ECHO
The famous part of Echo is on the other side of the dam
A canyon that carried the Pony Express and the railroad, a wall built in 1857 against an army that never came, and a reservoir that drowned a rail line rather than a town.
Echo Canyon is one of the most important routes in the westward expansion. Native people used it, then explorers, wagon trains, Mormon pioneers, the Pony Express for eighteen months from 1860, and the crews who built the transcontinental railroad . The town of Echo was settled in 1854 by James Bromley, who ran the Weber Stage Station .
None of it is under this reservoir. That is worth stating plainly, because the name attaches all of it to this water.
| Feature | Where it is |
|---|---|
| Echo Dam | 40.9655 N |
| The reservoir | Upstream of the dam, filling the Weber valley south to Coalville |
| Weber River at Echo gauge | 40.9677 N, below the dam |
| The town, the canyon, the trail | Below the dam |
| The 1857 breastworks | About five kilometres north of the dam, up a side canyon that joins the Weber below it |
Reclamation's own project history contains no mention of a cemetery relocation, a building removal, or a town being moved. That is a real difference from Rockport, twelve miles upstream, where the federal government bought every property in a town of twenty seven families in 1952 and the townsite is under the water. Echo drowned a railroad, a highway and some fields.
In the autumn of 1857, Mormon militia built low dry stone walls above the emigrant road through Echo Canyon, against an army they expected and never fought. The National Park Service: "Mormon militiamen, fearing an attack on Salt Lake City by the U.S. Army, built the low rubble walls above the emigrant road in 1857" . It describes defensive positions along the canyon rim and a trench across the canyon floor, surviving as rubble wall remnants and a faint horizontal line in the earth.
Summit County adds that the militia dammed the creek with a rock wall at the Narrows, and notes that the stone structures are still visible and were never used in combat . Non agency accounts describe dry masonry of uncut stones stacked without mortar, standing one to two feet high in segments of four to twelve feet, spread over roughly twelve miles of canyon and built by more than twelve hundred men in a few weeks, under Daniel H. Wells .
What is listed, in the town of Echo :
| Property | Reference | Listed |
|---|---|---|
| Echo Church and School, Temple Lane | 88003000 | 5 January 1989 |
| Echo School, 3441 S. Echo Road | 97000805 | 1 August 1997 |
| Echo Post Office, 3455 S. Echo Road | 03000159 | 14 August 2003 |
Echo Dam is not listed either, and that is a determination rather than an omission. Reclamation's 2009 assessment records the dam as "determined ineligible for the NRHP under Criterion C", and the dam tender's residence and outbuildings as ineligible too. One property in the project area was determined eligible: a segment of the historic Echo and Park City Branch of the Union Pacific Railroad, to be avoided by the work . Eligible is not the same as listed, and this page does not conflate them.
Echo Dam belongs to the Weber River Project, authorised and built between 1927 and 1931 . The reservoirs it usually gets grouped with, Wanship and Rockport, Lost Creek and East Canyon, belong to the later and separate Weber Basin Project. Reclamation lists them as different projects .
| Measure | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Structural height | 158 ft | Reclamation |
| 161 ft | The national dam inventory, whose own dam height field says 158 | |
| Hydraulic height | 110 ft or 113 ft | Reclamation against the dam inventory |
| Crest length | 1,887 ft | Everyone agrees |
| Capacity | 74,000 or 73,940 acre feet | Reclamation's round figure against the exact one at elevation 5,560 feet |
| Surface area | 1,455, 1,410 or 1,394 acres | The dam inventory, the federal water body polygon, and Utah State Parks |
| Drainage area | 715.33, 727 or 685 sq mi | The dam inventory, the gauge below the dam, and the two gauges above it added together |
Reclamation's data sheet gives the drainage area as 836 square miles , which is larger than any of the three above and is the figure that circulates most widely. All four are printed here. The gauge immediately below the dam measures 727 , and the two gauges feeding the top of the reservoir add to 685.
