CURRANT CREEK
A federal dam, and a creek the government spells two ways
Seven Utah streams share this name, two federal publications misspell it, the reservoir exists to send its water over a basin divide, and its high hazard dam carries no condition rating at all.
The water is Currant Creek Reservoir, in Wasatch County. Currant, the berry. And two federal publications spell it Current.
| Where | What it says |
|---|---|
| The national dam inventory, river field | "Current Creek" |
| Interior's project questions page | names "Current Creek" among four Uinta Basin streams |
| The names system, the water survey, the wildlife division, the environmental department, the soil conservation service, the Forest Service | all "Currant" |
And the correct spelling is not much help on its own. Seven separate Utah streams are named exactly Currant Creek , in Wasatch and Duchesne, Juab and Utah, Washington, Sanpete, Rich and Sevier counties. Utah also has a second dam with the name, PacifiCorp's Currant Creek evaporation ponds near Mona in Juab County, which is not this reservoir and is not on this creek .
Two more that get merged. Currant Creek Peak is in Wasatch County and Currant Creek Mountain is a different summit in Duchesne County . And the water quality rule that classifies this reservoir also classifies a different Currant Creek, the one running to Mona Reservoir in the Utah Lake drainage . A careless lookup lands a hundred miles away.
Only two features in the entire country are named Currant Creek Reservoir : this one, and a private forty acre irrigation pond in Oregon .
Currant Creek is a tributary of the Strawberry River, which runs to the Duchesne, which runs to the Green, which runs to the Colorado. The water in this reservoir does not go that way.
Interior's account of the Central Utah Project puts it in one sentence :
"Currant Creek Reservoir, with a total capacity of 15,671 acre-feet, diverts Currant Creek and five tributaries into the Strawberry Aqueduct."
Diversions through it average 101,900 acre feet a year, moved out of the eastern Uinta Basin to the Wasatch Front . That is an interbasin transfer: water leaving the Colorado River basin for the Bonneville Basin, which has no outlet to the sea at all. The federal water body record still files this reservoir under reach code 14060004, the Upper Colorado region , because that is where it sits, not where its water ends up.
The system also gives some back. It "releases 44,400 acre feet of water at various points along its course to support and enhance trout and other sport fishing annually in four important Uinta Basin streams" , and Currant Creek is one of the four named, spelled Current .
Where the aqueduct ends is a lake this series has already covered. The system delivers into Strawberry Reservoir, about sixteen miles southwest . That is a physical connection stated by a federal agency, which is a rarer thing on these pages than it sounds: most reservoirs that get linked together share nothing but a list.
This one is federal, unlike the last several in this series .
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Owner type | Federal, and the owner, funder, regulator, inspector and operator fields all read Bureau of Reclamation |
| State regulated | No |
| Year completed | 1975, construction 1974 to 1975 |
| Hazard potential | High |
| Last inspected | 9 June 2021, on a four year inspection cycle |
| Condition assessment | "Not Available", and the assessment date field is empty |
A hazard potential of High is a statement about what is downstream, not about the structure. The nearest downstream town in the record is Fruitland, fourteen miles away . The emergency action plan was last revised 7 July 2022.
The inventory also flags this dam as associated with the Uintah and Ouray Reservation . This page does not develop that, because no source retrieved here explains what the association is, and a land status flag in a dam database is not a statement about jurisdiction. It is recorded because it is in the record.
Nothing here is disputed by much except the two things that are disputed enormously.
| Measure | One federal source | Another |
|---|---|---|
| Drainage area | 46.93 square miles, the dam inventory | 13,000 square miles, Reclamation |
| Capacity | 15,671 acre feet, Interior and the dam inventory's maximum and normal storage, agreeing | 17,210 in the dam inventory's own combined storage field , and 17,240 from the wildlife division |
| Height | 177 feet, the dam inventory | 164.0 feet structural height, Reclamation |
| Spillway capacity | 840 cubic feet a second | 850 cubic feet a second at elevation 7,683.2 |
| Surface area | 300 acres, the dam inventory | 305 acres, the wildlife division . The federal water body polygon computes to 290 |
The capacity spread is small enough to work with, and the page still shows its working. Interior calls 15,671 the total capacity in a sentence about this reservoir , and the dam inventory's maximum and normal storage fields both read 15,671 . Against that, the same inventory record's combined storage field reads 17,210, which contradicts its own published definition of that field.
