Protect

ELECTRIC LAKE

Emery County
Fathom Restoration
39° 37′ 29″ N
111° 13′ 31″ WELECTRIC LAKE
Donate to Protect Electric Lake
The cutthroat trout here average 0.513 milligrams a kilogram of mercury, which is higher than any trout figure anywhere in Utah's own document. Twelve kilometres north, the same programme sampled the same species in the same year and got a quarter of that. Every figure here is quoted from its source.
0.513Milligrams a kilogram of mercury in cutthroat, above every trout figure in the state's document
1991The year this high hazard dam's condition was last assessed
30%Of the power plant's water. The creek supplies the rest
42Waters open to spearfishing under the rule. The guidebook prints nine
0Incidents at this lake found in searchable press
Live from Electric Lake
The storage number here is monthly, not daily, and the service flags it as derived. That is not a choice: this station advertises a daily series and returns nothing at all. There is no active gauge below the dam either.
contacting federal services
Water in the lakeNRCS
reading the monthly storage record
Of capacityUtah water rights
against 31,500 acre feet at spillway crest
The creek below the damUSGS
no gauge
There is no active water survey gauge below Electric Lake Dam. The site immediately downstream at 8,275 feet holds no published series, and the lake's own gauge went quiet on 29 September 2006.
Forecast over the waterNWS
contacting the National Weather Service
About  ·  01

A power company owns this one

Every other water in this series sits behind a government dam. This one is private, which means the state inspects it every year and publishes the file, and the federal record is three cycles out of date and has the spillway wrong by a factor of twenty five.

Every other water Fathom has built a page for sits behind a dam owned by the Bureau of Reclamation or run by a state or local body. This one is owned by a power company. Three separate agency records say so.

RecordWhat it says
The national dam inventoryOwner type Private. The dam's name in the record is "Pacificorp - Electric Lake". Every federal agency field is empty
Utah's dam safety fileOwner PacifiCorp-Huntington Plant, with an agent, a Huntington post office box and a telephone number
Utah's industrial water supplier registerSystem 11095, PacifiCorp (Huntington Power Plant)
That flips the regulatory picture completely. On the Reclamation dams in this series the inventory records state regulated: no. Here it records state regulated: yes, state jurisdiction: yes, state permitting: yes, state inspection: yes, state enforcement: yes, regulator Utah Division of Water Rights, and federally regulated dam: no . So there is a public state inspection file for this dam where the federal dams have none.

And the state file is more current than the federal one. Utah records the last inspection as 10 June 2026, by a named inspector, on a one year interval, out of the Price regional office . The national inventory still carries 20 June 2023 , three cycles behind. On the federal dams in this series the position is usually the reverse: a four year cycle and no state record at all.

The dam itself: 229 feet structural height, 217 hydraulic, a crest 920 feet long and 30 feet wide at elevation 8,586 feet, an 84 inch reinforced concrete outlet running 1,000 feet, finished in 1974 . It is an earthfill embankment with a drop inlet spillway, which dam engineers call a morning glory. Its owner built a 1:14 scale physical model of that outlet in 2018 to check its hydraulics for cavitation and flow instability , which is the same period as the dam's emergency action plan revision of 28 December 2018 .

Utah's industrial water supplier register lists three sources for the Huntington power plant. Read them together and the role of this lake becomes exact .

SourceWater rightPrimary use2025 usage
Electric Lake Reservoir93-1116"Power (Fossil-Fuel)"2,986.10 acre feet
Huntington Creek93-1115Power (Fossil-Fuel)6,819.00 acre feet
Huntington Plant potable well93-3773Domestic17.86 acre feet

The note against the first line reads, verbatim: "Storage water used at Huntington Plant" . The reported split of that water is about 86 percent cooling, 12 percent processing and the rest domestic.

Electric Lake is not the plant's water supply. It is the storage half of a two source supply, and the smaller half. In 2025 the lake delivered 2,986 acre feet against Huntington Creek's 6,819, which makes the reservoir 30 percent of the two combined . That percentage is this page's arithmetic on the register's own two figures. What a reservoir gives you is not volume, it is timing: the creek runs when it runs, and the lake runs when the plant needs it.

