KENS LAKE
The wrong county, a one letter twin, and a tunnel older than the lake
Five records put this lake in San Juan County and most writing puts it in Grand. Its drainage is three square miles. Its high hazard dam is private, inspected every year, and carries a condition rating from 2012.
Ken's Lake is described nearly everywhere as being near Moab, which is true, and in Grand County, which is not. It is in San Juan County, south of the county line that runs through Spanish Valley.
| Source | County it records |
|---|---|
| The federal names authority | San Juan |
| The national dam inventory | San Juan |
| The soil conservation service's station record | San Juan |
| Utah's fish consumption advisory table, which prints the county in the heading | San Juan |
| Utah's water quality classification rule, in its San Juan County table | San Juan |
It is not a trivia point. County determines which sheriff responds, which health department issues an advisory, and which set of records anyone searching afterwards will look in. Two news outlets covering the same 2023 algal bloom named two different health departments , which is what a county line running through a populated valley does to a record.
The agencies also disagree about the apostrophe. The names authority, the dam inventory and the state water quality rule write Kens Lake . The land manager, the reservoir storage network, the booking service and the state environmental department all write Ken's Lake . This page uses the apostrophe in prose because that is what the public and the land manager use, and the header carries the official form.
A search of the national dam inventory for the string ken in Utah returns twenty structures, and only one of them is this lake .
| What you might find | What it actually is |
|---|---|
| Kent's Lake No. 1 (Upper) and No. 2 (Middle) | Beaver County, on Birch Creek, two hundred and forty miles west. Also privately owned, also rated High hazard, completed 1915 and 1928 |
| Anderson (Kenneth) | Wasatch County, on Lake Creek, an irrigation reservoir from 1900 |
| Eleven Kennecott structures | Salt Lake County. Tailings ponds, retention dams and flood structures around the mine |
Against that, the names authority is unusually clean here: this is the only feature in the entire national gazetteer whose name begins Kens Lake . The confusion is not in the naming system. It is in everything downstream of it.
The dam inventory records a drainage area of three square miles above a reservoir whose normal storage is 2,680 acre feet . Those two numbers cannot both belong to a lake that fills on its own runoff. The same record files the water source as "Mill Creek - Offstream".
Water is taken out of Mill Creek and carried under the ridge through a tunnel. The operating agency's own account :
"The Sheeley Tunnel is named for Horace Sheeley, who according to some, had hoped to supply water through the tunnel and a flume to the area below Blue Hill for farming."
And the federal permission to divert came with a condition. The operating agency writes that the right of way "stipulated that the Diversion in Millcreek maintain a downstream flow of 3 CFS" . There are gauges above and below the tunnel and both are on the live strip at the top of this page . This page prints those readings and asserts nothing about compliance, because no source retrieved here states where that three cubic feet is measured, and the readings are provisional.
Even the tunnel's name is spelled two ways. The operating agency writes Sheeley . The water survey names both of its gauges SHELEY, with one e .
And the creek it takes from is closed. Utah's water rights policy for the Moab vicinity, last updated 18 May 2021, states that the Mill Creek upper watershed drainage is closed to new appropriations of both surface and ground water . That page does not mention this lake, the tunnel or the operating agency by name, so this build does not connect them beyond noting that the source creek is a closed drainage.
What this page does not call it. A diversion that moves water from one creek into a reservoir in another valley invites the phrase trans basin. No agency source retrieved here uses that phrase, or interbasin, for this project, and the federal water body record puts the lake in the same eight digit basin code as its source . So the page says off channel diversion and stops there.
This one is not federal and not a state park facility. It is a private dam under state regulation .
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Owner type | Private, and the inventory does not name the owner |
| Regulator | Utah Division of Water Rights, with state permitting, inspection and enforcement all Yes and federally regulated No |
| Completed | 1981, earth, 95 feet high and 4,050 feet long |
| Hazard potential | High |
| Last inspected | 26 September 2023, on a one year inspection frequency |
| Condition assessment | Satisfactory, dated 1 January 2012 |
This is the third dam in this series with that pattern and the fourth variation on it: one carried a 1991 rating against a 2023 inspection, one carried no rating at all, and this one carries a 2012 rating against annual inspections. Do not read "Satisfactory" as a statement about the dam today. It is a statement about the dam in 2012, sitting in a record that has been updated since.