What Reclamation does publish is elevations, and only elevations. Crest 7,692.0, maximum water surface 7,683.2, top of active conservation pool 7,678.0, top of inactive 7,674.0, top of dead storage 7,575.0 . Its facility page carries no capacity figure of any kind, which was checked twice. The one useful cross check is that the federal water body polygon stamps its own elevation at 7,678 , exactly Reclamation's top of active conservation pool, so the outline is drawn at a full working pool and not at a drought low.
Two advisory lists, two different fish
The first water in this series to appear on both of Utah's mercury advisory lists, a 2024 bloom warning the state's own bloom index does not carry, and an outline that needed checking.
Utah publishes two fish consumption advisory lists and they do not agree with each other. Earlier pages in this series found waters on one list and not the other. This is the first water found on both, and the two lists name different species.
| List | Dated | Species | Mercury |
|---|---|---|---|
| The environmental department's advisory table | 4/23/18 | Brown trout | 0.460 |
| The health department's list, from a 2022 mercury analysis | 2022 | Tiger trout | not machine readable |
The brown trout limits, verbatim from the older list :
| Pregnant women and children | Women of childbearing age | Everyone else |
|---|---|---|
| 0 four ounce meals a month | 2 eight ounce meals a month | 6 eight ounce meals a month |
The tiger trout figure could not be retrieved. The health department links a per water sheet for this reservoir and that sheet is an image with no machine readable text in it , so the mercury concentration and the meal limits behind the tiger trout listing are not quoted here.
One detail in the newer list is worth flagging rather than resolving. It writes this entry as "Currant Creek", with no Reservoir on the end, while writing eight of the other eleven entries as Reservoir something . Given that seven Utah streams carry this name, that is a real ambiguity. The linked sheet's own filename and the Spanish version of the entry both say Reservoir, which is why this page treats the entry as the reservoir. That identification is an inference from a filename, not a statement by the agency, and it is marked as such here rather than smoothed over.
Utah's environmental department issued a warning advisory for this reservoir on 9 October 2024, through the Wasatch County Health Department . The finding, verbatim:
"A harmful algal bloom is present at Currant Creek Reservoir."
Monitoring closed for the season on 26 November 2024, and the closing note reads :
"A harmful algal bloom may still be present at this waterbody."
So the honest statement is narrow in one direction and firm in the other. This water is monitored and it has a documented bloom warning. Absence from the index proves nothing about any water, which is a lesson this series learned by nearly publishing the opposite at another reservoir.
No cyanotoxin concentration and no cell count is published on the page , so none is given here. And nothing was found for 2025 or 2026, which is a not found rather than an all clear: the page's last entry is the November 2024 seasonal close, and it ends by saying a bloom may still be present.
The shape in the header is traced from the Fathom print artwork and checked against the federal water body polygon .
| Measure | Traced | Federal | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Width against length | 0.6147 | 0.6838 | 10.11% |
| Share of its bounding box | 0.362 | 0.322 | 12% |
| Area, matched on length | 293.6 acres | 290.6 acres | 1.03% over |
| Area, matched on width | 363.3 acres | 290.6 acres | 25% over |
The self check is clean. Adding up the federal polygon by hand gives 1.1758 square kilometres against the 1.1740 the dataset publishes, agreement to about fifteen hundredths of one percent.
About a mile and a half long and a mile across at the widest, from the federal polygon. Three surface areas are published and this page prints all three: 300 acres in the dam inventory , 305 from the wildlife division , and 290 computed from the federal polygon . No maximum depth, no mean depth and no shoreline length is published by anyone. Reclamation's "hydraulic height" of 124.2 feet is the operating depth of water at the dam and is not a lake maximum, so it is not printed as one.