The dates line up in a way worth noticing. The dam was finished in 1974 , and the Huntington plant's first unit, 496 megawatts, was commissioned in 1974 as well . The second unit followed in 1977. The dam's recorded purpose in the national inventory is water supply, not power : there is no generating plant at the dam, and the electricity in the name is made twenty four miles downstream by burning coal. This page does not print a retirement year for the plant, because the published date has moved from 2036 to 2032 and back to 2036, and a more recent report was not confirmed .

Two agencies carry a condition assessment for this dam and they carry the same one. Utah records assessment rating: SATISFACTORY, with the detail "Meets applicable hydrologic and seismic regulatory criteria", and assessment date: 01/01/1991 . The national inventory records Satisfactory with a condition assessment date that decodes to 1 January 1991 .

That is a thirty five year old assessment on a dam rated high hazard and inspected every single year. The inspections are happening: the most recent was 10 June 2026 . The assessment behind the rating is from the year the Soviet Union dissolved. Both agencies carry the same date, so this is not one record copying another badly; it is the assessment itself that has not been redated.

What "high hazard" means, and what it does not. Hazard potential is a classification of consequences if the dam failed, not a statement about its condition. Utah's file names the first downstream town as Huntington, 24 miles away . The two ratings are independent: this dam is rated high hazard and satisfactory at the same time, and both are correct as the agencies use the words.

The inventory's emergency action plan fields do not close. The prepared flag is empty and the last revised date reads 28 December 2018 . Utah's file independently carries that same revision date plus a standard operating procedure revision of 22 March 2019 , so the plan exists and the empty flag is the error. The inventory also names a member of Congress who left that seat in January 2025, which this page does not print.

The national inventory's maximum discharge field for this dam reads 90 cubic feet a second . That field is the spillway capacity.

Utah's dam safety file lists two separate numbers :

Utah's fieldValue
Spillway maximum discharge2,300 cubic feet a second
Maximum outlet discharge90 cubic feet a second
The federal record has put the outlet figure in the spillway field. Ninety cubic feet a second is also implausible on its face as a spillway for a high hazard dam draining thirty square miles of the Wasatch Plateau. This page does not use 90 as a spillway capacity anywhere, and anyone quoting the national inventory for this dam's spillway will be out by a factor of about twenty five.

The two records also describe the spillway differently: the inventory says uncontrolled , Utah says drop inlet , and the engineering account describes a morning glory spillway with intake tower, valve chamber, outlet conduit and an impact type energy dissipation basin . Those are three levels of detail on one structure rather than three different answers, and all three are recorded here.

Four agencies publish a point for this dam or its gauge. Three of them agree closely and one does not.

SourceLatitudeLongitude
Utah dam safety 39.6005208-111.2115459
The water survey lake gauge 39.6007973-111.2121177
The soil conservation service station 39.60062-111.21204
The national dam inventory 39.60518266-111.2157291
The first three sit inside about eighty metres of each other. The federal inventory's point is roughly 520 metres north and 360 metres west of them. All four fall inside the water body polygon, so none of them is badly wrong, but they are not the same place and the outlier is the one most people will find first.

Two more things this page had to settle rather than assume. First, the lake is wholly in Emery County. Its entire bounding extent was intersected against the current county boundary file and returned Emery and nothing else . Sanpete County is close, and Huntington Reservoir upstream is filed under Sanpete in the fishing guidebook , but the county line runs between the two. Second, the water surface is about 8,575 feet and the dam crest is 8,586 . The weather service's point elevation of 8,793 feet is a terrain grid value and is not this lake's elevation.

And there is a near name in the dam inventory, in another state. A nationwide search for every dam whose name contains the string electric returns twenty four, of which exactly one is in Utah . The one to watch is B+L Electric Lake Dam in Henry County, Missouri. Unlike the last two pages in this series, Utah does not hold a second dam of nearly this name.

Science  ·  02

0.513 milligrams a kilogram, on nine cutthroat

Higher than every trout figure in Utah's whole mercury document. And Scofield, twelve kilometres north, was sampled in the same round for the same two species and came back four to ten times cleaner.

