PALISADE
Utah is emptying this reservoir on purpose in 2026, to repair an 1899 dam its own inventory rates Poor. Every figure on this page is quoted from the record it appears in.
The state is emptying this reservoir on purpose
An 1899 private dam, rated High hazard and Poor condition, being repaired in 2026. A reservoir with a one square mile drainage that is filled by a canal. And the smallest water this series has covered.
Palisade Reservoir is being drained. Not drawn down, not low: drained. The wildlife division put it in a news release on 2 July 2026 .
Verbatim:
"Palisade Reservoir, Sanpete County: This waterbody will be completely drained this summer for dam and maintenance repair. As a result, the daily fish limit will be increased to no limit for all species. The change will be in effect from July 2 to Oct. 1."
This page is being published inside that window and it expires on 1 October 2026. Everything below describes a reservoir that, as the state describes it, is not currently there.
The order covers seven waters and the stated reason is "current low water levels from construction projects and ongoing drought impacts" . Palisade is the only one of the seven where the release uses the word drained. The others are described as low. The park's own conditions widget reads a water level of 22 per cent, with no date attached to the reading anywhere on the page , so this page will not tell you what is in there today.
The reason for the draining is in the dam record, and it is not subtle .
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Completed | 1899, earth |
| Hazard potential | High |
| Condition assessment | Poor |
| Date of that assessment | 1 January 1995 |
| Last inspected | 19 July 2023, on a one year cycle |
| Record last updated | 28 March 2024 |
| Owner type | Private. The record does not name the owner |
| Size | 24 feet high, 1,250 feet long |
| Storage | 1,050 acre feet maximum, 780 normal |
| Surface area | Field empty |
But the assessment is dated 1 January 1995, which is about thirty one years old and lands on a round date that reads like a placeholder. The dam is inspected every year and was last inspected in 2023 . So the correct sentence is that the inventory carries a Poor rating from 1995 in a record transmitted in 2024, not that anyone assessed it as Poor recently. This page will not say more than the record does.
The rating is not only in the inventory. In November 2019 Utah's dam safety programme named five high hazard Utah dams in poor condition and "Palisades Lake Dam in central Utah" was one of them, attributed to assistant engineer Dave Marble . That is news reporting an agency and not the agency speaking, so it sits in the lettered sources, and the inventory record above is the primary. One field is internally inconsistent: the emergency action plan prepared field is empty while a plan review date of 18 May 2011 is populated , so this page makes no claim about whether a plan exists.
The dam record gives the river as "Sixmile Creek - Offstream" , and the second word is the whole story.
The geological survey, on how it got here :
"built an earthen dam in the small drainage, dug a nearly three-fourths-mile-long canal to the stream channel in Sixmile Canyon, and began to divert water to fill the lake in the 1870s."
That is why draining it is even possible. An offstream reservoir with a one square mile catchment can be emptied and left empty, because nothing is pushing water into it except a diversion someone can close.
The survey names the builder: Daniel Funk, who helped settle Sanpete County in 1857 and "observed a small cove at the mouth of Sixmile Canyon could be dammed and filled to make a lake" .
Two agency dates that do not agree, both printed. The dam inventory gives a completion year of 1899 . The geological survey says the diversion began filling the lake in the 1870s . Both are agency sources and this page does not merge them. A dam can be rebuilt, and a fill date is not a completion date. Where the water goes afterwards is not published anywhere this build could find. The inventory gives the primary purpose as Irrigation and no source names the outlet or the system it serves.
Clean results, and nothing measuring the water
No advisory, four clean bacteria results and Utah's higher recreation class. And no gauge of any kind: the nearest federal instruments are on a different lake two and a half miles west.
