NEWTON
Probably the first one in the country
Reclamation makes a claim about the reservoir that stood here before this one that it makes about nowhere else in Utah, and then the dam it built to replace it had to be raised three feet after a 1984 spill.
Reclamation makes a claim about this place that it makes about nowhere else in Utah. Of the reservoir that stood here before the present dam, verbatim :
"This reservoir was the first large body of irrigation storage in the State of Utah and probably the first in the United States."
That reservoir was not this one. Reclamation says its dam "replaced an older privately constructed reservoir of inadequate capacity which had been formed by a dam 1.5 miles upstream from the present Newton Dam" .
| Date | What Reclamation's chronology says |
|---|---|
| 24 July 1855 | Initial settlement attempt |
| 1871 | Original dam construction begins |
| 1874 | "Reservoir first used" |
| 14 January 1890 | Newton Irrigation Company organised |
The listing itself is worth knowing about. The name "Newton Reservoir" is on the national register of historic places, listed 30 November 1973 . What is listed is the history, not the reservoir you can drive to.
The present dam is an earthfill structure 101 feet high, 410,000 cubic yards, with a service spillway on a radial gate and an emergency spillway with an uncontrolled crest 1,000 feet long at the west end . It was finished in 1946. Forty years later it was not big enough.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1978 | A dam safety evaluation finds three feet of unknown material added to the emergency spillway, and seepage above elevation 4,780 |
| 1982 | A second evaluation finds the unlined auxiliary spillway cannot pass the updated inflow design flood |
| June 1984 | The reservoir spills |
| 1986 to 1987 | The crest is raised three feet, with a grade sill and a training dike |
And the inventory carries no condition rating for this dam at all. The assessment field reads Not Available and the assessment date is empty . That is the third dam in this series with no published condition rating.
Newton Dam is on Clarkston Creek, and that is settled four ways: Reclamation says "an earthfill structure on Clarkston Creek" , the dam inventory's watercourse field reads Clarkston Creek and not offstream , the hydrography dataset flags the water body on network , and the drainage area is the right order of magnitude for a dam that intercepts its own creek.
One thing this page can report as unusually good. Reclamation and the dam inventory put this dam about forty five metres apart, which is the closest those two records have agreed anywhere in this series. At the last two lakes they were 222 and 583 metres apart. Reclamation still publishes its coordinate to fifteen decimal places , which is the sixth lake running.
The federal outline is the one that is wrong
A hundred and fifty three acres in the hydrography dataset against two hundred and ninety to three hundred and fifty published by three agencies, and a storage record that explains why.
Every page here checks the traced print artwork against the federal water body polygon, and on every previous page the federal polygon has been the reference. Not here.
| Source | Surface area |
|---|---|
| Utah's watershed restoration initiative | 350 acres |
| Reclamation and the dam inventory | 297 acres |
| The federal recreation portal, when full | about 290 acres |
| The hydrography polygon | 153 acres |
The polygon is less than half of what three agencies publish. Against Reclamation's 297 acres it is 48 percent smaller; against the restoration initiative's 350 it is 56 percent smaller.
So the honest comparison runs the other way here. The traced outline and the federal polygon are recognisably the same lake, the same diagonal run, the same bend, the same lobed southeastern end. The artwork draws it full and the polygon draws it low, and the arms that are fat in one are stringy in the other. On aspect ratio they sit 21.9 percent apart, which is far the largest gap in this series, and that gap is the finding rather than an error in the drawing.
What the artwork implies at full pool. Scaled so its area matches Reclamation's 297 acres, the traced outline is about 1.47 miles across by 1.60 miles long. Scaled to the polygon's 153 acres it is 1.06 by 1.15. No dimension is published by anyone, so both are stated as scalings rather than as measurements, and the page prints no single surface area.
Utah's water quality rule holds five Cache County waters, and two of them now have pages here .
| Water | Classes | |
|---|---|---|
| Hyrum Reservoir | 2A, 3A, 4 | Frequent primary contact, the swimming tier |
| Newton Reservoir | 2B, 3A, 4 | Secondary contact, one tier lower |
| Porcupine Reservoir | 2B, 3A, 4 | Also 2B, and the only Cache water open to spearfishing |
It also corrects something on the Hyrum page. That page gives Porcupine as 2B, 3A, 4, which is right. An earlier working note had it as "2B" alone, which is the first element of a three part string rather than the whole class. The published page is correct and no change was needed.
What 2B means beside 2A. Class 2A protects frequent primary contact, where people swim and swallowing water is likely. 2B protects secondary contact, where people boat and wade. Both waters share 3A, cold water game fish, and 4, agriculture. The difference between them is entirely about how close people get to the water.