Utah sampled three species at Electric Lake in 2021 and published the results in June 2023. The comparison line is stated in the document itself: "Mean mercury concentrations in fish fillet tissues were compared to EPA's screening value (SV) for mercury of 0.3 mg/kg" .

SpeciesFish sampledMean mg/kgRangeStd devOver the screening value
Cutthroat trout90.5130.3 to 10.2Yes
Tiger trout100.4500.1 to 0.90.3Yes
Kokanee100.1940.1 to 0.30.06No
0.513 milligrams a kilogram is higher than every trout figure anywhere in that document . Two waters in it carry higher means than Electric Lake's cutthroat, and neither of them is a trout: Starvation's walleye at 0.920 and Newcastle's small wiper at 0.685. Among trout, nothing beats this. Cutthroat here run 1.71 times the screening value and tiger trout 1.50 times.

The meal limits. These are maximum meals per month. WCB means women of childbearing age, 16 to 50 .

SpeciesGeneral publicWomen of childbearing age, children 6 to 16Pregnant and breastfeeding women, children under 6
Cutthroat trout62Do not eat
Tiger trout721
Note the shape of that table, because it looks like a mistake and is not. Cutthroat carry the higher mercury mean and the stricter instruction for pregnant women and young children, do not eat, while tiger trout at a lower mean allow one meal a month for that group but seven a month for the general public against cutthroat's six. The advisory is not a simple ranking of the means, and this page reproduces it as printed rather than tidying it.

Electric Lake is one of twelve waters on Utah's current advisory list, where its entry reads, exactly, "Electric Lake - Cutthroat trout and Tiger trout" . That list and the June 2023 document agree on the species here, which is not true of every water on it: on Starvation the list names one species and the document names two.

The third fish is the one that makes this section honest. Kokanee were sampled in the same round, ten of them, and came back at 0.194, below the screening value . That is why the advisory covers two species and not three, and it is why the kokanee is drawn on this page without a flag on it. Meal sizes on the state's own advisory sheet: 8 ounces for adults and for women of childbearing age, 4 ounces for pregnant women and children under six . Its own words: "You can't remove heavy metals like mercury by any cooking or cleaning methods."

This is the comparison that gives the numbers meaning. Scofield Reservoir is about twelve kilometres north. The state sampled it in the same 2021 round, reported it in the same table of the same document, and tested it for the same two species .

SpeciesElectric LakeScofieldRatio
Cutthroat trout0.513, over the screening value0.122, under4.2 times
Tiger trout0.450, over0.045, under10.0 times
Same programme, same year, same species, twelve kilometres apart, and one lake is on the advisory list while the other is not. Scofield's tiger trout came back at one tenth of Electric Lake's. This page does not offer a reason, because no agency document found here offers one. What it can say is that the difference is real, measured by the same people in the same season, and that it is the strongest thing either number has going for it.

And they are not the same water system, which is worth saying because the geography suggests otherwise. Electric Lake is in hydrologic unit 14060009, San Rafael ; Scofield is on the Price River, a different unit and a different river. Scofield has an approved load allocation on the state's list and Electric Lake has none . The only reason they look connected is the road: the boat ramp at the north end of Electric Lake is reached from the town of Scofield , and the water survey files this lake's own gauge as "ELECTRIC LAKE NEAR SCOFIELD, UT" . Proximity, not plumbing.

Utah classifies every named water for the uses it is protected for. In the Emery County table, Electric Lake reads 2B, 3A, 4, and the entry is bracketed by Cleveland Reservoir above and Huntington Reservoir below . A second, separately hosted reproduction of the rule gives the identical string, the identical county section and the identical two neighbours .

ClassWhat it protects, verbatim
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. Examples include, but are not limited to, wading, hunting, and fishing."
3ACold water game fish and the aquatic life in their food chain
4Agricultural use, irrigation and stock watering
Two absences in that string matter more than what is in it. There is no 2A, which is the tier for frequent primary contact where ingestion or submersion is likely. And there is no class 1C at all, which is the domestic supply class. In the same county list, Millsite Reservoir carries 1C and Joes Valley and Huntington North both carry 2A . Electric Lake sits at the lower recreation tier and outside the drinking water protections, which is consistent with a lake held for an industrial water right rather than for a town.

