in excess of a wakeless and or trolling speed". A trolling speed limit presupposes a motor running slowly
The recreation site page "The Reservoir is a non-motorized boating zone in accordance with Utah State Law". That presupposes no motor at all
What is certain either way: this is a no wake water. There is no fast boating, no water skiing and no towing at Causey under either statement. If you are bringing a motor, ring the Ogden Ranger District first, because the two Forest Service pages do not agree and only one of them is an order.

The same closure order bans alcohol outright, which is unusual and worth knowing before you pack. Prohibited, verbatim: "Possessing a beverage which is defined as an alcoholic beverage by Utah State Law", and separately "Possessing, discharging, or using any kind of firework or other pyrotechnic device on National Forest system Lands". The order runs from 30 June 2022 through 30 June 2027 .

The Forest Service lists the activities here as "swimming, kayaking, paddleboarding, fishing, and even spear fishing" . Nothing found here prohibits cliff jumping, and this page does not say otherwise; the restriction order covers alcohol, fireworks and boat speed. On life jackets the Forest Service states, verbatim, "Utah Law requires all boats have at least one wearable U.S. Coast Guard approved life jacket" .

Pineview Reservoir is the only cross link on this page where the relationship is continuous water rather than a shared rule, and it is documented four separate ways.

  • Reclamation states the distance: "Causey Dam is on the South Fork of the Ogden River about 11 miles upstream from Pineview Dam" .
  • The watershed dataset routes it: Causey's sub basin, 160201020205, drains to 160201020305, which is the sub basin Pineview sits in .
  • Reclamation puts both under one administrator: "Administration for Causey and Pineview Reservoirs is provided by the Forest Service" .
  • Both are named in the fault sentence, along with East Canyon and Lost Creek .
CauseyPineview
Classification2B, 3A, 41C, 2A, 3A, 4
Approved load allocationNoneYes
SpearfishingOpen, no exception Open, with an exception
Dead yellow perch as baitNot permittedPermitted
State parkNoNo
Drainage81 to 92 sq mi323 sq mi below the dam
Causey is a quarter of Pineview's catchment and a fraction of its water. Reclamation gives Causey 81 square miles of drainage and the water survey gives it 92; the Ogden River below Pineview Dam drains 323 . Causey is the small, deep, cold storage on one fork. Pineview is the large valley reservoir on the combined river, and it is the one with a drinking water class and a load allocation on it.

Downstream of Pineview the Ogden River runs on to the Weber, which the water survey gauges at Ogden on a drainage area of 1,670 square miles , and then to the Great Salt Lake. There is a USGS geologic quadrangle named after this dam: Geologic map of the Causey Dam quadrangle, Weber County, Utah, Geologic Quadrangle 790, mapped at 1:24,000 in 1969 . No Utah Geological Survey publication for Causey or Weber County was found, so this page cites the federal survey and not the state one.

Fishing  ·  04

Two species, and one of the few waters open to spearfishing with no exception

Kokanee salmon and lake trout are the only two the state names. The closure people expect on the reservoir is actually on both forks of the inlet.

Kokanee salmon

Named in the bag limit by the state, which is how this page knows it is here: "Limit 4 trout or kokanee salmon". The tributaries above the reservoir close from 15 August to the last Saturday of September, which is the shape of a spawning run closure, though no agency document says that is why.

Named in the bag limit

Lake trout

The other named species, and it carries an inverted slot: all lake trout under 22 inches must be released, and no more than one of the four fish limit may be a lake trout over 22 inches. Anglers here are asked to release the small ones and keep at most one large one.

Release under 22 inches

Two is the whole evidenced list, and it comes from one line of the fishing rules. The 2026 guidebook's Causey Reservoir entry reads, verbatim :

"Limit 4 trout or kokanee salmon, and no more than 1 may be a lake trout over 22 inches. All lake trout under 22 inches must be immediately released. An angler may use up to six lines when fishing through the ice. If the angler is using more than two lines, the angler's name must be attached to each line, pole or tip-up, and the angler may check only their lines."

That names kokanee salmon and lake trout. The word trout appears generically in the same sentence and no source found here says which trout, so none is drawn.