In September 2009 Reclamation published an assessment identifying two seismic deficiencies at this dam :
- The foundation soils under the dam are "potentially liquefiable and could lose strength during strong ground shaking caused by an earthquake."
- The spillway crest structure walls are "susceptible to failure (deformation or collapse) due to loading resulting from strong ground shaking."
The work: dewater the downstream foundation, relocate the dam tender's residence, excavate a keyway 60 to 70 feet deep and replace the liquefiable soil with engineered fill, build stability berms upstream and downstream, jet grout the spillway foundation, and replace the spillway walls and control sections. Capital cost 22 million dollars, about three construction seasons .
Three sources give three versions of when and what it cost. The 2009 assessment says 22 million dollars over about three seasons . The national dam inventory records the modification as 2015, seismic and structural . And a widely repeated account attributes a 50 million dollar retrofit beginning in July 2012 to a newspaper report. This page prints the agency figures and notes that the third exists. No completion document could be found.
Echo State Park opened on Saturday 12 May 2018, which makes it one of the newest state parks in Utah . Its first park manager, quoted at the opening: "We are really excited to get things going here at the park. This is something we've been looking forward to."
What came before is the interesting part. Recreation here was run day to day under contract by a Coalville resident, and Reclamation approached Utah State Parks about taking over while it negotiated a buy out of that contract. The deal was finalised on 1 November 2017 and the state parks board adopted the reservoir as a park by resolution on 22 February 2018 .
Day use has gone from 12 dollars a vehicle at the 2018 opening to 20 dollars now . The state's stated reason for taking the park on was pressure elsewhere: a spokesman at the time said they hoped it would "alleviate pressure from the Jordanelle and Deer Creek" .
From 73,347 acre feet to 8,259 in two years
The worst outline agreement in this series and the storage record that explains it, a mercury advisory whose evidence is a picture, and two algal advisories in one autumn with no numbers behind either.
The shape at the top of this page was traced by hand for a print, then scaled to the extent of the USGS water body polygon and measured off its own coordinates. This is the worst agreement of any water in this series, by a wide margin.
| Scaling | Traced area | Against the federal polygon |
|---|---|---|
| One scale factor, matched on width | 1,254 acres | 11.1 percent small |
| Stretched to fill the extent on both axes | 1,616 acres | 14.6 percent large |
| One scale factor, matched on length | 2,084 acres | 47.8 percent large |
The two shapes are 29 percent apart on proportion. Put side by side they are obviously the same reservoir, with the same hooked northern end and the same long southern tail. The federal polygon is simply narrower for its length.
Traced from OpenStreetMap geometry under the Open Database License, and that credit travels with any public use of the shape. The federal extent measures 3.87 miles on its long axis. Compare Rockport, twelve miles upstream, where three published surface areas sit within two and a half percent of each other and the traced outline lands within a quarter of one percent: that reservoir fills and spills nearly every year, and this one is drawn down for irrigation. The geometry of a reservoir is a record of how it is operated.
No maximum depth, no mean depth and no shoreline length for Echo Reservoir could be found from any agency: not Reclamation, not the dam inventory, not the water body polygon, not the wildlife division, and not Utah State Parks.
Two things the federal record does say about this reservoir that are worth knowing:
- Its federal name is the name on the sign. The water body polygon is filed as Echo Reservoir . That is not true twelve miles upstream, where the same federal dataset files Rockport as Rockport Lake and a query on Rockport Reservoir returns nothing at all.
- Its elevation field is empty. The polygon record for Echo carries no elevation , where Rockport's carries 6,037 feet. Reclamation gives the crest as 5,570 feet and the reference elevation for capacity as 5,560 , and the storage station's own published elevation is 5,570 .
Echo Reservoir carries a current mercury fish consumption advisory for brown trout and smallmouth bass . It is one of twelve waters on Utah's current advisory list, and one of only a handful where the advisory covers two species at once.
And Echo is absent from the state's June 2023 advisory update entirely. All four of its tables were enumerated . Echo would sort between Electric Lake and Forsyth Reservoir in the table of 2021 samples, and it is not there. It is also absent from the environmental department's older contaminant advisory list, which was last updated in April 2018.