One caveat on the neighbour list, applied honestly. The full Emery County list runs Cleveland, Electric, Huntington, Huntington North, Joes Valley, Millsite. "Huntington Reservoir" before "Huntington North Reservoir" is out of strict alphabetical order, which is the test this series uses to catch invented lists. Here it fails on one adjacency out of five, the same pattern appears independently in another Utah document, and two separate reproductions returned the same two neighbours for Electric Lake, so the entry itself is solid. The full list is printed with the caveat rather than without it.

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

MeasureTraced outlineFederal polygonGap
Proportion, width over length0.4280.4172.6 percent
Area, matched on width486 acres474 acres2.7 percent large
Area, stretched to fill on both axes499 acres474 acres5.3 percent large
Area, matched on length512 acres474 acres8.1 percent large

Two and a half percent on proportion is a good result, second only to Lost Creek in this series, and a long way from Echo, where the same two measurements came out twenty nine percent apart. The federal extent runs 3.63 miles north to south and 1.51 miles across, and the water fills only fourteen percent of its own bounding box, which is the emptiest box in the series.

An honest note on the method. The federal ring used here was a simplified version of the polygon, because the full one times out. Running the shoelace formula over it gives 1.918 square kilometres against the dataset's published 1.897 , so the simplification inflates the area by about 1.1 percent. The proportion figures are barely affected; the area figures should be read as good to about a percent, not better.

Traced from OpenStreetMap geometry under the Open Database License, and that credit travels with any public use of the shape. Four surface areas are published for this lake: 425 acres at spillway crest from Utah's dam file , 468.5 from the Forest Service , 468.8 from the federal water body dataset at high resolution and 475.7 from the same dataset at medium resolution , and the national inventory's surface area field is empty . The 425 is specifically at spillway crest, which is a different quantity, and the spread across the rest is under two percent. No maximum depth, mean depth or shoreline length is published for this lake by anyone.

The card at the top of this page reads from station 09UTELLK:UT:BOR. Its published metadata offers three durations: daily from 1 January 1900, monthly from 1 January 1900, and semimonthly from 21 January 2026 .

Only the monthly one returns anything. The daily and semimonthly series both come back as an empty list. That was checked against a control: the identical query form, pointed at a neighbouring reservoir station in the same basin, returns full daily and semimonthly data. So the query is right and this station's advertised series are simply not there. A live data strip on this lake built the ordinary way, on daily storage, renders blank. The card above is built on the monthly series instead, and says so.

There is a second thing to say about that number, and the service says it itself. The monthly series carries a flag reading derived, and the daily series at the control station carries the same flag reading not derived . The daily reading is the observation; the monthly figure is worked out from it. The card above is therefore a derived monthly value and is labelled that way, which is not something this series has had to say before.

DurationWhat a value object containsReturns data here
Dailydate and valueNo
Monthlymonth, year, value. No dateYes
Semimonthlymonth, monthPart, year, value. No date, and monthPart is a string where the others are integersNo
The water survey gave up on this lake in 2006. Site 09317800 holds reservoir storage from 1 October 1985 to 29 September 2006, 7,669 daily values, and nothing in the twenty years since . There is no active water survey gauge on Electric Lake and none below the dam either. The site immediately below the lake at 8,275 feet holds no published series . That is why the third card in the strip above is blank rather than showing a flow.

And there is no snow station in this drainage. The whole San Rafael basin holds two active snow telemetry stations and three retired snow courses, and every one of them sits in the Cottonwood Creek or Ferron Creek sub basins . The nearest active one, Red Pine Ridge, is sixteen kilometres south southwest at 8,990 feet and is in a different sub basin. Any snowpack figure quoted for Electric Lake is borrowed, and this page does not quote one.

Recreation  ·  03

Where everything is

Eight places, one boat ramp, no state park, and two pins that are here to show you something that is missing.

The whole lake
Midpoint of the USGS National Hydrography Dataset water body extent, GNIS 01447801, reach code 14060009001002, derived rather than published
Eight places, and two of them are here to show you something that is missing.

