JOES VALLEY
Two agencies, two creeks, one dam
Reclamation and the dam inventory both say this dam impounds Seely Creek. The names system, the water survey and the watershed file all say Seely Creek stops at the west arm and Cottonwood Creek runs through. Nobody argues about Straight Canyon.
Almost everything written about this reservoir says the dam is on Cottonwood Creek. Reclamation's own facility record does not. Its watercourse field reads Seely Creek , and the national dam inventory's watercourse field reads Seely Creek too .
Three other federal records put Seely Creek somewhere else entirely.
- The geographic names system files Seely Creek in Sanpete County, with its mouth inside this reservoir's west arm and its source twelve kilometres west. It is a tributary that ends here .
- The water survey names its site above the reservoir "Seely Creek at Joes Valley Reservoir" and its site immediately below the dam "Cottonwood Creek below Joes Valley Reservoir" . The stream that comes out of the dam is Cottonwood Creek.
- The watershed boundary file has a Seely Creek unit that drains into the unit the reservoir sits in .
There is an obvious way the two could be reconciled, and it is not published as fact anywhere: the confluence of the two creeks would have been on dry valley floor before 1966, and the names system now puts Seely Creek's mouth inside the pool. That is a guess about how two record sets came apart, not a finding, and no source states it.
Whichever creek it is, this dam sits on it. The previous page in this series, Huntington North, was proved off channel on exactly these four tests, and Joes Valley fails them in the opposite direction.
| Test | Joes Valley | Huntington North |
|---|---|---|
| The dam inventory's watercourse field | Seely Creek, a named stream | "Huntington Creek - Offstream" |
| The hydrography dataset's network flag | On network | Off network |
| Reclamation's own sentence | water is released from storage onto a natural stream | water is released from a ditch into the reservoir |
| Drainage area at the dam | 135 to 146 square miles | 2.3 square miles |
The national dam inventory records the owner type for Joes Valley as Local Government, the regulator as the Utah Division of Water Rights, and federally regulated dam: No . Reclamation's own facility page still lists the owner as its Provo Area Office .
The document that explains the gap is a Reclamation transfer of title agreement , executed under the Title Transfer Act. What it moves, verbatim:
"the Joe's Valley Dam, Reservoir and outlet works, the Huntington North Dam, Dikes, Reservoir and outlet works, the Swasey Diversion Dam, the Cottonwood Creek and Huntington Canal..."
So the water is under one agency, the dam under another body entirely, and the recreation stays with a third. That is why the boat ramps on this page are Forest Service and the storage number is Reclamation's.
The authorising act is worth naming because it is not the one you would expect for a small Emery County reservoir: the Colorado River Storage Project Act of 11 April 1956 . Construction commenced 20 June 1963 and was substantially complete in 1966 . No contractor name was found in any Reclamation document.
| Measure | Reclamation | The dam inventory |
|---|---|---|
| Structural height | 192 ft | 192 |
| Hydraulic height | 180.4 ft | 180 |
| Crest length | 750 ft at elevation 7,004 | 750 |
| Volume of fill | 1,290,000 cubic yards | Empty |
| Capacity | 62,460 acre feet, total | 61,538 normal, 74,237 maximum, headline storage field empty |
| Surface area | 1,170 acres | Empty |
Those two capacity figures are not in conflict. The inventory defines normal storage as everything below the normal retention level and maximum storage as everything below the highest attainable water surface, so 61,538 and 74,237 are the same reservoir measured to two different lines . Reclamation's 62,460 sits about nine hundred acre feet above the normal figure and does not say which line it uses.
And Reclamation publishes its coordinate to twelve and fourteen decimal places . That is the fourth lake in a row where it has done this.
Two absences worth stating. The reservoir is 1,170 acres by Reclamation, 1,192 by the Forest Service and 1,193 by the hydrography polygon . But no agency publishes a maximum depth or a mean depth for this reservoir at all. The hydraulic height of 180.4 feet is a dam dimension, the drop from maximum design water level to the lowest point of the original streambed, and turning it into a lake depth would be wrong. Dividing capacity by area gives a mean of about 53 feet at full pool, which is this page's arithmetic on two Reclamation numbers and not a measurement anyone took.