The reasonable inference, labelled as an inference: an advisory that is current but appears in neither the 2018 list nor the June 2023 update most likely comes from a sampling round after June 2023. No 2024 or 2025 advisory update document could be found to confirm that. For comparison, Rockport's 2021 figures are fully published: smallmouth bass at 0.699 milligrams a kilogram, above the screening value, against four trout and salmon species that all came back clean .
Echo and Rockport are usually said to have had a shared algal bloom in 2018. The joint advisory was October 2017.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 18 to 23 October 2017 | A single advisory covering both Echo and Rockport, issued by the county health department. No cell counts, no toxin concentrations and no advisory tier are given in the only account of it |
| 2018 | Rockport had a bloom in June, measured at 7.5 micrograms of microcystin a litre. Echo did not. The state's own 2018 monitoring table records Echo sampled on 17 September 2018 with an advisory status of none |
| 10 June, 15 July, 14 August 2024 | Monitored, no issues detected |
| 6 September 2024 | Warning advisory issued. "A harmful algal bloom is present in areas of Echo Reservoir" |
| 17 September 2024 | Lifted. Two weeks of monitoring showed the bloom was no longer present |
| 22 October 2024 | Warning advisory issued again |
| 1 November 2024 | Monitoring ended for the season, with the note that a bloom may still be present |
Note the November wording, because it matters in practice. Monitoring stops for the season, and the closing statement is that a bloom may still be present. The absence of an advisory in winter is not a statement that the water is clear.
Station 10131500:UT:BOR has recorded this reservoir's contents since September 1931, the year the dam was finished . Nothing else in this series goes back that far.
It publishes three durations and all three return data, in three different shapes:
| Duration | Record begins | What a value object actually contains |
|---|---|---|
| Daily | 1 October 1931 | date and value |
| Monthly | 1 September 1931 | month, year, value. No date |
| Semimonthly | 4 October 2017 | month, monthPart, year, value. No date, and monthPart is a string where the others are integers |
Below the dam, USGS 10132000 gauges the Weber River at Echo, draining 727 square miles . Above the reservoir, 10130500 gauges the Weber near Coalville at 435 square miles and 10131000 gauges Chalk Creek at 250 . Chalk Creek is why this reservoir has more than twice Rockport's catchment while sitting only twelve miles down the same river.
The snow that ends up here falls a long way east. The nearest snow station in the Weber headwaters is Smith Morehouse, 763:UT:SNTL, at 7,640 feet, reporting since 1978 , and a snow course has been read in the same basin since April 1929. Everything it measures passes through Rockport before it reaches this reservoir.
Where everything is
Eight places, a state park that is eight years old on a dam that is ninety five, and the reservoir twelve miles upstream that feeds it.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Open water | 1,394 surface acres, by Utah State Parks' own figure |
| Hours | 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., sixteen hour access, year round |
| Camping | Red Rock Marina Campground, Dry Hollow Campground, beach camping, a group camp, and five cottages |
| Day use | 20 dollars a vehicle, 5 walk in or bicycle, 2 a commercial passenger, and 40 dollars for a reservable day use site that comes with a table and a grill and no pavilion |
| Camping fees | 40 partial hookups, 50 full hookups, 70 a double site, 20 an extra vehicle |
| Cottage and group | 200 dollars a lake cottage, 300 for the Bison Run group campground, up to fifty people |
| Reservations | Open 1 May and can be made four months ahead; unreserved sites are first come first served |
Utah State Parks publishes no coordinate for this park, and no elevation on the park page. The pins on the map above are federal: the dam from the national inventory, and the gauges from the water survey. The only address given is the state parks head office in Salt Lake City.
