STEINAKER
They took the water out, and asked the public to carry the fish
A ten month emptying recorded in negative numbers, a salvage nobody counted, two dam modifications that no single agency source shows together, and a man whose first name two agencies disagree about.
In 2018 Reclamation took the water out of this reservoir to rebuild the dam. The public record of how far they took it is not in a press release. It is in the storage series.
| Month | Acre feet in the reservoir |
|---|---|
| April 2018 | 19,086 |
| June 2018 | 8,212 |
| July 2018 | 2,507 |
| August 2018 | minus 524 |
| October 2018 | minus 3,738 |
| November and December 2018 | minus 3,768 |
| January through May 2019 | zero, every month |
| June 2019 | 3,232, the first water back |
Federal storage station 09271300:UT:BOR, monthly . In the daily series the first reading at or below zero is 27 August 2018 and the minimum is minus 3,779 acre feet on 12 and 13 December 2018. The first reading back above zero is 18 June 2019.
Reclamation's own wording was that it and the water district would "slowly empty Steinaker Reservoir during the summer recreation season" and that levels would remain low throughout construction . The reservoir refilled: the water district said it would fill on winter flows from Ashley Creek and expected full capacity by 2021 , and monthly storage did peak at 36,123 acre feet in May 2023 and 36,131 in May 2024 . What it is doing in 2026 is a drought, not a construction project.
This is the part of the story that is not in any agency press release, and it is the part this page exists for.
The reservoir was going to be drawn past dead pool, which meant a complete fish kill unless somebody intervened. The wildlife division ran public salvage events. A largemouth bass salvage in May 2018 with more than fifty volunteer anglers, hampered by water still in the mid fifties. Then a bluegill salvage from 7 to 10 June 2018, including a free bluegill tournament on 9 June, which was Free Fishing Day, so no licence was needed .
The division's regional outreach manager at the time, quoted in the only account of it: "The four day event is a chance for the public to join with us to save fish that will be lost if we don't remove them from the reservoir" .
What went back is documented. By October 2019 Utah State Parks recorded roughly 700 adult bluegill restocked, and the division put an emergency catch and release rule on every bluegill at Steinaker and at Pelican Lake, running through 31 December 2020 . The biologist's reasoning, in the same release: bluegill school, anglers like to keep panfish, and the young fish needed protecting until enough of them were big enough to breed.
Habitat work was done in the empty basin while it was empty. Watershed Restoration Initiative project 4592 planned about 300 structures along 10,600 feet of the north and west shore. What actually went in was 18 structures at two sites instead of twelve at three, because the exposed lake bed was too difficult to work at the third. The rest were bought and stored at the Vernal game farm for the following spring. Budget 71,500 dollars .
Most accounts of Steinaker mention one dam safety project. There have been two, twenty four years apart, for entirely different reasons, and each is published by a different part of Reclamation.
| 1993 to 1994 | 2018 to 2019 | |
|---|---|---|
| The problem | Seismic. Foundation soil stability under the structure during earthquakes | "A slope failure was observed on the upstream face of the right abutment" |
| How it was fixed | Dynamic compaction: a 30 ton weight dropped from 112 feet over an area about 150 by 550 feet, plus a downstream berm, a relocated canal and a replaced toe drain | Abutment slope flattened, outlet works intake extended and rebuilt in concrete, gates recoated, new hydraulic system |
| Cost | Not published | 17.68 million dollars, 85 percent federal and 15 percent the water district |
| Contractor | Not published | Weeminuche Construction Authority, owned and operated by the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe |
| In the federal dam inventory | Yes. "1994 Foundation, 1994 Seismic, 1994 Structural" | No. It is not recorded at all |
The engineering finding is one sentence long in public. No environmental assessment, decision document, corrective action study, issue evaluation or risk analysis for the 2018 work could be found, at Reclamation's environmental documents index, its newsroom archive, the Interior Department, or the dam inventory. Reclamation publishes three other Steinaker assessments and none of them is this one. And for the 1993 work, no cost, contractor or decision document is published either.
Reclamation: Joseph Steinaker, an 86 year old local rancher honoured at the groundbreaking, whose family farm was the reservoir site and who had worked it for about sixty years .