Utah classifies its waters by the uses each one is protected for, and Currant Creek Reservoir carries four classes at once :
| Class | Definition, verbatim |
|---|---|
| 1C | "Protected for domestic purposes with prior treatment by treatment processes as required by the Utah Division of Drinking Water" |
| 2B | "Protected for infrequent primary contact recreation. Also protected for secondary contact recreation where there is a low likelihood of ingestion of water or a low degree of bodily contact with the water." |
| 3A | "Protected for cold water species of game fish and other cold water aquatic life, including the necessary aquatic organisms in their food chain." |
| 4 | "Protected for agricultural uses including irrigation of crops and stock watering." |
Notice 2B rather than 2A. 2A is the class for frequent primary contact where ingestion is likely. This reservoir is protected for infrequent primary contact . That is the swimming class, and it is the lower of the two.
Whether this water is on Utah's impaired waters list could not be determined. The integrated report landing page describes the report and its comment period and publishes no direct downloads, and does not name this reservoir either way. That is unresolved, not clean, and it is listed with the other gaps rather than glossed. The federal impaired waters service that would settle it returns an authorisation error on every request this series has ever made to it.
Where everything is
Nine places, two of which are gauges that stopped measuring this creek decades ago.
Currant Creek Campground is run by the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest, Heber-Kamas Ranger District . Not a state park: the full Utah roster of forty six was checked and this water is not on it . Not a county park either.
| Published | Not published |
|---|---|
| Season 6/5 to 9/20 | Number of sites |
| Boat ramp on site | Fees, which the page defers to the booking service for |
| Two minimum stay rules on weekends and holidays | Any horsepower or wake restriction |
A lakeside campground cannot sit three hundred feet above the crest of the dam that makes the lake. Both figures are printed and neither is averaged into the other. The Forest Service's own page for the same campground publishes no elevation at all .
No horsepower limit and no wake restriction is published by the managing agency , so none is stated here. That is an absence in the record and not a permission.
Both federal pages carry the same sentence about the surface :
"The road from the highway is paved for 10 miles and graded gravel for 7 miles."
And the route, verbatim :
"From Heber City, Utah, take Highway 40 east for 45 miles to the Currant Creek Junction. Turn off the highway and travel in a northwest direction approximately 17 miles to the campground."
An alternate route exists and it is longer in instructions than in miles : Highway 40 southeast about 22 miles to Forest Service Road 082, the Coop Creek road, then eight miles north and six more east and south. Co-op Creek is a real named feature and it is separately regulated in the fishing guidebook, three entries above Currant Creek on the same page .
Four fish, and a rule that excludes this lake by name
Two species come from mercury advisories and two from the wildlife division. The artificial flies and lures restriction everyone attaches to this water says in its own text that it does not apply to the reservoir.
Brown trout
Named by Utah's environmental quality department, on the state fish consumption advisory table, at mercury 0.460, dated 4/23/18 . An advisory requires tissue sampling, so it is about as hard as species evidence gets. Zero meals a month for pregnant women and children.
On the 2018 advisoryTiger trout
Named by Utah's health department, on its own twelve water list from a 2022 mercury analysis . The two state lists name different fish in this reservoir, and this is the one the newer list names. Its mercury figure could not be read: the per water sheet behind it is an image.
On the 2022 advisoryCutthroat trout
The wildlife division calls this water's cutthroat "abundant native cutthroat trout" . No subspecies is drawn or named, because no agency source names one for this reservoir, although the division plainly does distinguish them elsewhere.
Wildlife divisionMountain whitefish
Listed by the wildlife division as a possible catch here . It is the only species on this page that is not a trout, and the only one named by a single source in a single line.
Wildlife divisionThat is the whole list. Two species come from consumption advisories and two from the wildlife division's own page for this water.
And tiger trout being here is not evidence of brook trout. A tiger trout is a brown by brook hybrid, and the presence of a hybrid is not the presence of its parents. Brown trout is drawn because an agency names brown trout, not because it is half of something else.
No survey and no stocking record could be retrieved for this reservoir. The wildlife division's stocking application returns a 403, and five separate addresses for a technical report were tried across all four filename conventions this series has confirmed working for other waters. All five returned 404. So the species list rests on two advisories and one description page, and it is four fish long rather than the eight or ten a reservoir this size probably holds.