Everything in Rockport Reservoir eventually arrives here. Water released from Wanship Dam runs past Wanship, takes Silver Creek, then Chalk Creek at Coalville, and enters the top of this reservoir . It is the only direct channel connection between two reservoirs in this series.
| Echo | Rockport | |
|---|---|---|
| Built | 1927 to 1931, Weber River Project | 1954 to 1957, Weber Basin Project |
| Capacity | 74,000 acre feet | 62,100 |
| Drainage | 715 to 836 sq mi | 325 to 339 |
| Federal name | Echo Reservoir | Rockport Lake |
| State park since | 2018 | 1966 |
| Under the water | A railroad, a highway and farmland | A town |
| Mercury advisory | Brown trout and smallmouth bass | Smallmouth bass |
| Dam modified | Yes, 2015, seismic | Never recorded |
| Fishery report | None found | A 2022 monitoring report with published catch data |
What is not documented is joint operation. Echo is a Weber River Project facility and Rockport is a Weber Basin Project facility, separate authorisations decades apart . No agency document describing coordinated operation of the two could be found, and this page does not claim it.
Echo Canyon runs north east from the town, below the dam. Its walls are the Echo Canyon Conglomerate, and the canyon is why everything came this way: it is the natural grade from the Wasatch to the Wyoming plains, and it carried the emigrant road, the Pony Express, the Overland Trail and then the transcontinental railroad .
A few things from the county's own account that are worth having :
- The Echo Church, built 1876, served as a school from 1880 to 1913 and as a chapel until 1963, and is now a museum. It is one of the three National Register listings in the town.
- The Pony Express ran down this canyon for eighteen months from 1860. A ten word message from Salt Lake City to New York cost five dollars.
- Wahsatch, up the canyon, was a railroad division point during the construction of 1868 and 1869 and housed hundreds of workers.
Five species, and not one of them from a survey
No fishery report exists for this reservoir, the species list comes from a fishing forecast, and an automated read of the guidebook invented an entry for the fourth time in this series.
Brown trout
One of the two species Utah's mercury advisory covers here. The division's own fishing forecast for this reservoir does not name it at all, which is how thin the published record on this fishery is.
Under the mercury advisorySmallmouth bass
The other species under the advisory, and one of four the division names in its forecast. Twelve miles upstream at Rockport, smallmouth bass is the one fish in five that exceeded the mercury screening value.
Under the mercury advisoryWalleye
Named in the division's 2024 forecast with specific advice: quarter to half ounce jigs tipped with worm, along transition zones where rock and cobble give way to sand, early morning and evening. Rockport has kokanee where this has walleye.
Named in the 2024 forecastYellow perch
One of the four in the forecast. Echo is also on the guidebook list of reservoirs where dead yellow perch may legally be used as bait.
Legal as dead bait hereRainbow trout
The stocked fish. The division's forecast notes they head for deeper water as the reservoir warms while the bass and perch move toward the shore.
StockedTwelve miles upstream, Rockport has a 2022 monitoring report with published catch, biomass and condition numbers. Lost Creek has a 2023 fishery report. No equivalent for Echo Reservoir could be found, in the division's technical report directory, in site scoped searches, or by trying the same filename patterns the other two use.
So the species list on this page comes from a fishing forecast rather than a survey: the division's northern region bulletin of 3 July 2024, which heads four species for Echo: rainbow trout, smallmouth bass, walleye and yellow perch . Brown trout is the fifth on this page, and it is here because the state's mercury advisory names it , not because the forecast does.
Also not found for Echo: any record of an illegal introduction, any rotenone or chemical treatment ever, any Utah state record fish, and any confirmation of Blue Ribbon status. The division's Blue Ribbon page explains the designation and does not enumerate the waters ; the list lives inside a map application. The claim that the Weber River between Wanship and Echo is a Blue Ribbon reach appears only in non agency material and could not be confirmed.
Echo Reservoir has no entry of its own in the rules for specific waters. Statewide general limits apply. It appears in the 2026 guidebook exactly twice :
- The page 20 seasonal bass closure. The listed waters are "closed to the possession of largemouth and smallmouth bass from April 1 through June 27, 2026 (the fourth Saturday in June)" while underwater spearfishing. Echo is third on that list and Rockport is ninth. It applies only to spearfishing.