Newton Reservoir carries a fish consumption advisory for largemouth bass, and unlike the last few pages in this series, both of Utah's two disagreeing advisory lists carry it .
| Species | Mercury | Pregnant women and children | Women of childbearing age | Everyone else |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Largemouth bass | 0.605 | Do not eat | 1 meal a month | 5 meals a month |
A page built from that enumeration would have said this reservoir has no advisory. Exactly that error was published on another page in this series and had to be corrected. The lesson is now a rule here: never trust the list, always ask the question.
The underlying sample is the best fish evidence on this page and it names four species, not one. Utah's health department collected thirty seven fish from this reservoir in 2021 :
| Species | Fish | Mean mercury | Range | Advisory |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Largemouth bass | 10 | 0.605 | 0.3 to 1 | Yes |
| Black crappie | 7 | 0.225 | 0.08 to 0.3 | No |
| Bluegill | 10 | 0.172 | 0.07 to 0.3 | No |
| Yellow perch | 10 | sampled, below the screening value | No | |
The bass is three and a half times the bluegill, which is the ordinary shape of mercury in a warm water fishery: it concentrates up the food chain. No harmful algal bloom advisory of any level has ever been issued here: the state runs its own recreational monitoring page for this reservoir with dated 2025 results and no advisory .
Storage comes from soil conservation service station 09UTNEWT:UT:BOR, and the card above reads the monthly series because it has no choice .
The monthly figure is also flagged derived rather than observed, so the number above is worked out rather than measured, and the card says so.
What the record shows is a reservoir that emptied and then failed to come back.
| Month | Acre feet | Of the 5,600 Reclamation publishes |
|---|---|---|
| April 2025 | 5,273 | 94 percent |
| September 2025 | 440 | 8 percent |
| April 2026 | 2,756 | 49 percent |
| July 2026 | 1,070 | 19 percent |
From 94 percent to 8 percent in five months, a drop of 4,833 acre feet, which is 92 percent of the peak. And then the next spring peaked at barely half the previous one .
There is no flow card because nothing has measured this creek since 1947. USGS site 10115500, Clarkston Creek near Newton, is the only water survey site on the stream and its record ends on 12 April 1947 , the year after the dam was finished. Seventy nine years. That is the longest gap on any page in this series.
Where everything is
Eight places, one of which is a dam that stopped existing in 1946 and one of which is a different reservoir twenty miles south.
Utah's zoned waters rule has eighteen sections. Section eighteen is titled "Newton Reservoir", and it reads, in full :
"A person may not operate a vessel on Newton Reservoir at a speed greater than wakeless speed when the reservoir's elevation is at or below 4,761 feet above sea level."
Two independent reproductions return that sentence word for word, with the same section title and the same provenance: adopted by Utah State Bulletin 2024-02, effective 9 January 2024.
Read that against the storage record above. This reservoir spent much of 2025 and 2026 well below full. The rule is not an edge case here; it is the ordinary condition for most of a season.
A near coincidence that is not a fact. The gauge station's published elevation is 4,760 feet and the wakeless threshold is 4,761. One foot apart, and no agency source connects them. This page does not say the station is set at the rule elevation, because nothing says it is.
The section names no county, which is worth flagging because the neighbouring section sixteen names "Huntington Reservoir" with no county either, and Utah has two of those. There is only one Newton Reservoir in Utah, so the ambiguity does not bite here.
Utah's watershed restoration initiative describes this reservoir as "best known for its once dense population of tiger muskie" . Then it describes what happened to some of them.
The project is recorded as cancelled. So this page does not say Newton has an outlet screen. It says a screen was proposed in the 2018 financial year at a total project cost of 146,730 dollars and the project did not proceed.
And the muskie are still the subject of active rulemaking. On 12 August 2026 the wildlife division published a proposal "increasing the daily limit for tiger muskie caught at Newton Reservoir to 1 fish over 40 inches" .
That word "increasing" implies Newton currently has something more restrictive than the statewide limit, and six reads of the fishing guidebook found no Newton entry at all . The page states the proposal and does not state what it would be changing from, because the current water specific rule, if there is one, could not be found in the guidebook.
The fishing guidebook has no water specific entry for Newton Reservoir. The name appears once in the whole document, on the dead yellow perch bait list, and the statewide rules otherwise govern entirely . That list was checked four ways, including a separately issued question phrased so that "no" was the easy answer, and it survives.
The list, verbatim: "Dead yellow perch may be used as bait only in these waters: Big Sand Wash, Deer Creek, Echo, Fish Lake, Gunnison, Hyrum, Johnson, Jordanelle, Mantua, Mill Meadow, Newton, Pineview, Red Fleet, Rockport, Starvation, Utah Lake, Willard Bay and Yuba reservoirs" .