A reservoir in a fault trough
The fault zone comes within a hundred and twenty metres of the dam, no faults were found in its foundation, and Reclamation named a seiche as a hazard. All three of those are from the same report.
The shape in the header is traced from the Fathom print artwork. Checked against the federal outline , it splits: the proportions are very good and the area is not.
| Measure | Traced | Federal | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Width against length | 0.3774 | 0.3703 | 1.91% |
| Share of its bounding box | 0.461 | 0.416 | 10.8% |
| Area, matched on width | 1,301.6 acres | 1,197.2 acres | 8.7% over |
| Area, matched on length | 1,351.9 acres | 1,197.2 acres | 12.9% over |
Long axis 3.49 miles, width 1.29 miles, both derived from the federal polygon. This is the second longest lake in this series relative to its width. The reason is in the next panel: it is not a drowned canyon, it is a drowned graben.
Joes Valley Reservoir fills the floor of the Joes Valley graben, a north trending, fault bounded trough cut into the eastern Wasatch Plateau. Note the province: this is the Colorado Plateaus, not the Basin and Range, and all four fault entries below say so independently .
The state and federal surveys jointly catalogue four Quaternary fault structures under the Joes Valley name: the west fault (2453), the intragraben faults (2454), the east fault (2455) and the southern zone. The east fault's Straight Canyon section, which is the section at the dam, is described as "a steep linear escarpment in bedrock and unconsolidated deposits with up to 900 meters of total throw" .
"the Joes Valley fault zone approaches within 0.12 km of Joes Valley Dam" . A hundred and twenty metres. The dam crest is 229 metres long, so the fault zone is about half a dam away.
"No faults were observed in the dam foundation during construction." That is a direct observation of this structure, made while it was being built.
And this is the sentence almost nobody has read. Asked what could go wrong, Reclamation's engineering geologists wrote :
"Potential hazards to Joes Valley Dam associated with the MCE's on the Joes Valley faults include slope instability in the vicinity of the dam and surface faulting in the reservoir with resultant seiches on the water surface."
A seiche is a standing wave. Reclamation identified the possibility of a fault rupturing underneath the reservoir and setting the whole body of water rocking. That is an agency statement about this water and it is forty years old.
What this page will not do with any of it. The fault zone is assigned a maximum credible earthquake of surface wave magnitude 7.5 . That is a design input, not a prediction and not a probability, and it is not the same thing as saying a magnitude 7.5 earthquake is expected. Nor are the survey's slip rates and the 900 metres of throw statements about the dam: they characterise a fault zone in a 1999 compilation. The only agency statements about hazard at this dam are the ones quoted above, and they are from 1987.
Utah's codified water quality rule puts Joes Valley Reservoir at 2A, 3A, 4, in a six row Emery County table . This time there are two independent reproductions and they agree on all six rows in the same order, which is better than the previous two pages in this series managed.
| Water | Classes | |
|---|---|---|
| Cleveland Reservoir | 2B, 3A, 4 | |
| Electric Lake | 2B, 3A, 4 | Carries a mercury advisory |
| Huntington Reservoir | 2B, 3A, 4 | The Sanpete one, filed in the Emery table |
| Huntington North Reservoir | 2A, 3B, 4 | The only 3B, warm water, in the table |
| Joes Valley Reservoir | 2A, 3A, 4 | Swimming tier, cold water fish |
| Millsite Reservoir | 1C, 2A, 3A, 4 | The only one with a drinking water class |
The same layer also gives the reservoir an area of 1,051 acres, which is 142 acres smaller than the hydrography polygon. An assessment unit boundary is not a lake boundary, and nobody should read that number as a surface area.
The rest of the water quality picture is short. No approved total maximum daily load names this water . It is not among the twenty five waters on the state's harmful algal bloom monitoring list, and no Emery County water is . The impairment listing status was not established and this page therefore says nothing about it. The fish advisory is a different story and it is in the fishing section.
