LOST CREEK

The shape at the top of this page was traced by hand for a print, then measured against the USGS water body polygon 6 on its own coordinates, converted from web map metres to true metres by the cosine of the latitude. It is the best agreement in the whole series.

It is also the branchiest shape in the series. The water fills only fifteen percent of its own bounding box, against 22 percent for East Canyon and 15 to 30 percent for most of the rest. That is what a drowned canyon with two arms looks like from above: the federal extent is 2.07 miles long and 1.78 wide, but almost none of that rectangle is water.

Traced from OpenStreetMap geometry under the Open Database License, and that credit travels with any public use of the shape. Published surface areas: 365 acres from Reclamation and the dam inventory 1 4, 360 from the federal polygon 6, and 360 again from the federal recreation page 24. No maximum depth, mean depth or shoreline length is published by anyone. Hydraulic height at the dam is not a reservoir depth and is not printed as one here.

Utah classifies every named water body for the uses it is protected for. In the Morgan County table, two reservoirs sit next to each other and they are not classified the same way.

The other three classes are identical. 1C is protection for domestic water use after treatment. 3A is cold water game fish and the organisms they need. 4 is agricultural use 13.

What this does not mean. 2B is a protection tier, not a prohibition. Utah State Parks describes this reservoir as historically drawing people for "paddling, fishing, swimming, and camping in a peaceful, wakeless setting" 22. People swim here. The classification sets the water quality standard the state has to protect, and 2B is the lower of the two recreation tiers.

Neither reproduction carried an effective date on the retrieved text, and neither contained a stream level entry for Lost Creek itself, only the reservoir 13 A.

Most pages in this series carry a list of things a reservoir is under. This one mostly carries the opposite, and every item below was checked rather than assumed.

The absence of a load allocation is not the same as an absence of a problem, and the honest version is that no current impairment status for this water could be established at all. What is on the record is one algal bloom observation, in the next section.

The state runs recreational monitoring at this reservoir through the summer and publishes the results by sampling date 15. The page confirms the water it means: "Lost Creek Reservoir is approximately 10 miles northeast of Croydon in Morgan County."

Sampling sites named on that page are the state park boat ramp, the southeast shore 400 metres from the dam crossing, the southwest shore nearest the spillway, and the southeast and southwest shores. No 2025 or 2026 results could be retrieved, only a note that monitoring ended for the season on 1 November 2025, and the older departmental page that might hold earlier history is closed to automated reading. Monitoring stops for the winter, and the absence of a posting in December is not a statement that the water is clear.

The reservoir card at the top of this page reads 10132490. So does a USGS lake site. Same number, same water, two different records, and only one of them is alive.

The active record publishes three durations, and all three return data in three different shapes with three different start dates 7:

Code written for the daily shape and pointed at either of the others matches nothing, gets an empty list, and reports a timeout that never happened. That failure was live on two other pages in this series before it was found, and the card at the top of this page reads the daily duration and checks for a date key before it trusts a row.

The creek gauges are older than almost anything else here. Below the dam, 10132500 has recorded discharge since 1 February 1921, forty five years before the dam 8. At the mouth, 10133000 goes back to 1 February 1905 and holds only 5,339 daily values in 121 years, so it is long and very broken 11. And 10132900 at Croydon ran for exactly sixteen months, June 1966 to September 1967 10, which brackets the completion of the dam and then stops. Drainage area matters here: the reservoir's is 123 square miles, matching the dam inventory exactly 4 8. The 220 and 228 square mile figures are further down the creek and are not this reservoir's catchment.

There is no snow station in this drainage. The whole Upper Weber basin has two, both called Chalk Creek, both in Summit County in a different sub basin about twenty three miles away 12. Any snowpack number quoted for Lost Creek is borrowed from somewhere else, and this page does not quote one.

This reservoir has something most waters in this series do not: two consecutive fishery reports using the same sampling design, from April 2022 19 and May 2023 18. The curtain gillnet design was new in 2022, three nets suspended in open water at six metre intervals from the surface to eighteen metres, each 45.7 metres by 6.1, six panels, mesh 13 to 64 millimetres. Because the gear did not change between the two years, the two years can be compared.

The division's own summary, verbatim: "The fish community has shifted from a fishery dominated by Kokanee, Cutthroat Trout, and Rainbow Trout in 2022 to a more diverse fish community with the relative importance of Kokanee decreasing and Splake, Tiger Trout, and Utah Chub increasing in 2023" 18.

Why the chub increased, in the division's own words rather than anyone's inference: "The changes in Utah Chub size structure suggests that recent drought years and high water temperatures likely increased their reproductive potential" 18. Three age classes were present in 2023 where the 2022 sampling found one. Neither report mentions an illegal introduction and neither mentions rotenone, so this page does not raise either.

The recommendations are unusually blunt. On the kokanee: "Reestablishing Kokanee stocking will be imperative to support recent efforts to establish this fishery and not squander three years of stocking", with a proposed increase from 12,500 to 22,500 for 2024. On the chub: observe them to ensure salmonid density is high enough to keep top down control over the forage species, and consider an alternative predator such as wiper. And, notably, monitor the fish assemblage as state park development increases fishing pressure 18.

One arithmetic note, on the division's own figures. 2022 catch 28.0 against 2023 catch 9.7 works out to a fall of 65.4 percent; the report prints 65.2 18. The difference is rounding and this page uses the printed figure. Not found for this reservoir: any Utah state record fish, any confirmation of Blue Ribbon status, whose water list is not published on the page that describes the programme 20, and any extractable stocking history beyond what the two reports themselves give.

Lost Creek has two entries in the fishing rules where most waters have none. A stream entry for Lost Creek itself and a separate reservoir entry, plus a third mention in a restriction shared with three other waters. Three occurrences in the whole document, confirmed by two independent reads 21.

The reservoir rule, as two independent reads returned it word for word:

• Limit 4 trout or kokanee salmon, a combined total.
• Kokanee salmon of any size may be harvested as part of the limit.
• No more than 3 trout under 15 inches. No more than 1 trout over 22 inches. All trout between 15 and 22 inches must be immediately released.
• Trout and salmon may not be filleted, and their heads or tails may not be removed in the field or in transit. Lost Creek Reservoir shares that restriction with Strawberry, Scofield and Panguitch Lake.

The stream above the reservoir is catch and release only, artificial flies and lures only, over a reach described as running from the bridge about a quarter mile above the reservoir upstream to the headwaters, except Squaw Creek 21.

And there is no external cross check available for these rules. Utah's water by water fishing limits are set by proclamation and published in the guidebook, and no independent reproduction of them could be obtained. On other pages in this series the rules could be checked against a separately hosted copy of the administrative code; here they cannot. What the rules above rest on is two independent reads of the same document returning identical text, which is the best corroboration available and is weaker than a second source. Verify against the current guidebook before you rely on any of it 21.