Underwater spearfishing is not open here. Utah's rule lists forty two waters, lettered (a) to (pp), and the only Cache County entry is Porcupine Reservoir . Newton is not on it and is not on the guidebook's page 19 list either . No diving rule specific to this water was found in any source, which is an absence rather than a permission.
Five species, four of them weighed by the state
Thirty seven fish out of this reservoir in 2021, measured for mercury. Only one of the four drew an advisory, and printing the other three is the point.
Largemouth bass
The one species on the advisory. Utah's health department took ten of them out of this reservoir in 2021 and measured a mean of 0.605 milligrams a kilogram of mercury against a range of 0.3 to 1 . The limits are do not eat for pregnant women and children, one meal a month for women of childbearing age, five for everyone else .
On the mercury advisoryTiger muskie
What the reservoir is known for. Utah's restoration initiative calls it "best known for its once dense population of tiger muskie", and in 2013 more than a hundred large ones left through the outlet pipe during low water and clogged the irrigation system . The division proposed a limit change here in August 2026 .
What it is known forBlack crappie
Sampled and cleared. Seven were taken in 2021 and averaged 0.225 milligrams a kilogram, below the screening value, so no advisory attaches to them . That is a species presence established by an agency putting fish on a scale.
Sampled, clearedBluegill
The cleanest of the four sampled. Ten fish, mean 0.172, range 0.07 to 0.3 . That is three and a half times lower than the bass, which is the ordinary shape of mercury in a warm water fishery: it concentrates upward.
Cleanest of the fourYellow perch
Also sampled in 2021, also below the screening value . And Newton is one of eighteen waters in Utah where dead yellow perch may legally be used as bait, which is the only time this reservoir is named in the entire fishing guidebook .
Legal as bait hereFour of the five species above are named the hardest way there is. Utah's health department collected thirty seven fish from this reservoir in 2021 and measured the mercury in every one of them . Ten largemouth bass, ten bluegill, ten yellow perch, seven black crappie.
Tiger muskie is the fifth and it is named by two agencies, the restoration initiative and the wildlife division . Nothing else is drawn. The federal recreation portal adds "sunfish", which is a family and not a species, and a rainbow trout that no other agency names . The town's own website adds brown trout. None of those is enough to draw a fish.
No wildlife division fishery report for Newton Reservoir could be found. Eight direct addresses were tried across three known filename conventions and five years, and every one returned nothing.
The publishable statement is that no report was found, not that the division does not survey this water.
Blue Ribbon status is unresolved, which is the honest answer: the division states a count of designated waters and does not print the list. And no stocking record for this reservoir was obtained beyond the August 2026 news release naming tiger muskie .
What to watch for
Nothing found in searchable press, a search that returns people rather than places, and a reservoir that is often far lower than any map of it shows.
No incident of any kind at Newton 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, no dive operation.
A page assembled from search results would attach somebody else's death to this reservoir.
The publishable sentence is "no incident found in searchable press." It is not "nothing has happened here." No agency incident record, sheriff's log or dive team report for this reservoir was located either.
The single most practical hazard fact about this reservoir is not an incident. It is the stage.
The federal water body outline is drawn at something close to that low state, which is why it maps at 153 acres against the 290 to 350 that three agencies publish for full pool. Anyone reading a map of this reservoir is looking at one particular day, and that day may not be the day they arrive.
And the boating rule follows the stage rather than the calendar. Below 4,761 feet, wakeless speed only . That is thirteen and a half feet below full pool, so in a season like 2025 the restriction is in force for most of the summer. There is no public gauge you can read at the ramp: the storage number on this page is monthly and derived, and the creek has not been measured since 1947 .
Utah's environmental quality department runs a recreational monitoring page for this reservoir, covering both harmful algal blooms and E. coli, with dated results through the 2025 season .
One oddity worth knowing. The department's index of monitored waters does not list this reservoir, while the reservoir's own page under the same department exists and carries dated 2025 results. The index is not a reliable guide to what the department monitors, which is the same lesson the advisory table taught two panels up.
Mussel status was not established and this page does not claim one in either direction. Nor is there any total maximum daily load naming this water that could be retrieved, and the department path that would carry it is closed to automated reading.
The state weighed thirty seven fish out of this reservoir. Three of the four species came back clean.