- The dead bait list, verbatim: "Dead yellow perch may be used as bait only in Big Sand Wash, Deer Creek, Echo, Fish Lake, Gunnison, Hyrum, Johnson, Jordanelle, Mantua, Mill Meadow, Newton, Pineview, Red Fleet, Rockport, Starvation, Utah Lake, Willard Bay and Yuba reservoirs."
That verification method is now standard on these pages: literal string search, a transcription of the actual page, and a check that the alphabetical neighbours are in the right order. A list that comes back out of order is a list that has been invented.
What to watch for
One documented death, found by sonar, and a long list of things nobody publishes.
In September 2025 a 56 year old man from Salt Lake County went missing while kayaking on this reservoir. He was last seen at about 4:30 p.m. and reported missing shortly before 5:30 by his adult son. His body was located and recovered at about 1:30 a.m. the following morning .
Four agencies worked it: the county sheriff's search and rescue, the state natural resources law enforcement division, a second county's search and rescue, and the local fire district. Crews "used sonar technology to assist in their search, which extended late into the night" .
Life jacket use and water conditions were not stated in the account, so this page does not infer either. This is the only drowning, fatality or search and rescue incident at Echo Reservoir, Utah that could be sourced. Searches for this reservoir return a great deal about Dillon Reservoir in Summit County, Colorado, and about Echo Canyon Reservoir in Nevada. Neither is this water and neither is on this page.
- The mercury meal limits. The advisory exists and the document behind it is an image file .
- Maximum depth, mean depth and shoreline length, from anyone.
- Any fishery report, any state record, any illegal introduction record, any rotenone history, and any confirmation of Blue Ribbon status.
- Any cell count or toxin concentration for any bloom at Echo, in any year. The two 2024 advisories are described qualitatively and the year specific archives are closed to automated reading .
- Echo's current impairment listing and any total maximum daily load. The federal assessment interface returned an authorisation error and the state's 2024 integrated report page carries no assessment tables . Neighbouring East Canyon has TMDLs; nothing for Echo was found.
- A completion document for the seismic modification, and a reconciliation of the 22 million dollar estimate against the widely repeated 50 million dollar figure.
- Any agency document describing joint operation of Echo and Rockport.
- Any coordinate or elevation for the state park, from Utah State Parks.
- Boat ramp counts, lane numbers, or a low water ramp closure elevation. A ramp and dock existed at the 2018 opening and nothing more detailed is published, on a reservoir that has been down to 11 percent of capacity inside the last six years.
This reservoir has been down to eleven percent of capacity inside the last six years.
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 EchoEvery figure on this page is quoted from the source named beside it.
Sources
How these were checked
Numbered sources are agencies. Lettered sources are everything else, and on this page they carry the detail of the breastworks, the 2017 algal advisory, how this became a state park, and the 2025 recovery. Four claims did not survive checking. The breastworks are not on the National Register, and a nationwide search of the register's own service for the word returns nothing. The joint Echo and Rockport algal advisory was 2017, not 2018. An automated read of the fishing guidebook invented an Echo entry on page 36, and page 36 was transcribed to disprove it, which is the fourth such fabrication in this series. And Blue Ribbon status could not be confirmed for this reservoir or for the river reach below it. Where agencies disagree, all of them are printed: that happens over the dam's height, its hydraulic height, its capacity, its surface area, its drainage area, and what the seismic modification cost.The Weber River Project, by Christopher J. McCune. The right of way purchase, the railroad and highway relocations, the telephone line, and the construction record
Echo Dam data. Structural height 158 feet, hydraulic height 110, crest 1,887 feet, capacity 74,000 acre feet, drainage 836 square miles
Echo Dam safety of dams modification, environmental assessment and finding of no significant impact, September 2009. Two seismic deficiencies, the 22 million dollar cost, the drawdown restrictions, and the cultural resource determinations
Weber River Project. It is a separate and earlier project from the Weber Basin Project that built Wanship, Lost Creek and East Canyon