Utah State Parks: John Steinaker, "a member of a pioneer ranching family of the region" .
The dam was built fast. Contractor Morrison Knudsen of Salt Lake City bid 705,000 dollars below the engineer's estimate; groundbreaking 14 May 1959; completed 4 January 1961, one week ahead of schedule .
The water rights story behind it is older than the dam by eighty years. Farmers organised the Ashley Central Canal in 1879, three and a half miles long, irrigating 9,000 acres. By 1883 it had doubled and claimed a third of Ashley Creek. By 1897 the rights to the entire flow of the creek had been claimed and divided by court decree . The companies wanted storage and the natural high lakes were too small and too far. Steinaker Draw is what they got instead.
Reclamation's own environmental assessment records 51 known cultural resource sites in the Steinaker Reservoir area, including 43 prehistoric archaeological sites, 23 of which were recommended eligible for the National Register .
Fremont sites are specifically recorded among them, including campsites, habitation sites and rock art panels . On the later occupants, Reclamation writes that "Late Prehistoric groups were probably the ancestors of the modern Numic speaking occupants of the Uintah Basin," and identifies the Uintah and Ouray Reservation of the Northern Utes at Fort Duchesne, southwest of here .
And this page will not characterise what any of it means to anyone. The assessment states only that "consultation with Utah SHPO will occur after completion of this EA," and names no tribe that was consulted and records no meeting . The right sources are the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, through its own cultural rights and protection office, and the Utah State Historic Preservation Office, part of the Utah Division of State History.
The diversion dam that fills this reservoir is named for a fort, and the fort is named for a soldier killed in the 1879 fighting on the White River Ute Reservation. No agency source states that. Reclamation describes the Fort Thornburgh Diversion Dam in detail, nine feet high and 1,564 feet long, and never says where the name came from . The attribution is available only in non agency reference works, so this page notes it and does not build on it.
An off stream reservoir, filled from another valley
Where the water actually comes from, three capacities that mean different things, three mercury advisories and a fourth the state cannot agree on, and a shape that lands within one percent.
The shape at the top of this page was traced by hand for a print, then scaled to the extent of the USGS water body polygon and measured off its own coordinates.
| Scaling | Traced area | Against the federal polygon |
|---|---|---|
| One scale factor, matched on width | 690 acres | 0.8 percent large |
| Stretched to fill the extent on both axes | 718 acres | 4.9 percent large |
| One scale factor, matched on length | 748 acres | 9.2 percent large |
The two shapes are 4.1 percent apart on proportion, and they fill their bounding boxes almost identically: 37.4 percent for the drawing against 36.2 percent for the federal polygon. Matched on width the traced area lands within one percent of the federal figure, which is the closest agreement in this series so far.
Traced from OpenStreetMap geometry under the Open Database License, and that credit travels with any public use of the shape. The drawing measures 1.87 miles on its long axis against a federal extent of 1.94.
| Measure | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Surface area | 850 acres | The national dam inventory |
| 820 acres | Reclamation | |
| 684 acres | The federal water body polygon, 2.77 square kilometres | |
| Capacity | 40,358 acre feet | The dam inventory's NID storage and maximum storage |
| 38,173 acre feet | Reclamation's total capacity, and the same inventory's normal storage | |
| 32,760 acre feet | Active storage at elevation 5,517.8 feet | |
| Dam | Structural height 162.2 ft, crest length 1,997 ft, crest elevation 5,527 ft, zoned earthfill, 1,892,000 cubic yards | Reclamation |
| Hydraulic height | 131.5 ft or 138.0 ft | Reclamation, against the dam inventory |
| Drainage area | 19.0 or 20.88 sq mi | Reclamation, against the dam inventory |
| Spillway | Uncontrolled, 15 ft wide, 550 cfs | The dam inventory |
| Maximum depth | Not published by anyone | See the note below |
| Mean depth | Not published by anyone | Same |
| Shoreline length | Not published by anyone | Same |
No agency publishes a maximum or mean depth for this reservoir. Checked: Reclamation's data sheet, its 2007 assessment, the dam inventory, the water body polygon, Utah State Parks' page and brochure, and the wildlife division. The dam's hydraulic height is a property of the dam, not a depth of the reservoir, and this page does not print it as one. The elevation figures also measure different things and get conflated constantly: crest 5,527 ft, active pool 5,517.8 ft, dead pool 5,446 ft, streambed at the dam 5,389 ft , against the water body polygon's 5,520 ft .