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 NewtonEvery 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 five are reproductions of Utah rules that the state's own rules site returns errors for. Two of those five are second reproductions obtained specifically to stop this page resting on a single copy of a rule, and in both cases the two agree word for word. Where sources disagree, all of them are printed: that happens over the reservoir's surface area, its elevation, which direction the dam lies from the town, and what happened in 1874. One finding here is a warning about method rather than about this reservoir. The state's fish advisory page was read twice; one read enumerated the table and left this reservoir out of it, and the same read found it when asked directly whether it was there. Never trust the list. Always ask the question.Newton Dam data. An earthfill structure on Clarkston Creek, 101 feet high, 410,000 cubic yards, capacity 5,600 acre feet, surface area 297 acres, a service spillway controlled by a radial gate and an emergency spillway with an uncontrolled crest 1,000 feet long. The coordinate is published to fifteen decimal places
Newton Project. The dam replaced an older privately constructed reservoir of inadequate capacity formed by a dam a mile and a half upstream, and that earlier reservoir was the first large body of irrigation storage in the State of Utah and probably the first in the United States
Newton Project history. The 1871 dam, its failures, the 1886 enlargement, the 1946 completion, the 1978 and 1982 dam safety evaluations, the June 1984 spill and the 1986 to 1987 modification that raised the crest three feet
National Inventory of Dams, Newton Dam, federal identifier UT10126. Watercourse Clarkston Creek, surface area 297 acres, years modified 1987 hydraulic and 1987 structural, and a condition assessment of Not Available with no assessment date
National Hydrography Dataset, Newton Reservoir, GNIS 01430709, reach code 16010202001460, published at 0.62 square kilometres with an elevation of 4,769 feet and flagged on the surface water network. Three United States features share the name and only this one is in Utah
Newton Reservoir storage, station 09UTNEWT:UT:BOR. It advertises daily, semimonthly and monthly reservoir contents and only the monthly series returns anything
Clarkston Creek near Newton, site 10115500, at 4,700 feet. The only water survey site on this creek, and its record ends on 12 April 1947
Utah fish consumption advisories. Newton Reservoir, largemouth bass, mercury 0.605, with three separate meal limits. The entry is only reliably found by asking whether it is there: one read's own enumeration of the table left it out
Game and fish advisories. Twelve Utah waters from a 2022 mercury analysis, and Newton Reservoir is one of them, for largemouth bass
Fish mercury consumption advisories, June 2023. Thirty seven fish of four species taken from Newton Reservoir in 2021: ten largemouth bass averaging 0.605 milligrams a kilogram with a range of 0.3 to 1, ten bluegill at 0.172, ten yellow perch and seven black crappie at 0.225, and only the bass drew an advisory
Newton Reservoir recreational water quality monitoring. Harmful algal bloom and E. coli sampling with dated 2025 results and no advisory at any level
Newton Reservoir outlet screen, project 4047, fiscal year 2018. The reservoir is best known for its once dense population of tiger muskie, over one hundred large tiger muskie left through the outlet during low water in 2013 and clogged irrigation infrastructure, and the screen project is recorded as cancelled
2026 Utah Fishing Guidebook. Newton appears on the dead yellow perch bait list and has no water specific entry of its own
Recommended changes to fishing regulations, 12 August 2026. A proposal to increase the daily limit for tiger muskie caught at Newton Reservoir to one fish over 40 inches
Newton Reservoir recreation gateway. About 290 acres when full, and the species the recreation portal names
Newton Reservoir, national register of historic places listing, dated 30 November 1973. Three significant years are given and 1874 is one of them, with no stated meaning
Point forecast for the reservoir. Forecast office Salt Lake City
Utah Administrative Code R317-2-13, classification of waters. The Cache County table holds five waters. Newton reads 2B, 3A, 4 and Hyrum reads 2A, 3A, 4
Utah Administrative Code R317-2-13, a second and independently hosted reproduction of the same table, returning the identical five rows in the identical order
Utah Administrative Code R650-205-18, Newton Reservoir. One sentence, a wakeless speed restriction below a stated elevation, adopted by Utah State Bulletin 2024-02 effective 9 January 2024
Utah Administrative Code R650-205-18, a second reproduction returning the identical sentence word for word, current through Bulletin 2025-12 of 15 June 2025
Utah Administrative Code R657-13-9, underwater spearfishing. Forty two waters, running a to pp, with Porcupine as the only Cache County entry and no Newton
Below 4,761 feet this is a wakeless water
Utah's zoned waters rule has one section for this reservoir and it is one sentence : "A person may not operate a vessel on Newton Reservoir at a speed greater than wakeless speed when the reservoir's elevation is at or below 4,761 feet above sea level."
Reclamation's maximum water surface is 4,774.5 feet . So the restriction begins thirteen and a half feet below full pool and continues for the next thirty six feet of stage. In a season like 2025 that is most of the summer.
The storage card above cannot tell you whether the rule is in force. It reads acre feet, not elevation, and it reads a monthly figure that the service itself flags as derived . There is no public stage reading for this reservoir that this page could find.
The percentage divides by 5,600 acre feet, which Reclamation publishes on both its facility page and its project history and which the dam inventory repeats .
There is no flow card. Not because a service failed, but because nothing measures Clarkston Creek. The only water survey site on it, 10115500, ended its record on 12 April 1947 .