This is one of the cleaner water quality records in this series, and every part of it is a fetched result rather than an absence of searching.
| Checked | Result |
|---|---|
| Utah fish consumption advisories | Not on the list. Newton Reservoir and Pelican Lake sit adjacent, with the position a Palisade entry would occupy visibly empty between them |
| Bacteria, 2025 season | Four results, all below recreational thresholds, on 21 May, 24 June, 15 July and 18 August |
| Harmful algal blooms | No advisory of any level on the page |
| The local health department | A site search for Palisade returns no results |
| Beneficial use class | 2A, 3A and 4 |
3A is cold water game fish and 4 is agriculture, which is what an irrigation reservoir would be expected to hold .
A clean negative is not a clean bill of health. No advisory means no Utah agency has published one. It does not mean anyone sampled for mercury here and found none.
Two things could not be established and neither is an absence. Whether this water is on Utah's impaired waters list, and whether it has a pollution budget, are both unknown to this page: the state's integrated report pages sit behind a path that refuses automated reading. The one document that opened was the assessment methods paper rather than a waterbody list, so it proves nothing either way. What is solid is that Palisade is a classified water with assigned uses, which is a different statement from being listed or not listed as impaired.
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 | 0.8783 | 0.8406 | 4.48% |
| Share of its bounding box | 0.614 | 0.562 | 9.2% |
| Area, matched on width | 69.8 acres | 66.8 acres | 4.55% over |
This is by a wide margin the smallest water in this series. Under half a mile long, four tenths of a mile across, 66.8 acres by the federal polygon. The dam inventory leaves its surface area field empty and the state tourism office says 70 acres . Those two agree to within five per cent and this page prints the federal one.
The elevation trap, and how it was resolved here. The federal polygon stamps 1,788.6 on this record with no unit given . As feet that would put the lake at 1,788 feet, below the town it sits above: the two nearest federal gauge datums are 5,360.00 and 5,366.20 feet . As metres it works out to 5,868 feet, and the state tourism office publishes 5,800 . So it is metres. The reservoir two pages back in this series carries 8,083 in the same field, and that one is feet. Same dataset, same column, different units on different rows.
Nothing measures this reservoir. No stream gauge, no reservoir gauge, no federal storage station. That was established by asking the two questions separately, which matters more than it sounds.
| Query | Result |
|---|---|
| Stream gauges with daily records in this county | Twenty nine sites, no station name contains Palisade |
| Lake and reservoir gauges in this county | Exactly one row, and it is Gunnison Reservoir |
| Soil conservation service stations in this basin | Twenty seven returned complete, no Palisade. The only reclamation station is Gunnison Reservoir |
Gunnison Reservoir is two and a half miles west, in the same county, and it has both a federal gauge and a federal storage station . Palisade has neither. Any live storage or flow figure a search turns up for this corner of Sanpete County is almost certainly Gunnison, and putting it on a Palisade page would be the single easiest mistake to make about this water. It is not on this page and the map marks the trap.
Also not published by anyone. Maximum depth, mean depth and shoreline length. Dividing 1,050 acre feet of maximum storage by about 67 acres implies a mean of roughly fifteen feet, and that is arithmetic on this page rather than a measurement, and a mean is not a maximum. The one depth figure in the record is from an incident report: a body was recovered from 15 to 20 feet of water in 2023 . That is not a bathymetric survey and this page does not use it as one.
Where everything is
Six agencies publish six different coordinates for one small park, and the seventh point on this map is the reservoir people mistake for it.
Palisade is a Utah state park, and has been since 1962 . The nine hole golf course arrived in the 1970s and became eighteen in the 1980s .
The same address pattern does the same thing at another Utah state park, which is how this build established that the fault is the address and not the park. Anyone reading fees off that address for any Utah state park is reading Green River's.
The correct address prints real Palisade figures : day use 15 dollars Monday to Thursday, 20 Friday to Sunday and holidays, 10 for seniors, per vehicle up to eight people. Camping from 35 dollars. Cabins 125 with full amenities and 100 basic.