There is no state park here. Recreation is a Forest Service matter, on the Manti-La Sal National Forest, Ferron Ranger District , and the developed footprint is one site.

ItemDetail
The siteElectric Lake North Side Boating Site, at the north end
FacilitiesA boat ramp, vault toilets, and no drinking water
FeeNot stated as a fee site
HoursOpen 24 hours a day, with seasonal use given as beginning in May
Getting there, north endFrom Scofield, south on state route 96, then state route 264 for about ten miles, then forest road 50222 for the last two thirds of a mile
Getting there, south endState route 31, near the dam. No boat facilities at that end, and the access road along the southern shoreline is on PacifiCorp land
The southern access road is a live issue, and the state has money in it. A 2026 restoration project is repairing it, with the wildlife division leading and PacifiCorp partnering, at a cost of 15,000 dollars. Its own words: heavy monsoon rains have rutted the road, "if the road deteriorates anymore it will be closed to angling access", and it is the only vehicle access to that stretch of shoreline . Repairing it is also expected to cut erosion into the reservoir.

What is not published, and therefore is not on this page. No motor or horsepower restriction was found in any source; the Forest Service page permits motorised and non motorised boating and states no limit . That is a not found and not a none exists, and part of the shoreline is private land which may carry rules of its own. Ice fishing is not addressed by any source retrieved. And no claim of year round road access is printed here: the Forest Service season note points the other way, on a road that tops out above 8,500 feet.

Huntington Creek rises on the Wasatch Plateau above this lake. The named headwater tributaries, from the fishing rules for the Left Fork, are Scad Valley Creek, Rolfson Creek, Lake Creek, Staker Creek, Millers Flat Creek and Paradise Creek , and the water survey has sites on three of them .

PointElevation
Dam crest8,586 ft
The water surfaceAbout 8,575 ft
Huntington Creek just below the lake8,275 ft
Huntington Creek near the town, 24 miles down6,420 ft

Below the dam the creek runs down Huntington Canyon, past the coal fired plant this lake supplies, to the town of Huntington. From there it joins the San Rafael River, then the Green, then the Colorado . This is the Colorado side of the divide.

The lake sits in hydrologic unit 140600090102, named "Headwaters Huntington Creek" . Its drainage is small for a reservoir this deep: 30 square miles by both the dam records and 31.0 by the water survey . Thirty square miles of high plateau filling a lake 229 feet deep at the dam is why the storage record swings the way it does.

Utah's Emery County classification list is a short one and it is a useful map of what is around here .

WaterClassesWhat that means beside Electric Lake
Cleveland Reservoir2B, 3A, 4The entry immediately above. Same classes
Electric Lake2B, 3A, 4
Huntington Reservoir2B, 3A, 4The entry immediately below, and not upstream of this lake. It sits in the Left Fork Huntington Creek sub basin, which meets the headwaters unit this lake sits in only below both of them . Filed under Sanpete County in the fishing guidebook, which is how you can see the county line runs between the two
Huntington North Reservoir2A, 3B, 4Downstream, and a tier higher for recreation. It is also the only 3B water in the county table, meaning warm water game fish. This is the one with a state park on it
Joes Valley Reservoir2A, 3A, 4Also a tier higher
Millsite Reservoir1C, 2A, 3A, 4The only water in the county carrying the domestic supply class
Read that column and the shape of the county falls out of it. The three waters at the top of the drainage, Cleveland, Electric and Huntington, are all 2B. The three lower down, Huntington North, Joes Valley and Millsite, are all 2A, and Millsite is the one a town drinks from. The high cold storage lakes are protected for wading and fishing; the valley reservoirs are protected for swimming.

Also on this lake's doorstep, and named by the Forest Service on the same page as Electric Lake: Ferron Reservoir, Huntington Reservoir, Joes Valley Reservoir, Cleveland Reservoir, Gooseberry Reservoir and Muddy Creek . And the soil conservation service carries storage stations on Cleveland Lake, Huntington, Miller Flat, Huntington North, Joes Valley and Millsite, all in the same basin as this lake .

Fishing  ·  04

Three species, and the monitoring is private

There is no public fishery report for this lake because the company that owns the dam pays for the monitoring, and it happens every three years.