The closure applies to the tributaries, not to the reservoir, and this is exactly the kind of detail that becomes a correction. The guidebook's separate entry for Causey Reservoir tributaries reads: "Right and left forks of the South Fork Ogden River, from Causey Reservoir upstream to the headwaters. CLOSED Aug. 15 through 6 a.m. on the last Saturday of September." The reservoir stays open. What closes is both forks of the inlet, through the late summer.

The lake trout rule is the interesting one. Release everything under 22 inches, keep at most one over it. That is an inverted slot, the reverse of the usual arrangement, and it is the kind of rule fisheries managers write where a predator is being held at low density. That last sentence is interpretation, not an agency statement, and no document found here gives a reason.

There is a fishery monitoring report for Causey and it could not be read. The wildlife division published one dated 2023, and its filename on the division's own server uses a space where every other report in this series uses an underscore. Three separate address forms all returned nothing. That document is where a real species list, catch rates and stocking history would come from, and it is the highest value thing still missing from this page. Not found either: any stocking record, any Utah state record fish, any illegal introduction account, and any rotenone history. Blue Ribbon status is unresolved rather than negative: the division's page lists no waters at all .

Ice fishing is agency confirmed. The guidebook names Causey in one sentence on page 11: "Ice fishing at Flaming Gorge, Porcupine and Causey reservoirs and Pelican Lake." And the reservoir rule allows up to six lines through the ice, with your name attached to each one past the second.

Causey is open to underwater spearfishing, and it is open without an exception, which is the part that matters.

The 2026 guidebook prints a list on page 19 headed "Waterbodies open to spearfishing", under the sentence "Only the waters listed below are open to underwater spearfishing for game fish year-round." Nine entries follow, and Causey Reservoir, Weber County is third :

  • Big Sand Wash Reservoir, Duchesne County
  • Brown's Draw Reservoir, Duchesne County
  • Causey Reservoir, Weber County
  • Electric Lake, Emery County
  • Grantsville Reservoir, Tooele County
  • Porcupine Reservoir, Cache County
  • Uinta Mountains, with a bulleted list of seventeen high elevation lakes
  • Willard Bay Reservoir, Box Elder County
  • Yuba Reservoir, Juab and Sanpete counties
The governing rule lists forty two waters, not nine. Utah Administrative Code R657-13-9 runs from paragraph a to paragraph pp, and Causey Reservoir is paragraph d, with no exception clause . Twelve of the forty two carry one: Deer Creek, East Canyon, Echo, Fish Lake in Sevier County, Flaming Gorge, Lake Powell, Newcastle, Pineview, Recapture, Rockport, Starvation and Steinaker. Thirty carry none, and Causey is one of the thirty.

Reconciling the two lists turns up something the last page in this series got incomplete. Take the rule's thirty no exception waters, collapse the seventeen Uinta lakes into the single line the guidebook uses, and thirteen are left. The guidebook names eight of those thirteen. Five qualify on exactly the same test and are missing from it: the Jordan River, Quail Creek Reservoir, Red Fleet Reservoir, Utah Lake and Utah Lake tributaries . No reason is given anywhere for the omission.

So the accurate sentence about Causey is this: it is one of forty two Utah waters open to underwater spearfishing, one of thirty open with no seasonal or species exception, and one of nine entries the guidebook prints. It is not "one of only nine waters." Nine is a count of printed lines. The Forest Service independently names "spear fishing" among the activities here , which is a second agency confirming it happens. No SCUBA specific rule, permit or registration for Causey was found in any source, and the rule requires only "a valid Utah fishing or combination license" . One sourcing caveat: Utah's own rules website returns an error for this rule, so the forty two waters rest on a single non agency reproduction, with the guidebook as the agency restatement.

Recreation  ·  05

What to watch for

The first recovery in this series where both halves are on the record: a remotely operated vehicle found him, and divers brought him up.

In July 2025 a 23 year old serviceman went missing after cliff jumping at Causey. Two independent accounts describe the recovery in substantively identical words, and between them they give this series something it has not had before.

Verbatim: "At approximately 9:10 p.m., a Department of Natural Resources remote-operated vehicle located Angel's body in an area of water approximately 48 feet deep. Divers recovered Angel's body." And: "a remote-operated vehicle from DNR located Harris' body in an area of the reservoir that was roughly 48 feet deep. Divers then recovered Harris' body."