Steinaker is an off stream reservoir. Steinaker Draw drains 19 to 21 square miles depending on which agency you ask , which is nowhere near enough to fill 38,000 acre feet. The water is Ashley Creek, taken at the Fort Thornburgh Diversion Dam and carried across by the Steinaker Feeder Canal .
The diversion dam is a rockfill overflow structure, nine feet high and 1,564 feet long, 7,000 cubic yards of material, completed at the end of August 1960. The feeder canal was first tested on 27 May 1961 at 33 cubic feet a second .
Ashley Creek is gauged above the diversion at USGS 09266500, drainage area 101 square miles, with a daily discharge record running back to 1 October 1914 . That is the longest continuous water record anywhere in this series.
There is no gauge on the feeder canal. The full Uintah County site inventory was searched across stream, canal and lake site types and no Steinaker Feeder Canal site exists. How much water actually crosses into this reservoir, and when, is not published by anyone. Reclamation states the unit delivers about 15,000 acre feet a year for irrigation , where its own written history describes supplemental irrigation to 14,761 acres and 1,500 acre feet of municipal water to Vernal, Maeser and Naples .
Utah samples fish here and the results carry consumption limits. From 2021 sampling, eleven fish of each species :
| Species | Mean mercury | Range | Above the screening value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brown trout | 0.477 mg/kg | 0.3 to 0.6 | Yes |
| Rainbow trout | 0.408 mg/kg | 0.2 to 0.6 | Yes |
| Largemouth bass | 0.299 mg/kg | 0.2 to 0.6 | No |
The advisory that follows, in maximum meals a month :
| Species | General public | Women 16 to 50, children 6 to 16 | Pregnant or breastfeeding, children under 6 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brown trout | 6 | 2 | Do not eat |
| Largemouth bass | 10 | 3 | 1 |
| Rainbow trout | 7 | 2 | 1 |
The bluegill advisory is the original one. It was issued in 2009, in the same action that put a largemouth bass advisory on Red Fleet . Steinaker appears nowhere in Utah's foundational mercury report covering 1990 to 2005 , which is consistent with an advisory that postdates it. No agency publishes where the mercury comes from. The 2006 report explicitly does not attribute sources, and the health department says only that fish accumulate contaminants from water, sediment and food. Anyone telling you it is atmospheric deposition at this specific reservoir is not quoting an agency.
This reservoir has a working daily storage series, station 09271300:UT:BOR, running back to 1 October 1961 . It is the station that recorded the reservoir going negative for ten months, and it is the only instrument publishing a live number for this water.
It publishes three durations, and all three return data in three different shapes:
| Duration | Record begins | What a value object actually contains |
|---|---|---|
| Daily | 1 October 1961 | date and value |
| Semimonthly | 4 October 2017 | month, monthPart, year, value. No date at all, and monthPart is a string where the others are integers |
| Monthly | 1 October 1964 | month, year, value. No date at all |
There is no snow station in Steinaker Draw, and the nearest one is in the wrong drainage for it. The card in the strip above reads Trout Creek, 833:UT:SNTL, at 9,440 feet , because that station sits in the Ashley Creek headwaters, which is where the water in this reservoir actually comes from. Kings Cabin is closer to the reservoir and drains somewhere else.
What is not measured: no maximum or mean depth, no bathymetry, no shoreline length, no live water temperature from any federal source, and no gauge on the canal that fills it. Utah State Parks publishes a live temperature and a percentage on its park page and publishes neither the instrument nor the denominator.
Steinaker is classified 1C, 2A, 3A and 4: a drinking water source after treatment, protected for frequent primary contact recreation, for cold water game fish, and for agriculture . Red Fleet carries exactly the same classification, which makes the difference in their records interesting rather than expected.