Cutthroat trout

Mean mercury 0.513 milligrams a kilogram on nine fish, which is higher than any trout figure anywhere in the state's document and 1.71 times the screening value. Six meals a month for the general public, two for women of childbearing age, and none at all for pregnant women or children under six. The Forest Service says this is what you are likely to catch here.

0.513 mg/kg. Do not eat if pregnant

Tiger trout

A brown trout and brook trout hybrid, and the Forest Service says the wildlife division stocks this lake with them. Mean mercury 0.450 on ten fish, 1.50 times the screening value, with the widest range of the three at 0.1 to 0.9. Seven meals a month, two, and one.

0.450 mg/kg. Stocked here

Kokanee salmon

The reason this page can say the advisory covers two species and not three. Ten kokanee were sampled in the same round and came back at 0.194, below the 0.3 screening value, so there is no meal limit on them. No agency source found here says whether they are stocked or self sustaining.

0.194 mg/kg. Under the screening value

Three is the whole evidenced list, and that is not a shortcut. The state's 2021 mercury round put a needle into cutthroat trout, tiger trout and kokanee at this lake and nothing else . The Forest Service names two: "The Department of Wildlife Resources of Utah (DWR) stocks this lake with Tiger Trout. Likely to catch Cutthroat Trout in this lake." . Nothing else could be sourced.

There is no wildlife division fishery monitoring report for Electric Lake, and this page found out why. Four filename variants were tried against the naming convention that resolves for other waters in this series, and all four returned nothing. Then a state restoration project record supplied the explanation, in one sentence: "PacifiCorp funds annual Huntington Creek surveys and triennial Electric Lake fish population monitoring." Monitoring here happens every three years and is paid for by the company that owns the dam, which is exactly what you would expect on a private water and exactly why the public technical report series does not carry it.

So there is no catch rate, no length or weight distribution, no relative weight, no stocking table and no population trend published for this lake. The mercury sampling is the only fish data on this page with numbers in it, and it was collected for a health programme rather than a fisheries one.

Four things were chased and not established, and none is asserted here. Which subspecies the cutthroat are: the lake is in the Colorado River basin so Colorado River cutthroat is the geographically expected answer, but that is inference and no document says it, and the division's brood report returned an error. Whether the lake is a brood or egg take water. Any whirling disease history. And Blue Ribbon status, which is unresolved rather than negative: the division's page names no list and the application holding the list returns nothing . This page makes no Blue Ribbon claim in either direction.

Electric Lake is open to underwater spearfishing, and that is a real and unusual thing about it. But the number most often attached to it is wrong, and this page had to correct its own premise to get here.

The 2026 guidebook's page 19 list is headed "Waterbodies open to spearfishing" and reads, verbatim: "Only the waters listed below are open to underwater spearfishing for game fish year-round." Nine entries follow :

  • 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 underlying rule lists forty two waters, not nine. Utah Administrative Code R657-13-9 runs from paragraph a to paragraph pp, and Electric Lake is paragraph j, with no exception clause attached to it . Most of the other forty one carry one: Deer Creek, East Canyon, Echo, Flaming Gorge, Lake Powell, Pineview, Recapture, Rockport, Starvation and Steinaker are all closed to bass spearfishing from April into June; Fish Lake in Sevier County is closed to all game fish for most of the year; Newcastle is open only for wipers and rainbow trout; the Jordan River is northern pike only.

The two lists reconcile, and the check is worth showing. Take the rule's forty two, keep only the entries with no exception, and collapse the seventeen Uinta lakes into one line as the guidebook does. What is left is exactly the guidebook's nine, plus five waters that qualify on the same test and are missing from the guidebook list for no stated reason: the Jordan River, Quail Creek, Red Fleet, Utah Lake and Utah Lake tributaries .

So the defensible statements are these. Electric Lake is one of forty two waters open to underwater spearfishing in Utah. It is one of a small set open for all game fish, all year, with no seasonal or species exception. And it is the only water in the Emery County and San Rafael drainage on either list, which is the genuinely distinctive one. One caveat on sourcing: the state's own rules site returned an error for this rule, so the forty two waters above rest on a single non agency reproduction , and the guidebook is the agency restatement . Check both before you plan a trip around it.