Green fees are not printed on this page. The park's own golf fees page publishes them inside an image, and only the driving range appears as text. An unreadable number is not a number, and no other course's figures will be substituted for it. Ten cabins, three full and seven basic, and guests bring their own linens . The state tourism office gives the campsite count as 74 on one page and as 53 sites plus ten cabins on another . Both are the same publisher and this page prints the disagreement rather than picking.
Only electric motors are permitted, and the state parks division says it plainly: "only electric motors are permitted on the lake" .
The wildlife division lists this park among waters that provide fishing access to anglers with physical challenges . The same page carries its own warning: not all of these areas have hard surfaces, and those that do may not meet accessibility standards. So this page does not describe Palisade as accessible. It says it is on that list, which is a weaker claim, and points you at the park.
Summer hours are 8 in the morning to 10 at night and Stage 2 fire restrictions were in force when this page was built: no open fires of any kind, including inside established fire pits and charcoal grills . No winter hours are published. The route is about 133 miles south of Salt Lake City, then two miles east of Sterling on Palisade Road .
No limit, all species, until 1 October
Seven fish, all seven from a single agency page, and one of them is a goldfish. Nothing here rests on a net.
Rainbow trout
Named on the park's fishing page. The trout limit that page prints is four fish, and that limit is suspended until 1 October 2026.
Tiger trout
A brown by brook hybrid. Named by both the park page and the federal recreation listing, which is the only species overlap between the two.
Cutthroat trout
Named by both sources. Neither names a subspecies, so none is drawn.
Black crappie
Named by the park page only. No survey, no stocking record and no size data for this water was reached by this build.
Wiper
A white bass by striped bass hybrid, and a stocked fish wherever it appears. Named by the park page only.
Bluegill
Named by the park page only. A warm water panfish in a reservoir the state classifies for cold water game fish.
Goldfish
Named by the park page, beside the trout, without comment. It is not native and it is not stocked as a sport fish anywhere.
The fishing rule at this reservoir right now is the shortest one in this series .
"the daily fish limit will be increased to no limit for all species. The change will be in effect from July 2 to Oct. 1."
The wildlife division sets fishing rules and the parks division does not. The order is the one that governs. The park page appears not to have been updated, and this page prints both rather than quietly dropping the stale one, because anyone who reads the park page and nothing else will get it wrong in the direction of thinking there is a limit when there is not.
And it reverses on 2 October. Everything in this section is written for a window that closes. Check the current rule before you fish here, because this page will be describing a suspended order the day after it lapses.
Every species drawn above comes from one source: the park's own fishing page . That page names rainbow trout, tiger trout, cutthroat trout, black crappie, wiper, bluegill and goldfish, and this page draws exactly those seven and nothing else.
Nothing is flagged, and that is deliberate. On other pages the flagged fish are the ones a mercury advisory names, because an advisory means somebody sampled tissue. This water is on no advisory list , so there is no hard species evidence here at all and ranking one of these seven above another would be inventing a distinction the record does not support.
The federal recreation listing names three of the seven, rainbow, tiger and cutthroat , and no source found here contradicts any of the other four.
About the goldfish. It is drawn because the state names it. Goldfish is not native to Utah and is not stocked anywhere as a sport fish, and a population of them in a reservoir is generally what happens when people empty aquariums into it. No source found in this build says how it got here, so this page does not say. What it will not do is quietly drop the one name on an agency's list of seven that is inconvenient. The park page lists it beside the trout without comment and this page draws it the same way.
Two questions a fishing page is expected to answer, and this build could not answer either to the standard the rest of this page is held to.
The previous page in this series set out why the difference matters: this document has returned a fabricated entry with a correct county, and a strict existence question confirmed the fabrication rather than catching it. An incomplete transcription cannot prove an absence. Check the current guidebook yourself.
Blue Ribbon. The programme page publishes no list and no count and does not mention Palisade . The most recent funding release says there are 41 waterbodies and names four, none of them this one . Not named is not the same as not designated, and this page says only what it found.