Search for fishing regulations at Currant Creek and you will find an artificial flies and lures restriction. It is real. It is current. And it is not about the reservoir.
The entry, verbatim and in full :
"Currant Creek, Wasatch County. From the confluence with Water Hollow Creek upstream to the headwaters, including all tributaries to Currant Creek Reservoir, but not the reservoir itself. Artificial flies and lures only."
And there is no other entry. A separately issued existence question, phrased so that "no" was the easy answer, confirmed that the 2026 guidebook contains no standalone rule for Currant Creek Reservoir at all . The reservoir is governed by Utah's general statewide regulations: four trout, season open all year, two poles with a licence.
The 2023 guidebook says the same thing, word for word, on page 27 instead of page 30 . Nothing was dropped between editions here, unlike the previous lake in this series, where a restriction people still quote had quietly disappeared.
Why this trips people. The creek and the reservoir share a name, the rule's own text names the reservoir twice while excluding it once, and a search engine has no way to tell a water body from the stream it is on. The alphabetical order of the guidebook entries was checked against a first reading that had them out of order, and the first reading was wrong: Cow Hollow, then Currant Creek, then Cutler Reservoir. The entry is real and sits where it should.
Seventh page in this series where this cannot be settled. What is different here is how close it came to being settled incorrectly, and that is worth writing down.
Fetching that page directly returns a title of "Fish Utah, Division of Wildlife Resources", and the served document contains neither the words "Blue Ribbon" nor the words "Currant Creek". The application builds its content in the browser, so the served page is an empty shell for every water in the state. The only artifact carrying that string is a third party crawler's stored title, undated and not reproducible.
It is suggestive: something rendered that page with its scripts running and captured a title the application had built. It is not an agency document and it is not cited as one here.
What the division does publish is counts, and they do not agree. Its Blue Ribbon page describes the programme and its four criteria, names two waters as examples, states that a downloadable card "includes all 43 waterbodies, current as of 2021", and prints no list . A funding release says "There are currently 43 waterbodies in addition to two mountain areas in Utah" . Earlier pages in this series recorded 41 in a July 2026 release and 44 in a third. None of them names this reservoir.
The division does publish per water designation releases. Gunlock Reservoir, four hundred miles south, has one . No equivalent release naming Currant Creek Reservoir was found, which is a not found rather than a no. Unresolved remains the honest answer, and it is a better answer than a crawler artifact dressed up as a federal fact.
What to watch for
Nothing found in searchable press and a county full of decoys, a bloom advisory whose last word was that it may still be present, and no measurement of what leaves this dam since 1994.
No incident of any kind at Currant Creek Reservoir was found in searchable press. No drowning, no boating fatality, no missing person, no vehicle in the water, no ice incident, no recovery operation.
Add the name problem from the top of this page: seven Utah streams called Currant Creek, a second Utah dam with the name in Juab County, a Currant Creek Reservoir in Oregon, and two Currant Creeks in Nevada . A list assembled from search results would carry incidents from at least two states and three Utah counties.
The publishable sentence is "no incident found in searchable press". It is not "nothing has happened here".
What was not queried. Utah's public safety department and the Wasatch County sheriff's own incident records were not searched directly, and they remain the sources that would actually answer this. That is a gap in this build, stated rather than hidden.
The one hazard statement about this water that comes from an agency is the 2024 advisory , and the sentence that closed it out is the one worth carrying:
"A harmful algal bloom may still be present at this waterbody."
Check the state's current monitoring page before getting in this water, and understand that a quiet page here can mean an unmonitored season rather than a clean one. Blue green algae is cyanobacteria and dogs are at higher risk than people, because they drink the water and lick their coats.
Note also what class this water is protected for. 2B, infrequent primary contact, which is the lower of Utah's two recreation classes . That is a designation, not a warning, and it is not a statement that the water is unsafe. It is recorded here because the combination of a 2B classification and a bloom advisory is the context a swimmer would want.