Electric Lake has no entry of its own in the rules for specific waters. Statewide general limits apply. What the guidebook does govern here is the water below the dam: the Right Fork of Huntington Creek, from Flood and Engineers canyons up to Electric Lake Dam, is limit 2 trout, artificial flies only, and the Left Fork and its tributaries are artificial flies and lures only . That entry was returned word identically by two independent reads. The list of headings around it was not, and three reads gave three different answers, so no page order for it is printed here.
Recreation  ·  05

What to watch for

No incident at this lake could be found, and the one that keeps coming up in search results happened thirty miles downstream at a different reservoir.

No drowning, boating fatality, search and rescue call out, dive recovery or ice incident at Electric Lake could be found, from an agency or from the press.

Read that precisely. It means no reported incident could be found in searchable press. It does not mean none has happened, and it is not a search of the county sheriff's records or of local print archives. A small, high, remote lake with one boat ramp and no campground is exactly the kind of place that generates little coverage either way.

The results that did come back are the reason this section exists. Searches for incidents at this lake return several accounts of a drowning at Huntington State Park, in Emery County, on Huntington Creek. Right county, right drainage, wrong water: Huntington State Park is on Huntington North Reservoir, about thirty miles downstream and 2,700 feet lower . None of those incidents happened here, and a list assembled from search results without opening each one would put them on this page.

Other results checked and rejected: incidents at Utah Lake, Lake Powell, Tibble Fork, a Herriman reservoir, Crane Lake and a Montana ice fishing death. Because no incident was found, no recovery method is reported either, which this page states rather than leaves silent, because the diver against sonar distinction is tracked across this series.

  • This is 8,575 feet. Cold water year round, and the road in tops out higher than the lake .
  • One boat ramp, at the north end, reached from Scofield. The dam end has no boat facilities .
  • No drinking water at the site, and vault toilets only .
  • Part of the shoreline is private. The southern access road is on PacifiCorp land .
  • Two species here carry a fish consumption advisory, with a do not eat instruction for pregnant women and children under six on cutthroat trout .
Mussels are not recorded here. The wildlife division states Utah's confirmed infestation "is currently limited to Lake Powell", and Electric Lake is named nowhere on that page . The statewide rules still apply, and they matter more than usual to anyone moving dive gear between waters: "Boaters are required to stop at all operating AIS inspection stations", and anyone arriving from an infested water within the last thirty days must decontaminate before launching.

Could not be found:

  • Maximum depth, mean depth and shoreline length, from any source.
  • Any fishery monitoring report, at four filename variants that work for other waters. Monitoring here is triennial and privately funded .
  • The cutthroat subspecies, any brood or egg take role, and any whirling disease history.
  • Blue Ribbon status, in either direction .
  • Any impairment listing or assessment unit. The federal assessment interface returned an authorisation error, and the state's report delivers results through an interactive map .
  • Any harmful algal bloom history. The state's bloom page does not name this lake , and the lake's own monitoring page is closed to automated reading.
  • Any motor or horsepower restriction, and anything at all about ice fishing .
  • Any geological mapping specific to this lake.
  • A discharge permit for the power plant this lake supplies.

Pregnant women and children under six are told not to eat the cutthroat trout from this lake at all.

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 Electric Lake

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 Electric Lake. This is a privately owned dam, which means Utah rather than a federal agency inspects it, and the state file is more current than the federal one. The national dam inventory's spillway capacity for this dam is the outlet figure, and no spillway number from that record is used here. The lake is not one of nine Utah waters open to underwater spearfishing, which is how the guidebook page reads: the governing rule lists forty two, and Electric Lake is distinctive instead for being open with no seasonal or species exception and for being the only water in its drainage on either list. No fishery data beyond the mercury sampling appears here, because monitoring at this lake is triennial and privately funded rather than published in the state technical report series. And the storage figure at the top of this page is monthly and is flagged by the service that publishes it as derived rather than observed, because the daily series this lake advertises returns nothing at all. This is a reference for the public and is not a navigation chart.