Stocking could not be checked at all. The division's stocking application returns a single alphabetical table that truncates at LILY across repeated reads and ignores its own filter parameters . P is after L, so the position a Palisade row would occupy was never reached. This page cannot say this water is stocked and cannot say it is not. Six of the seven fish drawn above are species that ordinarily arrive in a Utah reservoir by truck.
What to watch for
One recorded death, in fifteen to twenty feet of water, without a life jacket. A reservoir being taken to nothing. And a name that returns Idaho first and a second Utah lake second.
On 3 June 2023 an eighteen year old drowned at this reservoir, and the state parks division published the account . He is not named on this page.
Those last two facts are in the release because the agency put them there. A state parks release naming a depth and a life jacket in the same paragraph is making a point without making it, and this page repeats it without decoration.
Five agencies responded: the state parks division, the Sanpete County sheriff, Sanpete County search and rescue, and the Gunnison Valley and Ephraim City police . On a sixty seven acre lake.
Nothing else was found and the search was not narrow. No boating fatality, no vehicle in the water, no ice incident and no submerged debris recovery at this reservoir surfaced in agency or press sources. One further item exists and is not published here: a local radio station carries a headline describing a non fatal drowning at Palisade Lake, and the article could not be read. A headline is not a source, so it is recorded as a gap rather than an event. The park's conditions widget carries an ice thickness field , which means winter ice is tracked here, and no ice incident was found either.
The condition to plan around at this water is not a hazard in the usual sense. It is that the water is scheduled to be gone .
Another water in this series showed what a deep drawdown means operationally. In 2021 responders at a drawn down Utah reservoir could not launch their boats, because the water was too low and the dock was closed, and carried out a recovery with kayaks and by swimming. That was a partial drawdown.
The park page still lists the water temperature, the ice field and an algae reading, and a water level of 22 per cent, with no date on any of it . This page will not date an undated number, and it will not tell you what is in the basin today. Call the park.
The repair itself could not be sourced. Beyond the phrase "dam and maintenance repair" in the fishing order , no engineering document, project scope, contractor or schedule was found. How long the reservoir stays empty is not published anywhere this build could reach, and the fishing order's 1 October date is a fishing rule expiry, not a refill date.
Palisade is a dangerous name to search, and the two failure modes are different sizes.
| Water | Where | Size |
|---|---|---|
| Palisade Lake, this one | Sanpete County, Utah | 0.27 sq km, 1,050 acre feet maximum |
| Palisades Reservoir | Idaho and Wyoming, on the Snake River | 1,401,000 acre feet |
| Palisade Lake, the other Utah one | Duchesne County | 0.099 sq km |
The trap closer to home is worse, because it is in Utah. The federal names database returns two features called Palisade Lake in this state . Ours is class Reservoir in Sanpete County. The other is class Lake in Duchesne County, about fifty miles north east. A Palisade Lake, Utah search can land on the wrong Utah lake in the wrong county, and nothing on either page would tell you.
Four spellings are in official use for this one water. The dam inventory calls the dam Palisades Lake, plural . The federal names database calls the water Palisade Lake . Utah's water quality rules call it Palisade Reservoir , and so do the parks and wildlife divisions . All four refer to the same sixty seven acres. There are fifteen more Palisade waters across Colorado, California, Montana, Washington and Idaho.
Sixty seven acres, an 1899 dam rated Poor, and a state order to empty it.
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 PalisadeEvery figure on this page is quoted from the source named beside it.
Sources
How these were checked
Numbered sources are agencies. The two lettered sources are both doing specific jobs. The first is news reporting Utah's dam safety programme naming this dam among five in poor condition, which the agency itself did not publish in a document this build could reach, and it corroborates a rating the federal inventory already carries. The second is a state promotional publisher whose own two pages give different campsite counts, and it is cited for the disagreement rather than for a figure.Where sources disagree, all of them are printed. Two Utah agencies are currently publishing different fishing limits for this water and both are on the page. Two agencies give different construction dates and both are on the page. Three method notes. This page states no fishing rule beyond the emergency order and no Blue Ribbon status, for the reasons given in the fishing section. It prints no figure taken from the fees address that serves another park. And it does not date the park's own conditions widget, because that widget carries no date.