The lake is named for a person and formally named for him too. The operating agency records that it was named for K.E. McDougald . A non agency account gives the formal name as the K.E. McDougald Reservoir and identifies him as chair of the county water conservancy district and a former mayor of Moab, who died in a plane crash in 1983. No agency source uses that formal name and the names authority does not carry it as a variant , so this page does not print it as the lake's name.
An undated advisory, a bloom that is newspaper reporting, and no depth at all
The state lists largemouth bass at 0.473 and prints no date beside it. A 2023 cyanobacteria bloom is real and is not in the agency record. And no agency has ever published how deep this lake is.
Utah's environmental department lists this lake for largemouth bass . The block is headed with the county, which is the fourth federal or state record to put it in San Juan.
| Species | Mercury | Pregnant women and children | Women of childbearing age | Everyone else |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Largemouth bass | 0.473 | 0 four ounce meals a month | 2 eight ounce meals a month | 6 eight ounce meals a month |
And this block carries no date. The environmental department's page prints a line reading "Fish Consumption Advisory (4/23/18)" above some of its waterbody blocks and not others . Minersville Reservoir and Navajo Lake carry that line. This one is the name and the table, with nothing else. So this page gives the figure and does not give a date, and does not borrow one from another block on the same page. The same thing happens at Currant Creek Reservoir, whose block on the same page is also undated , and an earlier version of that page borrowed a date it should not have.
What the number is not. The column is headed Hg Level and this build did not retrieve a stated unit for it, so no unit is printed here. The figure is 0.473 and it is the environmental department's.
This lake had a cyanobacteria bloom in 2023. That is newspaper reporting, and this page presents it as newspaper reporting, because the agency record does not carry it.
| What the agency published | What the newspaper published |
|---|---|
| A post headed "October 18, 2023: Harmful algal bloom (HAB) monitoring update" | A healthwatch issued 6 September 2023, over 200,000 cells per millilitre, and "Tests for toxicity came back negative" |
| Four dated entries on the lake's own monitoring page, all from 2025, all reporting E. coli below recreational thresholds | Described as "the first incidence of a suspected toxic bloom" at this lake |
So the honest split is this. The state monitored this lake for blooms in 2023 and published an update. A local newspaper reported that a healthwatch was issued and that toxin tests came back negative. The advisory level, the date and the cell count are the newspaper's, not the state's, and two outlets covering it named two different health departments .
What the state does publish here is bacteria, and it is clean. Sampling at the south beach on 29 June, 15 July and 30 September 2025 each reported "E. coli counts were measured below recreational thresholds" . Monitoring closed for the season on 1 November 2025 and was due to resume in June or July 2026. None of this appears on the state's harmful algal blooms index, whose own monitoring table is headed 2018 and does not name this lake .
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 | 1.0806 | 1.0427 | 3.63% |
| Share of its bounding box | 0.606 | 0.554 | 9.4% |
| Area, matched on width | 55.0 acres | 52.1 acres | 5.6% over |
But the polygon computes to 52 acres and the only published surface area is 86 . The polygon also carries a null elevation , so unlike other lakes in this series it cannot be checked against a working pool. A forty percent shortfall and no elevation stamp together say low pool snapshot. So this page does not publish 52 acres as the surface area, and it cannot publish 86 either, because that figure comes from a document with no author and no agency host.
There is no agency bathymetry for this lake at all. No maximum depth, no mean depth and no shoreline length is published by the land manager, the dam inventory, the water survey or the state. The dam inventory leaves its surface area field empty . The only figures in circulation, 70 feet maximum, 33 feet mean, 7,000 feet of shoreline, come from that same unattributed sheet , whose capacity row contradicts itself by a factor of about twenty two between its own metric and imperial columns. A document that cannot keep its own units straight is not a source for a depth.