Algae. The state's own advisory dataset records two harmful algal bloom events at Steinaker in 2023: 28 days at health watch and 70 days at warning . Red Fleet appears nowhere in that dataset at all.
Where an advisory would show up, if there is one: Utah State Parks states that park management posts warnings on the individual park page and that local health officials post advisory signs at the park itself . So the park page is the thing to check before you swim, not this one.
There is a total maximum daily load in this watershed, and it is worth being precise about where. The Ashley Creek selenium and total dissolved solids TMDL, 2002, covers the lower eight miles of Ashley Creek below the Green River confluence, not this reservoir. It required a 78 percent selenium reduction and a 20 percent dissolved solids reduction, and it identified the cause as seepage from the Ashley Valley sewage lagoons through an outcrop of Mancos shale, with closure of that facility completed in 2001. The TMDL notes that at low flows Ashley Creek is completely diverted into Steinaker Reservoir before re entering its channel downstream.
That TMDL document could not be read from the state environmental department's own site, which is closed to automated reading in full. What is described above was read from a third party copy, so it is reported here without a numbered agency chip beside it. If you need to rely on it, get it from the department directly.
Where everything is
Eight places, a campground with three site counts, a trail nobody publishes, and the sister reservoir six miles northeast.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Campsites | 30 by the reservation system , 31 by the park brochure , 32 by a Reclamation assessment |
| What is in it | 11 standard, 8 full hookup with 20, 30 and 50 amp electric plus water and sewer, 8 electric only, 1 tent only, 1 cabin named Dippy, and one group site for 50 |
| Season | Utah State Parks says camping runs 15 May to 30 September . The reservation system says the campground is open year round . Both are live |
| Hours | 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. in summer, 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. in winter . Gates close at 10 |
| On the water | Boat ramp, sandy beaches and a swim dock, fishing pier and fish cleaning station, courtesy docks, group day use and overnight areas |
| Capacity | The 2007 assessment gives the campground 256 people at once, the boat ramp 30 trailers, and the beach picnic area 300 people |
Utah State Parks publishes no coordinate for anything in this park, on either its page or its brochure. The pin on the map above is the reservation contractor's, and the check this page ran before printing it was whether it plots outside the water body polygon. It does. The park's own refund policy is worth reading before you book: it does not refund "due to weather, bugs, early camping departures, or the amount of time spent inside the park" .
Utah State Parks lists hiking as an activity at Steinaker and names no route . Its official brochure names no trails at all .
A route called the Steinaker Lake Trail circulates widely. No Utah agency publishes a trail by that name. It appears on hiking and camping aggregators only. It may well be a real path that people walk; what does not exist is any agency publishing it, its length, its difficulty or where it starts.
These two are run by the same water district, are both Reclamation dams in the Central Utah Project, are both Utah state parks, and share an administrative address and phone number: the park brochure is headed "Steinaker/Red Fleet, 4335 N Highway 191, Vernal" . Fathom has a page on the other one at /red-fleet.
They do not share a watershed. Steinaker is off stream from Ashley Creek; Red Fleet sits on Big Brush Creek. They are separate tributaries of the Green River. And they are classified identically under the state water quality rules, 1C, 2A, 3A and 4 , which is what makes the rest of this table worth printing.
| Steinaker | Red Fleet | |
|---|---|---|
| Completed | 1961 | 1980 |
| Hazard potential | High | High |
| Condition assessment | Not available | Not available |
| Last inspected | 22 June 2021 | 23 June 2021, the following day |
| Safety modifications | Two, and a ten month emptying | None recorded |
| Spillway discharge | 550 cfs through a 15 foot spillway | 5,510 cfs through a 32 foot spillway |
| Drainage area | 19 to 21 sq mi, and it is off stream | 83 to 94 sq mi, and it is on stream |
| Mercury advisories | Three, or four depending which state page you read | None in the current update |
| Algae advisories | 98 advisory days in 2023 | Not in the dataset at all |
| Utah record fish | One, a bluegill by spearfishing in 2009 | None |
| Guidebook entry | None. Statewide limits apply | Has its own entry |
All dam figures from the national inventory , advisories from the state health department , algae day counts from the state dataset , records from the wildlife division , guidebook treatment from the 2026 guidebook . Both reservoirs are on the same page 20 spearfishing bass closure list, on the same dates.