National Inventory of Dams, Echo Dam, federal identifier UT10120. Hazard potential high, condition assessment not available, modified in 2015, and a structural height that contradicts its own dam height field
National Hydrography Dataset, Echo Reservoir, GNIS 01427742, reach code 16020101006397. The surface area and the polygon this page measures its outline against
Defensive breastworks. Mormon militiamen built the low rubble walls above the emigrant road in 1857
Echo Canyon. The 1854 settlement, the stage station, the 1876 church, the Pony Express, and the militia's rock wall at the Narrows
National Register of Historic Places spatial service. Three listings in Echo, and no listing anywhere in the country whose name contains the word breastworks
Echo Reservoir storage, station 10131500:UT:BOR. Daily record from 1 October 1931 and monthly from September 1931, the longest in this series
Weber River at Echo, site 10132000. Below the dam, drainage area 727 square miles
Weber River near Coalville, site 10130500. Drainage area 435 square miles, at the head of the reservoir
Chalk Creek at Coalville, site 10131000. Drainage area 250 square miles
Smith Morehouse SNOTEL, station 763:UT:SNTL, at 7,640 feet in the Weber headwaters
Northern region fishing forecast, bulletin of 3 July 2024. The four species it heads for this reservoir, and the walleye advice
2026 Utah Fishing Guidebook. Echo appears on the page 20 spearfishing bass closure list and in the dead yellow perch bait list, and has no entry of its own in the rules for specific waters
Blue Ribbon fisheries. The programme is described and the designated waters are not enumerated on the page
Game and fish advisories. Echo Reservoir is on the current list for brown trout and smallmouth bass
Fish consumption advisory updates, June 2023. Echo appears in none of its four tables
Echo Reservoir recreational monitoring. The 2024 advisory sequence, issued 6 September, lifted 17 September, and issued again 22 October
Harmful algal blooms. The 2018 monitoring table records Echo sampled 17 September 2018 with an advisory status of none
Echo State Park opens Saturday 12 May 2018
Echo State Park. The 1,394 surface acres, the hours, the campgrounds and the cottages
Echo State Park fees. Twenty dollars a vehicle, forty to seventy for camping, two hundred for a cottage
Utah water quality standards, classification of waters of the state. Echo and Rockport are classified identically
Invasive quagga and zebra mussels. Utah's infested waters are limited to Lake Powell
2024 integrated report. Approved by the federal environmental agency on 30 April 2024, with no assessment unit tables published on the page
Wanship Dam data, for the reservoir twelve miles upstream
Echo Canyon breastworks. The autumn 1857 construction under Daniel H. Wells, the dry masonry description, the twelve miles of canyon and the twelve hundred men
Toxic algal advisory remains in effect for Echo and Rockport reservoirs, 18 October 2017. The only account of the joint advisory
Echo Reservoir in Summit County chosen as Utah's newest state park. The November 2017 deal, the February 2018 board resolution, and the Coalville resident who ran recreation here before the state did
Summit County search and rescue recovers body of missing kayaker at Echo Reservoir, September 2025. The agencies that responded and the sonar search
How far this reservoir actually swings
Between January 2020 and July 2026 the federal storage record shows a maximum of 73,347 acre feet and a minimum of 8,259 . The high was June 2023. The low was September 2021, and it is about 11 percent of capacity.
That is why the outline at the top of this page disagrees with the federal polygon by 29 percent. The two shapes are the same reservoir on two different days. There is a section on it under Science.
The percentage divides the storage reading by 74,000 acre feet, which is what Reclamation publishes . Its own 2009 assessment gives the more exact 73,940 acre feet at elevation 5,560 feet , and the national dam inventory uses 73,940 for all three of its storage fields . The difference is 60 acre feet and it moves this number by less than a tenth of a percent.
The storage record is the longest in this series. Contents have been recorded here since September 1931 . All three durations return data, in three different shapes, and the semimonthly one only goes back to 2017 while looking exactly like the others.
The flow card is the Weber River at Echo, below the dam, draining 727 square miles . Above the reservoir the river is gauged near Coalville at 435 square miles and Chalk Creek at 250 .