This is the first recovery in this series where both halves are on the record, and they are different halves. A state remotely operated vehicle located the body in about 48 feet of water. Divers then recovered it. On East Canyon divers found a man in twenty feet of water; at Echo and Rockport sonar did the finding and no diver is mentioned; at Starvation three recoveries are on the record and not one account says how any of them was made. Here it is both, in sequence, from two sources. Do not write "found by divers" for this one, and do not write "found by sonar."

The two accounts refer to the man by different names, which is unresolved and is why this page does not print one. A third account that might have settled it could not be read. The Weber County Sheriff's Office worked the incident .

Three more incidents at Causey could be sourced, and two of them were not on the water at all. No count is offered, because the search was not exhaustive and this page does not aggregate press reports into a statistic.

WhenWhat happenedRecovery method
March 2020A 19 year old drowned in the early hours of a Saturday morning, reported at 2:45 a.m. The sheriff's office described it, verbatim, as "The victim was deceased. It was a recovery operation." A lieutenant said the two people present were "possibly consuming alcohol" Not stated anywhere in the account
June 2020A woman in her thirties fell thirty feet while climbing, injuring her back and torso, and was taken to hospital in stable condition. Not a cliff jumping incident, and this page does not reclassify it as oneNot a water recovery
September 2019A hiker slipped and injured her ankle on the Skull Crack trail and was carried out by county search and rescue and the fire district Not a water recovery
Note where these keep happening. Skull Crack is the trail in the 2019 rescue, the road closed by the current order, and the parking lot where the new boat ramp is being built . It is the main access point and it is where the record concentrates. Note also that the alcohol ban took effect on 30 June 2022 , more than two years after the 2020 drowning.

The March 2020 date is worth reading carefully: 20 March is an ice out incident, not a summer swimming one, on a reservoir at 5,700 feet. No ice related incident was found despite the guidebook confirming ice fishing happens here , and no dive recovery other than the July 2025 one.

  • Both access roads are closed to 31 December 2026, with construction expected into 2027 .
  • Alcohol is prohibited outright by Forest Service order .
  • No wake, under either Forest Service statement, and the two do not agree on whether motors are allowed at all .
  • No fees, and no campground is named on the reservoir's own recreation page .
  • This is 5,700 feet , and the dam has a hydraulic height of 193 feet , so it is deep and cold for its size.
  • Mussels are not recorded here . The statewide rules still apply, and they matter to anyone moving dive gear: "Boaters are required to stop at all operating AIS inspection stations", and anyone arriving from an infested water must decontaminate first.

Could not be found:

  • Maximum depth, mean depth and shoreline length, from any agency source.
  • The 2023 fishery monitoring report, which exists and would not open .
  • A second reproduction of the water classification rule .
  • Any impairment listing or assessment unit for Causey .
  • Any algal bloom history. The state's Causey page is closed to automated reading .
  • A construction cost for the dam .
  • Winter road maintenance or a seasonal gate status .
  • Blue Ribbon status, in either direction .
  • Any Utah Geological Survey publication for this reservoir or this county .

A remotely operated vehicle found him in forty eight feet of water, and divers brought him up.

Fathom Restoration is a Utah 501(c)(3) that runs volunteer dive cleanups and is built to pull what does not belong out of Utah water, statewide.

Donate to Protect Causey

Every figure on this page is quoted from the source named beside it.

FATHOM RESTORATION
Five things on this page are narrower than what is usually written about Causey. This is a zoned earthfill embankment and not a concrete dam; the concrete is the spillway, and Reclamation's own dam safety office writes the sentence that causes the confusion. Causey is not one of only nine Utah waters open to underwater spearfishing, which is how the guidebook page reads: the governing rule lists forty two, thirty of them without an exception, and the guidebook omits five waters that qualify on the same test. The late summer closure at Causey applies to both forks of the inlet above the reservoir and not to the reservoir itself, which stays open. The July 2025 recovery was made in two stages by two different means, a state remotely operated vehicle locating the body and divers recovering it, and this page prints both rather than picking one. And the water quality classification here rests on a single reproduction of the rule rather than the two this series normally requires, because the federally hosted copy would not yield the Weber County table. Access roads were closed when this page was written. This is a reference for the public and is not a navigation chart.