Utah State Parks publishes a live ice conditions field for this reservoir, alongside water temperature and water level . On 13 August 2026 it read open water, 73 degrees and 21 percent.
There is no Steinaker specific ice guidance from any agency. The statewide guidance from the state's outdoor recreation division: at least four inches of good clear ice to walk on, six or more for a snowmobile or all terrain vehicle, clear ice holds more than cloudy, March and April are particularly dangerous as ice deteriorates, avoid areas near stream mouths and underwater springs, and "ice is never 100 percent safe" .
The county sheriff's guidance quoted at the time is the only site specific ice advice this page found for Steinaker, and it reaches us through a news outlet rather than from the sheriff directly: use extreme caution as ice thins, especially near reservoir inlets . This is an off stream reservoir with a canal inlet, so that is the relevant sentence here.
No entry in the guidebook, and one record taken with a speargun
Statewide limits, a spearfishing closure people misread, a fishery description that is nineteen years old, and a reservoir that was not stocked at all in 2026.
Bluegill
The fish this reservoir is known for, the fish volunteers were asked to carry out over four days in June 2018, and the fish about 700 of which went back in. Then the division closed it to keeping any at all until the end of 2020.
Salvaged 2018, catch and release to 2020Largemouth bass
The other salvage. More than fifty volunteer anglers turned out in May 2018 and the water was still in the mid fifties, which made it hard. It was the last species scheduled to go back, a year after refilling.
50 volunteers, May 2018Rainbow trout
The reservoir is managed as a put, grow and take rainbow fishery, in Reclamation's own words. One of the two species whose 2021 mercury sample sat above the screening value.
Above the mercury screening valueBrown trout
Named as a trophy fishery in the 2007 federal assessment. It also carries the strictest consumption advisory here: do not eat, for pregnant women and children under six.
Do not eat, for the most vulnerable groupGreen sunfish
Listed alongside bluegill in the 2007 assessment. It appears in no salvage account and no restocking list found.
Listed in 2007, absent sinceUtah chub
A non game forage fish here, and a listed species rather than a problem. There is no rotenone history at Steinaker and no record of any illegal introduction.
Forage fish, and no rotenone hereCommon carp
The other non game species the federal assessment lists. Nobody salvaged it and nobody put it back.
Not salvaged, not restockedSteinaker Reservoir has no entry of its own in the rules for specific waters. That was verified two ways: a literal search of the 2026 guidebook returns Steinaker only on the page 20 closure list and inside the Ashley Creek entry ; and the division's contracted publisher lists, alphabetically, Starvation, Stateline, Strawberry, Strawberry tributaries and Strawberry River, with no Steinaker between Starvation and Strawberry .
The one rule that does name Steinaker is a spearfishing rule. Page 20, verbatim: the listed waters "are closed to the possession of largemouth and smallmouth bass from April 1 through June 27, 2026 (the fourth Saturday in June) while underwater spearfishing" . Steinaker is on that list and so is Red Fleet. It applies only to spearfishing. Ordinary angling for bass is not restricted in that window.
The creek above has its own entry and it is stricter than the reservoir: "Ashley Creek, Uintah County. From Steinaker (Thornburg) diversion upstream to the water treatment plant near the mouth of Ashley Gorge. Limit 2 trout. Artificial flies and lures only" . Note the guidebook's spelling of Thornburg, which differs from Reclamation's Thornburgh.
The fullest published account of this fishery is a Reclamation environmental assessment from 2007, not a wildlife division document. It describes Steinaker as managed as a "put, grow and take fishery for rainbow trout", plus trophy brown trout, largemouth bass, bluegill and green sunfish, plus non game forage fish including carp and Utah chub .
The habitat project has the division's own account of why drawdowns matter here: drastic seasonal drawdowns coincide with bluegill and largemouth bass spawning and produce "year class failures" when vegetation and spawning habitat "become high and dry" . That was written about ordinary operating drawdowns, before the reservoir was taken to zero for ten months.