Three gauges have measured this creek. The two near the dam are both dead .
| Gauge | Daily discharge record |
|---|---|
| Below Currant Creek Dam, site 09286700 | 1 October 1983 to 2 October 1994. Thirty one years ago. |
| Below Red Ledge Hollow, site 09287000 | 1 October 1945 to 12 October 1983 |
| Near Fruitland, site 09288000 | 1 January 1935 to today, still reporting |
The live gauge on this page is not a dam release gauge and the card says so. Site 09288000 sits at 6,664.78 feet, roughly a thousand feet lower and fourteen river miles down, near Fruitland . It measures a creek that has picked up Water Hollow and other tributaries on the way. It is a real, continuous, ninety one year record of the creek, and it is not a measurement of this reservoir.
Which matters more here than at most reservoirs, because this one is a diversion structure. The water it sends into the Strawberry Aqueduct never passes any of these gauges . No public gauge measures the diversion itself, and none was found in this build.
Utah issued a harmful algal bloom warning for this reservoir in October 2024 and closed the season saying it may still be present.
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 Currant CreekEvery figure on this page is quoted from the source named beside it.
Sources
How these were checked
Numbered sources are agencies. Lettered sources are two legal publishers reproducing Utah administrative code, used because the state's own rules site returns a 404 for the text of that rule and its mirror is closed to automated reading. Where sources disagree, all of them are printed: that happens over the drainage area, over the capacity, over the surface area, over the campground elevation, over which advisory list names which fish, and over how many Blue Ribbon waters Utah has. One method note is specific to this page and it is the most important thing in this box. A search engine's stored title for the wildlife division's fishing application reads "Currant Creek Reservoir (Blue Ribbon)". Fetching that page returns a document containing neither phrase. A search result is not a source, even when the link in it points at a government domain, and this page does not cite one as though it were. A second method note carried from earlier pages saved the fish list. A first reading of the guidebook reported the neighbouring entries out of alphabetical order, which meant the reading rather than the rule was wrong; a re-read put them in order and confirmed the entry.National Inventory of Dams, federal identifier UT10149, Currant Creek Dam. Owner type Federal, every federal agency field the Bureau of Reclamation, state regulated No, completed 1975, height 177 feet, surface area 300 acres, drainage area 46.93 square miles, hazard potential High. Condition assessment reads "Not Available" and the condition assessment date is empty. The river field reads "Current Creek"
Currant Creek Dam facility record. Central Utah Project, Bonneville Unit. Crest elevation 7,692.0 feet, structural height 164.0 feet, hydraulic height 124.2 feet, maximum water surface 7,683.2 feet, top of active conservation pool 7,678.0 feet, drainage area 13,000 square miles. No capacity figure of any kind appears on the page
Strawberry Aqueduct and Collection System. States that Currant Creek Reservoir, with a total capacity of 15,671 acre feet, diverts Currant Creek and five tributaries into the aqueduct, lists the ten collected streams, and gives the average annual diversion out of the eastern Uinta Basin as 101,900 acre feet
Central Utah Project frequently asked questions. Spells this stream "Current Creek" in a list of four Uinta Basin streams, and records that responsibility for completing the project moved from the Bureau of Reclamation to the Central Utah Water Conservancy District under Public Law 102-575 in 1992
National Hydrography Dataset, Currant Creek Reservoir, permanent identifier 75929713, published at 1.1740 square kilometres with a stamped elevation of 7,678 feet and reach code 14060004001055, which places it in the Upper Colorado water resource region
Geographic Names Information System. This reservoir is feature 1447833. Seven distinct Utah streams are named exactly Currant Creek, and only two features in the whole country are named Currant Creek Reservoir. Currant Creek Peak is in Wasatch County and Currant Creek Mountain is a different summit in Duchesne County
Currant Creek Reservoir storage, station 09UTCURR:UT:BOR. Unusually for this series it serves all three durations. The daily series is the one this page reads
Currant Creek below Currant Creek Dam, site 09286700. Daily discharge from 1 October 1983 to 2 October 1994, and nothing since
Currant Creek below Red Ledge Hollow, site 09287000. Daily discharge from 1 October 1945 to 12 October 1983