Reservoir contents come from soil conservation service station 09323900:UT:BOR, at 6,990 feet . It serves daily, semimonthly and monthly, and daily is the only one flagged not derived, so it is the only one that is observed rather than computed. That is what the card above reads.
The record starts on 20 November 1965 , which is before the dam was substantially complete in 1966 . Storage records that begin during final construction are not unusual and no source explains this one. The same pattern turned up at Causey, whose monthly record starts a month before its dam was finished.
There is no flow card because every flow record here is dead. Cottonwood Creek near Orangeville, site 09324500, draining 208 square miles, published daily discharge and stopped on 15 November 1984 . Nothing continuous has replaced it. The water leaving this dam has not been measured for forty two years.
And the Forest Service says 6,960 , thirty feet below all three, on its own page for this reservoir, while its own pages for the marina, both boat ramps and both campgrounds all say 7,000. Those are shoreside sites that sit above the water, so 7,000 is a rounded site elevation and not a conflict. The 6,960 is.
Reclamation's own elevations, which are precise and consistent: spillway and outlet works at 6,989.7 feet, maximum water surface 6,997.4, dam crest 7,004 . That is 7.7 feet of surcharge above the reference elevation and another 6.6 feet of freeboard to the crest.
Where everything is
Nine places, one of them the same dam twice, and none of them a boulder field, because no agency publishes where those are.
Three bodies have a role here and they do not overlap. The Emery Water Conservancy District holds the dam and outlet works . Reclamation built it and still publishes its data . The Forest Service runs everything a visitor touches, through the Ferron Ranger District of the Manti-La Sal National Forest .
That division is not inferred. Reclamation's transfer agreement writes it down, preserving "Forest Service jurisdiction and use of the Joe's Valley Reservoir for recreation and fish and wildlife purposes" .
No agency source states that this reservoir freezes, supports ice fishing, or carries any ice safety guidance. Ice fishing here is widely described in non agency writing and the Forest Service gives a May season of use, which implies a winter but does not describe one. At almost seven thousand feet this is a cold water reservoir, and the absence of agency ice guidance is worth knowing before anyone walks out on it.
Joes Valley is an internationally known bouldering destination. The question worth asking is not whether climbers come. It is whether an agency has had to manage the crowd, and the answer is that two have, in two jurisdictions.
The Forest Service page reads like a climbing guide, which is not how forest recreation pages read : "the rock is textured but skin-friendly, it's featured yet strong, and the landings are generally fantastic." It names five zones by the names climbers gave them, Trent's Mom, Big Joe, Eden Zone, Hillside/Hulk and Riverside, and states that "Workers have recently put in a bathroom, and worked on access trails and landing zones in both Straight Canyon and Cottonwood Canyon."
And the land management bureau, whose ground abuts, sought public comment on a Joe's Valley bouldering plan citing "undesignated trails and campsites, soil erosion, and human waste issues" . Two federal agencies, two management responses, one boulder field.
No pin on the map above is a boulder field, and that is deliberate. The Forest Service names five climbing zones and publishes a coordinate for none of them. Every pin on this page is a bare decimal coordinate that came from an agency, so a boulder field pin would have to be invented, and it is not. The rock is sandstone, which the Forest Service does say .
Joes Valley is not open to underwater spearfishing. Utah's rule lists forty two waters, lettered (a) through (pp), and says those are the only waters open for game or nongame fish, carp excepted . Joes Valley is not among them, and it is not on the guidebook's page 19 list either .
The neighbouring page is worth the comparison: Huntington North is not in the zoned waters rule either, but the rule does contain a section reading "Huntington Reservoir" with no county attached, which almost certainly belongs to a different lake. Joes Valley has no such ambiguity, because nothing in the rule mentions it at all.
No diving rule specific to this water was found in any source. Not in the zoned waters rule, not in the spearfishing rule, not on any Forest Service page. This page states that as an absence: it does not mean diving is permitted and it does not mean it is prohibited.