There is no rotenone history at Steinaker and no record of any illegal fish introduction. Both were searched for specifically. The rotenone story that circulates alongside this reservoir belongs to Pelican Lake, which was covered by the same 2019 bluegill emergency rule but was restored by a completely different method. Do not merge them.
Read row by row across the wildlife division's record tables, exactly one row names this reservoir: bluegill, 14 ounces, 9 and three quarter inches, Tony Arbaney, 2009, under spearfishing . Red Fleet holds none in any category.
Blue Ribbon status is claimed once and not corroborated. The state habitat project record describes Steinaker as holding Blue Ribbon status as a critical fishery . The wildlife division's own Blue Ribbon programme page does not name Steinaker, publishes criteria rather than a list, and directs users to a map application. This page reports the claim and its single source, and does not repeat it as a fact.
What to watch for
One death on the ice, a mussel status that could not be confirmed, and a high hazard dam with no condition rating.
19 February 2022. A 52 year old man from Vernal fell through the ice while fishing on this reservoir. Dispatch was called at 9:14 a.m. after witnesses heard him and saw his dog jump in after him. He was located deceased at about 10:50 a.m., roughly six feet from where he went through, in an estimated ten feet of water. The county sheriff's office and county search and rescue responded. The dog was rescued .
The statewide ice thresholds, which are agency guidance: four inches of good clear ice minimum to walk on, six or more for a snowmobile or all terrain vehicle, clear ice holds more than cloudy, avoid partially covered water and areas near stream mouths and underwater springs, and late season March to April is particularly dangerous .
The sheriff's own warning at the time named reservoir inlets specifically . Steinaker is filled through a canal inlet rather than a stream, which is an unusual configuration for that warning but not a reason to ignore it.
- Mussel status could not be confirmed either way. Possessing or transporting invasive mussels has been illegal in Utah since 2008, and boats must be decontaminated before entering or travelling with them in Utah . The state list that would settle whether Steinaker is designated failed to load, on a certificate error, and the division's landing page does not show the list. Steinaker was not found named on any list this page could reach, and that is not the same as confirming it is clean. Clean, drain and dry regardless.
- Fire restrictions were in force in August 2026. The park page carried Stage 2 restrictions: no open fires of any kind, including in established fire pits, charcoal grills, pellet grills or any ash producing fuel . Check before you arrive; this changes through the season.
- No wind station, no wind guidance and no cliff jumping advisory specific to this reservoir from any agency.
- No drowning, boating fatality or search and rescue incident other than the February 2022 ice death could be sourced. A prominent drowning that surfaces alongside searches for this park is Red Fleet's, and it is a different reservoir. Absence of other records is not evidence there are none.
- Any engineering document behind the 2018 dam modification. The public record of the deficiency is one sentence. No assessment, decision document, corrective action study or risk analysis is published anywhere reachable.
- The drawdown elevation in feet, and any cost, contractor or decision document for the 1993 to 1994 work.
- Any salvage total from 2018, and any stocking manifest for what went back.
- Maximum depth, mean depth, shoreline length and bathymetry, from anyone.
- Current impairment status, algae cell counts and toxin concentrations. The state environmental department and the state algal bloom site are both closed to automated reading, and the federal assessment interface returns an authorisation error.
- Park fees. The state park fee page for this park serves a golf course rate card.
- Any agency coordinate for anything in this park.
- Any agency published trail at the reservoir, including the one everybody names.
- Where the mercury comes from. No agency attributes a source.
- Whether the 2009 bluegill advisory is still in force. Two pages of the same state agency disagree .
- A condition rating for a high hazard dam. The federal inventory records the hazard as high and the condition as not available . Steinaker is not state regulated, because Reclamation owns it, so there is no Utah dam safety record either. Same as Red Fleet.
The state asked volunteers to carry the fish out of this reservoir, and then nobody wrote down how many they saved.