Utah classifies this lake 2B, 3A with a site specific footnote, and 4 . The relevant one is the first.
| Class | Definition, 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." |
| 3A | "Protected for cold water species of game fish and other cold water aquatic life, including the necessary aquatic organisms in their food chain." The entry carries a footnote reading "Site-specific criteria are associated with this use" |
| 4 | "Protected for agricultural uses including irrigation of crops and stock watering." |
That is not a contradiction and this page is not calling it one. A use classification sets which water quality standards apply; it does not permit or forbid anything a visitor does. It is worth knowing which standard the state is holding this water to, especially at a lake where the state samples a beach for bacteria every summer.
Both the classification and the definitions above are non agency sources and they are chipped as such. Utah's own rules site returns a 404 for the text of this rule and its mirror is closed to automated reading, so this page is quoting a legal publisher reproducing Utah code, not Utah .
Whether this lake is on Utah's impaired waters list could not be determined. The most recent approved integrated report is the 2022 one, approved by the federal environmental agency on 8 March 2022, and its landing page does not name this lake either way. That is unresolved, not clean.
Where everything is
Nine places, three of which are other Utah waters that a search for this one will hand you.
The Bureau of Land Management runs this recreation area, and its own pages do not agree about what you can put on the water.
| Page | What it says, verbatim |
|---|---|
| The campground page | "Electric motors only - gas powered engines are prohibited" |
| The recreation site page | "Boating on the reservoir is limited to non-motorized craft." |
| The group sites page | "limited boating (electric motors only)" |
| The federal booking service | Repeats the electric motors rule |
If you are planning to launch anything with a motor on it, call the Moab Field Office first. That is not a hedge; it is the only thing the published record supports.
No boat ramp is mentioned by any agency source read in this build, on any of the four pages. Do not assume a formal launch exists. Swimming is listed as an activity and the group sites page says swimming is permitted , but no agency names a designated swimming beach and none mentions a lifeguard. The state samples something it calls the south beach for bacteria , which is the closest thing to an official beach in any record found here.
The campground is shut as this page is written. Verbatim from the federal booking service :
"This facility is closed July 6, 2026 to August 28, 2026."
| Published | Value |
|---|---|
| Sites | Forty eight, in two loops. Loop A by reservation, Loop B first come first served |
| Fee | 20 dollars a site a night plus a reservation fee. The two group sites are 125 dollars each |
| Services | No drinking water and no electricity. Vault toilets, gravel pads, fire rings |
| Elevation | 5,085 feet from the land manager , 5,030 feet on the storage station record |
It is not a state park. That was checked against the full Utah roster of forty six rather than against a sub page . The nearest state park to Moab is Dead Horse Point.
Two fish, no rule, and a clean no on Blue Ribbon
One species is named by an agency on an agency page and one is not. The state fishing guidebook does not mention this lake in either of the last two editions.
Largemouth bass
The only species named for this lake by an agency on an agency page. Utah's environmental department lists it on the state fish consumption advisory table at mercury 0.473 . An advisory requires tissue sampling, so it is the hardest species evidence there is.
On the state advisoryRainbow trout
Named by the wildlife division in a regional fishing report that lists this lake among waters stocked with rainbow trout . The text is the division's own and the host is not: it is served from a commercial government mailing service rather than a wildlife division domain, so this page chips it as a non agency source. The same sentence groups this lake with the La Sal Mountain lakes, which it is not one of.
Agency text, non agency hostThat is the whole list, and it is the shortest in this series except for one. Only one species is named for this lake by an agency on an agency domain.
The same sheet records that the lake was chemically treated to control rough fish in 1984 and 1988 and does not say what was treated . No rough fish is drawn, because reasoning from a treatment record to a species is exactly the move this series exists to refuse. The land manager's pages name no species at all , and the booking service says only that fishing is popular .