National Inventory of Dams, federal identifier UT00119, name Palisades Lake. County Sanpete, river Sixmile Creek and flagged Offstream, owner type Private, state regulated Yes by the Utah Division of Water Rights, federally regulated No. Completed 1899, earth, 24 feet high and 1,250 feet long, maximum storage 1,050 acre feet, normal storage 780, drainage area 1 square mile, surface area field empty, primary purpose Irrigation, spillway uncontrolled, hazard potential High, inspected annually. Condition assessment Poor dated 1 January 1995, last inspected 19 July 2023, record last updated 28 March 2024. The emergency action plan prepared field is empty while the plan review date reads 18 May 2011
Emergency change to daily fishing limits at seven waterbodies, 2 July 2026 at 9:53 in the morning. For this reservoir: "Palisade Reservoir, Sanpete County: This waterbody will be completely drained this summer for dam and maintenance repair. As a result, the daily fish limit will be increased to no limit for all species. The change will be in effect from July 2 to Oct. 1." The stated reason for the order as a whole is "current low water levels from construction projects and ongoing drought impacts", and Director Riley Peck is quoted
National Hydrography Dataset. Palisade Lake, permanent identifier 79648003, geographic names identifier 01447775, published at 0.27 square kilometres with a stamped elevation of 1,788.6 and reach code 16030004000521, which is the Lower San Pitch basin
GeoSights, Palisade State Park, Sanpete County. Author Peter J. Nielsen, Survey Notes volume 55 number 3, September 2023. Records Daniel Funk observing "a small cove at the mouth of Sixmile Canyon could be dammed and filled to make a lake", the building of the dam and a canal in the 1870s, the renaming by a second owner from the Hudson River Palisades, state park status in 1962 and the golf course expansion. Describes the rock wall the lake is named for as near vertical beds of the Funk Valley Formation
Palisade State Park. Summer hours 8 in the morning to 10 at night, Stage 2 fire restrictions in force when read, and a conditions widget carrying a water temperature, a water level percentage, an ice field and an algae field with no timestamp on any of them
Palisade State Park fishing. Names rainbow trout, tiger trout, cutthroat trout, black crappie, wiper, bluegill and goldfish. States "the daily limit for trout at Palisade Reservoir is four fish" and "only electric motors are permitted on the lake"
Palisade State Park fees. Day use 15 dollars Monday to Thursday and 20 Friday to Sunday and holidays, 10 for seniors, per vehicle up to eight people. Camping from 35 dollars a night. Cabins 125 and 100
Palisade State Park fees address without the park prefix. Returns the fee table for Green River Golf Course at a status code of 200 rather than an error, and the word Palisade does not appear on it
Palisade State Park camping. Ten cabins, three with full amenities and seven with basic. Guests bring their own linens
Palisade State Park directions. Published as 39 degrees 12 minutes 23.0 seconds north by 111 degrees 39 minutes 56.0 seconds west. About 133 miles south of Salt Lake City, then two miles east of Sterling on Palisade Road
Utah fish consumption advisories. Palisade does not appear on this page in any row for any species. The entries either side of the position it would occupy, Newton Reservoir and Pelican Lake, are adjacent with nothing between them
Palisade Reservoir recreational monitoring. Four E. coli results in 2025, all below recreational thresholds, and a season close on 1 November 2025. No harmful algal bloom advisory of any level appears on the page
Central Utah Public Health Department, the local authority that issues harmful algal bloom advisories for this county. A site search for Palisade returns no results
Standards of quality for waters of the state. The Sanpete County table classifies Palisade Reservoir 2A, 3A and 4: frequent primary contact recreation, cold water game fish, and agricultural use
Stream gauges with daily records in Sanpete County. Twenty nine sites and no station name contains Palisade