Four species, two of them on a mercury advisory
The advisory is on a state list that most searches do not return, and finding it here forced a correction to a page published two lakes ago.
Splake
On the state's fish advisory for mercury, which is how this page knows it is here: an advisory takes tissue sampling . The Forest Service names it too and volunteers the definition, "hybrid between Brook and Lake Trout", and adds that "Trophy splake have reached 16 pounds" .
On the mercury advisoryTiger muskie
The other species on the mercury advisory , and a genuinely odd fish to find in a cold reservoir at seven thousand feet. Three federal and state sources name it and none contradicts. Do not confuse it with the tiger trout beside it: both are here and they are not related.
On the mercury advisoryTiger trout
Here because the wildlife division records a state catch and release record from this water: 31.5 inches, caught 30 December, released . A December record is its own small piece of evidence about what this reservoir is like in winter.
State record, 31.5 inchesCutthroat trout
Named by the Forest Service, and by nobody else . No subspecies is drawn or named, because no agency source names one for this water. The division plainly does track them, distinguishing Bonneville from Colorado River in its own record list. It has just not been found doing it here.
Forest Service onlyUtah's environmental quality department publishes a fish advisories page. Entry thirteen reads, verbatim :
"Joe's Valley Reservoir - Splake Trout, Tiger Muskie (Mercury)"
This mattered beyond this page. Working from the twelve water list alone, the Causey page in this series was published saying that reservoir has no fish consumption advisory. The longer list names Causey for brown trout. That page has been corrected.
What this page will not print is the meal limits. The dedicated advisory page for this reservoir is closed to automated reading, so the numbers behind the listing could not be obtained, and the health department's June 2023 update does not carry this water under either spelling of its name. The publishable statement is that an advisory exists, that it names splake and tiger muskie, that the contaminant is mercury, and that anyone who wants the limits should go to the department directly .
The 2026 guidebook's entire water specific regulation for Joes Valley Reservoir is one line :
"Limit 1 trout over 18 inches (goes toward the statewide trout limit)."
And no agency states what it is for. Not the guidebook, not a division news release, not a management plan. The obvious reading, that it protects large splake and tiger trout in a trophy fishery, is an inference, and it is not presented here as agency reasoning.
An older version of the guidebook carries different wording for the same water, which is why this page cites the year. The entry was checked four ways, including a question phrased so that "no" was the easy answer, and it survives.
Rainbow, brown, brook and lake trout are not drawn on this page. No agency names any of them in this water. Splake are a brook by lake trout hybrid, and the presence of a hybrid is not evidence that either parent is here.
Two further absences. No fishery monitoring report for this reservoir was found, and this time the search was exhaustive: ten filename forms were tried against the division's own server, covering underscores, a literal space before the year, hyphens, with and without the word reservoir, three years and both document formats. Every one returned nothing, while the same attack found real files for other waters, so the server is not the problem. And Blue Ribbon status is unresolved: the division states a count of designated waters and does not print the list . Unresolved is the honest answer.
What to watch for
Nothing found in searchable press, a forty year old agency sentence about standing waves, and an advisory on two of the four fish.
No incident of any kind at Joes Valley Reservoir was found in searchable press. No drowning, no missing person, no body recovery, no vehicle in the water, no boating fatality, no through the ice incident, and no dive operation.
That is a weaker statement than it looks and this page will not strengthen it. Six searches were run under both spellings of the name. Every result was either content about this reservoir that is not about an incident, or an incident at a different water entirely.
The state's own boating accident report was checked and returned nothing, and that check does not count: the document has no machine readable text, so a negative from it is a negative from a document that could not be read. It is not cited here as evidence.
The publishable sentence is "no incident found in searchable press." It is not "nothing has happened here", and no agency incident record, sheriff's log or dive team report for this reservoir was located.