No wildlife division survey of this lake exists online. Nine addresses were tried across both directories the division actually uses and four of the five filename conventions this series has confirmed working elsewhere. All returned 404. A domain scoped search returned technical reports for eight other Utah waters and nothing for this one. So there is no netting survey behind either fish on this page, and the species list is two long rather than the six or eight a warm water reservoir this size probably holds.
Ken's Lake does not appear in Utah's fishing guidebook. Not in the 2026 edition and not in the 2023 one . Statewide limits apply and nothing else.
The alphabetical test is the one that settles it. The K entries run Jordanelle Reservoir, then Kolob Reservoir, then Kolob Reservoir tributaries, then Lake Canyon Lake . Kens Lake would sort between Jordanelle and Kolob, and there is nothing between them.
One rule nearby that is not this lake's. Kolob Reservoir, the entry that would sit directly after this one if this one existed, carries "Limit 2 trout (must be under 15 inches or over 22 inches)" and "All trout from 15 to 22 inches must be immediately released" . That is a genuine protected slot limit, unlike the rule the previous lake in this series is famous for, and it belongs to Kolob. It does not apply here and nothing does.
This lake is not a Blue Ribbon fishery. Seven pages in this series could not settle that question. This one can, because two wildlife division pages that would name it do not.
The division's Blue Ribbon page describes the programme and its four criteria and prints no list and no count . Its most recent funding release, dated 15 July 2026, states that there are 41 waterbodies including two mountain areas, names four project waters, and does not name this lake .
And nothing here was taken from the division's fishing application. Its Blue Ribbon page points readers at that application for the list . The application was fetched and it is a shell that builds its content in the browser, so the served document contains no waterbody data for any water. A search engine's stored title of that application is not a source, and none was used.
What to watch for
No incident found and a search full of other states, a flash flood that packed the diversion with mud, and a lake that has lost nearly three quarters of its water and freezes hard enough to skate on.
No drowning, boating fatality, vehicle in the water, submerged debris recovery, dive operation or search and rescue callout at this lake was found in any source, agency or press.
Closer to home the problem is worse rather than better. Moab sits between the Colorado River, Lake Powell and a national park, and any search for a water incident near Moab returns those first. The publishable sentence is "no incident found", and it is not "nothing has happened here".
Two gaps in this build, stated rather than hidden. The San Juan County sheriff's own incident records were not queried directly, and neither were Utah's public safety records. And no source states which agency has primary water rescue jurisdiction at this lake, which matters more than usual here because the lake and its land manager are in different counties.
The gauge above the tunnel has been running since 1 October 1954 . In late July 2022 it did this:
| Date | Cubic feet a second |
|---|---|
| 25 July 2022 | 5.35 |
| 26 July 2022 | 57.3 |
| 27 July 2022 | 6.41 |
Roughly eleven times baseline, and back down inside a day . That is what a desert flash flood looks like in a gauge record.
Sediment is the hazard this lake actually has. Not a documented incident history, which does not exist, but a diversion fed reservoir at the bottom of a flash flood catchment. For anyone planning to be under the surface here, that is a visibility problem and a footing problem, and it arrives with the weather rather than on a schedule.
One figure this page will not print as fact. The same report gives a record maximum stream height for the upper Mill Creek gauge. The water survey's peak flow endpoint is closed to automated reading, so that figure could not be checked against the agency record and it is left out.
Storage is published monthly and the direction is one way .
| Month | Acre feet |
|---|---|
| June 2024 | 2,522, the highest in the recent record |
| March 2026 | 960 |
| July 2026 | 674 |
From 2,522 acre feet to 674 in twenty five months, a loss of about 73 percent .
The two March 2026 figures do not match either: the operating agency says 893 and the federal storage record says 960 . Both are printed.
And it freezes hard. A local paper's 2022 review carries a photograph captioned "A group played hockey on Ken's Lake" . No agency publishes ice thickness, an ice safety notice or a winter closure for this water, and none is offered here. A shallow desert reservoir at 5,000 feet that draws down through the summer and freezes in the winter is a lake whose surface and whose bottom both move.