Currant Creek near Fruitland, site 09288000. Daily discharge since 1 January 1935 and still reporting, at elevation 6,664.78 feet, about fourteen river miles below the dam
Utah fish consumption advisories. Currant Creek Reservoir, brown trout, mercury 0.460, dated 4/23/18, with three separate meal limits and no meals at all for pregnant women and children
Game and fish advisories. Twelve Utah waters from a 2022 mercury analysis, and this one is listed as "Currant Creek - Tiger trout". Eight of the other eleven entries carry the word Reservoir and this one does not
Currant Creek Reservoir recreational water quality monitoring. A warning advisory issued 9 October 2024 by the Wasatch County Health Department, and monitoring closed for the season on 26 November 2024
Harmful algal blooms. The statewide index, whose advisory table is a 2018 archive and which does not name this reservoir at all
2026 Utah Fishing Guidebook, page 30. The Currant Creek entry restricts the creek and its tributaries to artificial flies and lures and excludes the reservoir in its own words. There is no standalone entry anywhere in the book for Currant Creek Reservoir
2023 Utah Fishing Guidebook, page 27. The same entry, word for word, three years earlier
Fish Utah entry for Currant Creek Reservoir. Elevation 7,683 feet, surface area 305 acres, capacity 17,240 acre feet, "abundant native cutthroat trout", and mountain whitefish as a possible catch
Blue Ribbon fisheries. Describes the programme and its four criteria, names two waters as examples, states that a bingo card includes all 43 waterbodies current as of 2021, and prints no list
Blue Ribbon fisheries programme allocates 450 thousand dollars. States that there are currently 43 waterbodies in addition to two mountain areas in Utah, and names none of them
Currant Creek Campground, Heber-Kamas Ranger District. Season 6/5 to 9/20, boat ramp on site, driving directions in full, and the road described as paved for ten miles and graded gravel for seven. No site count, no elevation, no fee and no horsepower limit appear
Currant Creek Campground, federal recreation site 231929. Gives the campground elevation as 8,000 feet, which is higher than Reclamation puts the crest of the dam
Utah state parks. The full roster runs to forty six and Currant Creek Reservoir is not on it
Gunlock Reservoir designated a Blue Ribbon fishery. A per water designation release exists for Gunlock. No equivalent release naming Currant Creek Reservoir was found
Point forecast over the reservoir. Forecast office Salt Lake City
Utah Administrative Code R317-2-13, classification of waters of the state. The Wasatch County lakes and reservoirs table, in which Currant Creek Reservoir is classified 1C, 2B, 3A and 4. The same rule separately classifies a different Currant Creek in the Utah Lake drainage near Mona
Utah Administrative Code R317-2-6, use designations. The verbatim definitions of classes 1C, 2B, 3A and 4
Why the flow gauge is fourteen miles from the dam
Three gauges have measured Currant Creek and the two near the dam are both dead.
Site 09286700, Currant Creek below Currant Creek Dam. Daily discharge from 1 October 1983 to 2 October 1994 . That is the gauge this card would use if it existed.
Site 09287000, Currant Creek below Red Ledge Hollow. Daily discharge from 1 October 1945 to 12 October 1983 . It stopped the same month the gauge below the new dam started, which is what a relocation looks like.
Site 09288000, Currant Creek near Fruitland. Daily discharge since 1 January 1935, still reporting . This is the card. It sits at 6,664.78 feet, about a thousand feet lower and fourteen river miles down, and it has picked up Water Hollow and other tributaries on the way.
So the number on that card is real and it is not a dam release. It measures the creek below this reservoir, not the water this reservoir lets out, and it cannot see the diversion at all: the water sent into the Strawberry Aqueduct never passes any of these gauges .
The storage card, by contrast, is unusually good for this series. Station 09UTCURR:UT:BOR serves daily, semimonthly and monthly, and this page reads the daily series . The service flags that series as observed rather than derived, and its record starts 15 October 1982, seven years after the dam. Four other stations in this series advertise durations they do not serve, and the previous lake's only working series was flagged derived.
And the percentage beside it is arithmetic on a disputed denominator. It is worked against 15,671 acre feet, the figure Interior calls the total capacity and the one the dam inventory's maximum and normal storage fields both carry . Two other published figures exist, 17,210 and 17,240, and the card states what the same reading would be against them.