The one hazard statement about this water that comes from an agency is forty years old and it is in a Reclamation seismotectonic report written specifically for this dam . Verbatim:
"Potential hazards to Joes Valley Dam associated with the MCE's on the Joes Valley faults include slope instability in the vicinity of the dam and surface faulting in the reservoir with resultant seiches on the water surface."
The same report says no faults were observed in the dam foundation during construction . Both sentences are true and both are on this page, because either one alone gives a false impression.
What is not known. The peak horizontal acceleration for this dam site is not stated in the text retrieved, and no current dam safety condition assessment for Joes Valley was obtained. The 1987 study is the most recent agency assessment of seismic hazard at this structure that this page could find, which is itself worth knowing.
There is a mercury advisory on two species here, splake and tiger muskie . Both are drawn above and both are flagged.
The limits are not on this page because the department's own page carrying them could not be read. Anyone planning to eat fish from this reservoir should get the numbers from the department .
The neighbours are on the same list. Electric Lake carries one for cutthroat and tiger trout. Millsite Reservoir, the other Emery County water in the same classification table, carries one for splake, the same species as here . Three Emery County reservoirs, three mercury advisories, and no agency document found explains the pattern.
Reclamation named the hazard here in 1987. Almost nobody has read the sentence since.
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 Joes ValleyEvery 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 all four of them are reproductions of Utah rules that the state's own rules site returns errors for. The water classification on this page has two independent reproductions that agree, which the previous two pages in this series could not manage. Where agencies disagree, all of them are printed: that happens over which creek the dam impounds, where the dam is, how big the reservoir is, how high the water sits, how much it holds, how much land drains to it, who owns the dam, and what the water is classified for. One finding here corrected a page published two lakes earlier, because the fish advisory list that names this reservoir also names Causey, and the Causey page had been built from a shorter list that does not.Joes Valley Dam data. Watercourse field reads Seely Creek. Structural height 192 feet, hydraulic height 180.4, crest 750 feet at elevation 7,004, 1,290,000 cubic yards, capacity 62,460 acre feet, surface area 1,170 acres, drainage area 135 square miles, built 1963 to 1966
Emery County Project. Construction commenced 20 June 1963, irrigation facilities transferred for operation on 1 January 1970, and the sentence about water released from storage flowing on Seely Creek to Cottonwood Creek
Transfer of title agreement, Emery County Project. The dam and outlet works pass in fee to the Emery Water Conservancy District, the reservoir passes by Forest Service easement, and Forest Service jurisdiction over recreation is expressly preserved. Authorising act the Colorado River Storage Project Act of 11 April 1956
National Inventory of Dams, Joes Valley, federal identifier UT10124. Owner type Local Government, federally regulated dam No, regulator the Utah Division of Water Rights, watercourse Seely Creek, drainage area 144 square miles, normal storage 61,538 acre feet and maximum storage 74,237
National Hydrography Dataset, Joes Valley Reservoir, GNIS 01442164, reach code 14060009001013, published at 4.828 square kilometres, elevation 2,130.6 metres, and flagged on the surface water network
Geographic Names Information System. Joes Valley Reservoir is feature 1442164 in Emery County. Seely Creek is feature 1445422, filed in Sanpete County, with its mouth inside this reservoir's west arm. Cottonwood Creek is feature 1440015, rising north of the reservoir and running on downstream
Watershed boundary dataset. The reservoir sits in unit 140600090205, Straight Canyon. The Seely Creek unit, 140600090203, drains into it
Joes Valley Reservoir storage, station 09323900:UT:BOR, at 6,990 feet in Emery County. Daily reservoir contents, the only duration here flagged not derived
Water survey sites at and below the reservoir. Cottonwood Creek below Joes Valley Reservoir, Seely Creek at Joes Valley Reservoir, and the reservoir site 09323900 itself, which gives a drainage area of 146.00 square miles
Cottonwood Creek near Orangeville, site 09324500, draining 208 square miles. Daily discharge ended on 15 November 1984