No agency has ever published how deep this lake is, how much shoreline it has, or what lives in it beyond one fish.
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 Kens LakeEvery figure on this page is quoted from the source named beside it.
Sources
How these were checked
Numbered sources are agencies. Lettered sources carry more weight on this page than on any other in this series, and that is the point of separating them. One is a legal publisher reproducing Utah code, used because the state's own rules site returns an error. One is the wildlife division's own writing on a commercial mailing host, which is why the second fish is chipped rather than flagged. One is an unsigned, undated data sheet that is the only document in existence giving this lake a depth, and it contradicts itself by a factor of about twenty two in its own capacity row. One is a local newspaper, and it is the only source for the 2023 bloom. Where sources disagree, all of them are printed: that happens over the county, over the boating rule, over the distance from Moab, over the elevation, over the surface area, over the storage on a single day in March 2026 and over the spelling of both the lake and the tunnel. One method note is specific to this page. The state advisory table prints a dated line above some waterbody blocks and not others. This lake's block carries no date, so this page prints none, and does not borrow one from a block further down the same page.National Inventory of Dams, federal identifier UT00393, Kens Lake. County San Juan, owner type Private, state regulated Yes by the Utah Division of Water Rights, federally regulated No, completed 1981, height 95 feet, length 4,050 feet, maximum storage 3,360 acre feet, normal storage 2,680, drainage area 3 square miles, surface area field empty, hazard potential High, condition assessment Satisfactory dated 1 January 2012, last inspected 26 September 2023, inspection frequency one year. The river field reads "Mill Creek - Offstream"
National Inventory of Dams, every Utah structure whose name contains the string ken. Twenty records, of which one is this lake. The set includes Kent's Lake No. 1 and No. 2 in Beaver County and a reservoir filed as Anderson (Kenneth) in Wasatch County
Geographic Names Information System, feature 1434695. The official federal form is "Kens Lake" with no apostrophe, feature class Reservoir, county San Juan. It is the only feature in the national gazetteer whose name begins Kens Lake
National Hydrography Dataset, Kens Lake, permanent identifier 77853731, published at 0.2110 square kilometres with a null elevation and reach code 14030005006113
Ken's Lake storage, station 09UTKENS:UT:BOR, county San Juan, elevation 5,030 feet, record beginning 1 October 1980. It advertises daily, semimonthly and monthly and only monthly returns anything. The monthly series is flagged derived rather than observed
Mill Creek at Sheley Tunnel, near Moab, site 09183500. Daily discharge since 1 October 1954, still reporting, at elevation 5,403.62 feet. On 26 July 2022 the daily record runs 5.35 then 57.3 cubic feet a second
Mill Creek below Sheley Tunnel, near Moab, site 09183600. Daily discharge since 1 October 2003 and water temperature since 20 June 2014
Ken's Lake, from the agency that operates it. Names the Sheeley Tunnel and Horace Sheeley, records that the federal right of way stipulated the Mill Creek diversion maintain a downstream flow of 3 cubic feet a second, gives 893 acre feet in storage at 34 percent on 18 March 2026, and states the lake was named for K.E. McDougald
Utah fish consumption advisories. The block for this water is headed "Ken's Lake (San Juan County)" and carries largemouth bass at 0.473 with three meal limits. Unlike some other blocks on the same page it carries no date line
Game and fish advisories. Twelve Utah waters from a 2022 mercury analysis, and this lake is not among them
Ken's Lake recreational water quality monitoring. Four dated entries, all from 2025, all reporting E. coli below recreational thresholds at the south beach, and a seasonal close on 1 November 2025. No advisory of any level appears on the page
Everything the environmental department has tagged to this lake, including a post headed "October 18, 2023: Harmful algal bloom (HAB) monitoring update"
Harmful algal blooms. The statewide index, whose monitoring table is headed 2018 and which does not name this lake at all
2026 Utah Fishing Guidebook. Rules for Specific Waters begins on page 28 and this lake appears nowhere in the document. The K entries run Kolob Reservoir and Kolob Reservoir tributaries
2023 Utah Fishing Guidebook. The same absence, three years earlier