Lake and reservoir gauges in Sanpete County. Exactly one row is returned and it is Gunnison Reservoir near Sterling, site 10216200, datum elevation 5,366.20 feet. A reservoir gauge is site type LK, so a stream type query cannot find one
Soil conservation service station list for the Lower San Pitch basin. Twenty seven stations returned complete, and no station named Palisade. The only Bureau of Reclamation station in the basin is Gunnison Reservoir
Utah man dead after incident at Palisade State Park, 4 June 2023. An eighteen year old was swimming with friends when the weather began to deteriorate, went under and did not resurface. Recovered from 15 to 20 feet of water, and not wearing a life jacket. Five agencies responded
Fishing access for anglers with physical challenges. Lists Palisade State Park, Sanpete County, and warns on the same page that not all of these areas have hard surfaces and that those that do may not meet accessibility standards
Blue Ribbon fisheries. The programme and its criteria, with no list and no count of designated waters on the page, and no mention of Palisade
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 waters, and does not name this reservoir
2026 Utah Fishing Guidebook. Two attempts to transcribe a contiguous alphabetical run over the position a Palisade entry would occupy both truncated at Panguitch Lake, returning four entries for the whole of O, P and Q. Both runs showed Pacer Lake and Panguitch Lake adjacent
Geographic names, filtered to Utah. Two features are named Palisade Lake in this state. This one is feature 1447775, class Reservoir, county Sanpete. The other is feature 1431083, class Lake, county Duchesne, about fifty miles north east
Palisades Project, on the South Fork of the Snake River in eastern Idaho, states Wyoming and Idaho. Reservoir capacity 1,401,000 acre feet with 1,200,000 active. This is the Palisades that a search for the name returns first, and it is not in Utah
Palisade State Park, federal recreation gateway 15112. Names rainbow, tiger and cutthroat trout, and the trail and off highway vehicle access nearby
Point forecast over the reservoir. Forecast office Salt Lake City
Fish stocking records. The application returns a single alphabetical table that truncates at LILY across repeated reads and ignores its own filter parameters, so the position a Palisade row would occupy was never reached
Five high hazard dams in Utah listed in poor condition, 13 November 2019. Reports the Utah Dam Safety Program naming five, including "Palisades Lake Dam in central Utah", and attributes it to Dave Marble, assistant engineer. This is news reporting an agency rather than the agency itself, and the dam inventory record is the primary source for the rating
Utah Office of Tourism on this park. Gives a 70 acre reservoir and an elevation of 5,800 feet, and gives 74 campsites on one page and 53 tent and recreational vehicle sites plus ten cabins on another. A promotional publisher whose two pages disagree with each other
The live water figures you will find for this area belong to a different reservoir
Palisade Reservoir has no federal gauge and no federal storage station. That was established three ways rather than one.
Stream gauges, this county. Twenty nine sites with daily records, and no station name contains Palisade .
Lake and reservoir gauges, this county. A reservoir gauge is site type LK, not ST, so the stream query above could not have found one. That query was run separately and returned exactly one row: Gunnison Reservoir near Sterling, site 10216200 .
Soil conservation service stations, this basin. Twenty seven returned complete, and the only Bureau of Reclamation station among them is Gunnison Reservoir .
Gunnison Reservoir is two and a half miles west of Palisade, in the same county, and it is a different water. It has a gauge and a storage station. Palisade has neither. A live storage number found under a search for this corner of Sanpete County is almost certainly Gunnison, and it is not on this page.
There is a fourth trap one state away. Palisades Reservoir on the Snake River in Idaho and Wyoming holds 1,401,000 acre feet against this reservoir's 1,050 , and Reclamation publishes live data for it. A search for Palisade reservoir storage returns a working feed for the wrong state.