Seismotectonic study for Joes Valley, Scofield and Huntington North Dams, report 86-7, by Lucy L. Foley, Richard A. Martin Jr. and J. Timothy Sullivan, approved 10 February 1987. The fault zone approaches within 0.12 kilometres of the dam, is assigned a maximum credible earthquake of surface wave magnitude 7.5, no faults were observed in the dam foundation during construction, and the named hazards include surface faulting in the reservoir with resultant seiches
Quaternary active fault database, structure 2455, Joes Valley fault zone east fault. The Straight Canyon section is a steep linear escarpment in bedrock and unconsolidated deposits with up to 900 metres of total throw, compiled October 1999
Quaternary active fault database, structure 2453, Joes Valley fault zone west fault, a normal fault bounding the west side of the northern Joes Valley graben
Quaternary active fault database, structure 2454, the Joes Valley intragraben faults
Utah fish consumption advisories. Roughly fifty water and species entries, dated 4/23/18, including the line "Joe's Valley Reservoir - Splake Trout, Tiger Muskie (Mercury)"
Game and fish advisories. Twelve Utah waters from a 2022 mercury analysis, and no Joes Valley entry. The page itself points readers to the environmental department for the current list
Harmful algal blooms. Twenty five Utah waters are monitored and no Emery County water is among them
Approved total maximum daily loads. No Joes Valley entry
Assessment units. The reservoir is unit UT-L-14060009-017, and the beneficial class string in this dataset reads 2A, 2B, 3A, 4, which is not what the codified rule says
2026 Utah Fishing Guidebook. The Joes Valley Reservoir entry carries one rule, and no Joes Valley water appears on the page 19 spearfishing list
Eleven new Utah fishing records set in 2022. A 31.5 inch tiger trout at Joes Valley Reservoir, caught 30 December and released
Joes Valley Reservoir recreation site. Splake described as a hybrid between brook and lake trout, trophy splake to sixteen pounds, muskie tiger, tiger trout and cutthroat trout named, stocking managed by the wildlife division, and an elevation thirty feet below what three other agencies publish
Joes Valley bouldering. The world's premier bouldering destinations, sandstone boulders, work done on access trails and landing zones in Straight Canyon and Cottonwood Canyon, and five climbing zones named by their climber given names
Proposed projects archive. Bouldering and camping at Joe's Valley have contributed to recreation resource impacts throughout the area
Public comment sought on the Joe's Valley bouldering plan. Undesignated trails and campsites, soil erosion, and human waste issues
Joes Valley boat ramps, campground and group site, with published coordinates and site elevations
Point forecast for the reservoir. Forecast office Salt Lake City
Utah Administrative Code R317-2-13, classification of waters. The Emery County table, in which Joes Valley Reservoir reads 2A, 3A, 4
Utah Administrative Code R317-2-13, a second and independently hosted reproduction of the same table, giving the same six rows in the same order and citing the subsection as R317-2-13.12h
Utah Administrative Code R657-13-9, underwater spearfishing. Forty two waters, running a to pp, and no Joes Valley among them
Utah Administrative Code R650-205, the zoned waters rule. Eighteen sections and no Joes Valley section
Four numbers are published for this reservoir's capacity
The percentage on the card divides by 62,460 acre feet, which is what Reclamation calls total capacity on both its facility page and its project page .
The dam inventory publishes two different numbers and they are not in conflict with each other. Normal storage 61,538 acre feet is everything below the normal retention level. Maximum storage 74,237 is everything below the highest attainable water surface, including surcharge. Its own headline storage field is empty .
A fourth figure, 54,920 acre feet, circulates widely and matches no agency record. It is roughly seven and a half thousand acre feet below Reclamation's figure and six and a half thousand below the dam inventory's normal storage. It does not appear on this page.
The storage reading itself comes from station 09323900:UT:BOR , which serves daily, semimonthly and monthly. Only the daily series is flagged as observed rather than computed, so that is the one the card reads.
There is no flow card. Not because a service failed, but because there is no gauge. Cottonwood Creek near Orangeville, site 09324500, draining 208 square miles, published daily discharge and stopped on 15 November 1984 .