Ken's Lake Campground. Boating "Electric motors only - gas powered engines are prohibited", 20 dollars a site a night, elevation 5,085 feet, no drinking water and no electricity, and the site described as both ten miles and approximately eight miles south of Moab on the same page
Ken's Lake Recreation Site. States that "Boating on the reservoir is limited to non-motorized craft"
Ken's Lake Campground, federal recreation site 10040993. Forty eight sites in two loops, and a seasonal closure reading "This facility is closed July 6, 2026 to August 28, 2026". It repeats the electric motors rule and names no county
Ken's Lake Group Sites. A separate facility, two sites at 125 dollars each, swimming permitted, and boating described a third way as "limited boating (electric motors only)"
Blue Ribbon fisheries. The programme and its four criteria, no list and no count, and no mention of this lake
Blue Ribbon fisheries programme allocates over 446 thousand dollars, 15 July 2026. States that there are currently 41 waterbodies including two mountain areas, names four project waters, and does not name this lake
Utah state parks. The full roster runs to forty six and this lake is not on it. The nearest state park to Moab is Dead Horse Point
Water rights policy for Area 05, the Moab vicinity, last updated 18 May 2021. States that the Mill Creek upper watershed drainage is closed to new appropriations of surface and ground water. It does not mention this lake, the tunnel or the operating agency by name
Point forecast over the lake. Forecast office Grand Junction
Utah Administrative Code R317-2-13 and R317-2-6. Kens Lake is classified 2B, 3A with a site specific footnote, and 4, in the San Juan County lakes and reservoirs table, and the class definitions are quoted from the use designations section
Southeastern Region fishing report, 7 July 2017. Names this lake in a list of waters stocked with rainbow trout. The text is the wildlife division's own, but it is served from a commercial government mailing host rather than a wildlife division domain, so this build does not treat it as an agency page
An undated data sheet headed KENS LAKE, with no author, no letterhead and no agency host. Publishes 86 acres, 70 feet maximum depth, 33 feet mean depth and 7,000 feet of shoreline, and a capacity row whose metric and imperial columns disagree by a factor of about twenty two
First known cyanobacteria bloom in Ken's Lake detected this summer, 14 September 2023. Reports a healthwatch issued 6 September 2023 by the Southeast Utah Health Department, over 200,000 cells per millilitre in the sample tested for species, and toxicity tests returning negative
What the two flow cards do and do not tell you
This lake is filled by a diversion, and the water survey happens to gauge Mill Creek on both sides of it. That is unusual and it is why this page has two flow cards instead of one.
Site 09183500, Mill Creek at Sheley Tunnel. Above the diversion, at elevation 5,403.62 feet, with daily discharge since 1 October 1954 .
Site 09183600, Mill Creek below Sheley Tunnel. Below the diversion, daily discharge since 1 October 2003 and water temperature since 20 June 2014 .
The difference between them is not the diversion. It is the difference between two gauges on a creek, and a creek gains and loses water between any two points for reasons that have nothing to do with a tunnel. Neither gauge measures what goes into the lake, and this build found no public gauge that does.
Why the downstream number is worth looking at anyway. The agency that operates the reservoir writes that the federal right of way "stipulated that the Diversion in Millcreek maintain a downstream flow of 3 CFS" . This page does not assert that the condition is met or missed at any reading, because no source retrieved here states where that flow is to be measured, and the instantaneous values on these cards are provisional.
The storage card reads the monthly series and has no choice . Station 09UTKENS advertises daily, semimonthly and monthly reservoir contents and returns an empty array for daily and for semimonthly. A control station elsewhere in Utah does the same on the identical query, so that is the network and not this lake. The monthly series is also flagged derived rather than observed.
And there is no percentage card. Three percentages full are in circulation for this lake and they imply three different full pools: 2,626 acre feet from the operating agency's own 893 at 34 percent , about 2,053 from a local report, and 2,680 from the dam inventory's normal storage . The acre feet are the number; the percentage is not.