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 SteinakerEvery 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 two of them carry things no agency has published: the 2018 fish salvage, and the death on the ice in February 2022. Both are labelled as non agency wherever they appear. Three claims did not survive checking. There is no Steinaker entry in the 2026 fishing guidebook, despite an automated read producing one. There is no rotenone history and no illegal introduction record at this reservoir; that story belongs to Pelican Lake. And the Blue Ribbon claim rests on one state record and is not corroborated on the wildlife division's own programme page, so it is reported rather than repeated. Where agencies disagree, all of them are printed: that happens over the surface area, the capacity, the drainage area, the campground size, the camping season, the founder's first name, and whether a bluegill advisory exists.Interior awards 17.68 million dollar contract for dam modification in Utah, 18 April 2018. The slope failure on the upstream face of the right abutment, the 2014 restricted operations, the contract value and the contractor
Steinaker Dam safety modification work to begin. The emptying of the reservoir, the 85 to 15 cost share and the schedule
Dam safety modifications at Steinaker Dam substantially complete, October 2019. The as built scope and the return to normal operations
Safety of Dams facility improvements, Provo Area Office. The 1993 to 1994 seismic foundation work, the 30 ton weight dropped from 112 feet, and the fact that it is the only modification this page records
Steinaker Dam and Reservoir data. Structural height 162.2 feet, crest 1,997 feet, capacity 38,173 acre feet, surface 820 acres, drainage 19 square miles
Historic Reclamation projects, Central Utah Project Vernal Unit. The pre dam canal history, the construction chronology, Morrison Knudsen, the Fort Thornburgh Diversion Dam and Joseph Steinaker
Steinaker Reservoir normal water surface elevation increase, final environmental assessment, chapter 3. The fishery description, the campground capacity, and the 51 cultural resource sites
Steinaker Reservoir normal water surface elevation increase, final environmental assessment. Active storage 32,760 acre feet at elevation 5,517.8 feet
National Inventory of Dams, Steinaker Dam, federal identifier UT10113. Hazard potential high, condition assessment not available, last inspected 22 June 2021, not state regulated, and modified only in 1994
Steinaker Reservoir storage, station 09271300:UT:BOR. Daily record from 1 October 1961, and the series that recorded the reservoir at minus 3,768 acre feet
Ashley Creek near Vernal, site 09266500. Daily discharge from 1 October 1914, drainage area 101 square miles
National Hydrography Dataset, Steinaker Reservoir, GNIS 01447864, reach code 14060010004313. The surface area and the polygon this page measures its outline against
Trout Creek SNOTEL, station 833:UT:SNTL, at 9,440 feet in the Ashley Creek headwaters, reporting since 1978
Watershed Restoration Initiative project 4592, Steinaker Reservoir fish habitat enhancement, 2019. The structures built in the drained basin, the budget, and the division's own account of what drawdowns do to spawning
Bluegill fishing at Steinaker and Pelican, October 2019. The roughly 700 adult bluegill and the emergency catch and release rule
2026 Utah Fishing Guidebook. Steinaker has no entry in the rules for specific waters. It appears only on the seasonal spearfishing bass closure list at page 20, and inside the Ashley Creek entry
Record fish caught in Utah. One row names Steinaker: a bluegill taken by spearfishing in 2009
Fish stocking report. Steinaker appears in neither the 2026 report by water nor the 2026 report by Uintah County
Utah fish consumption advisory updates, June 2023. The mercury concentrations measured in 2021 and the three species advisories that follow from them
Game and fish advisories. This page lists four species for Steinaker, including bluegill, where the document it links to lists three
Mercury in fish, 1990 to 2005. Steinaker does not appear in it, which places the advisory after 2005
Utah water quality standards, classification of waters of the state. Steinaker and Red Fleet are classified identically, and Ashley Creek changes class at the Steinaker diversion
Harmful algal blooms at Utah state parks. The posting protocol and where advisories go
Steinaker State Park. The hours, the camping season, and the live water temperature, water level and ice condition fields
Steinaker State Park brochure. The 31 site campground, the facilities, John Steinaker, and the address the two parks share
Steinaker State Park campground record. Thirty sites, open year round, and a cabin called Dippy
Steinaker Service Canal Trail. A 1.9 mile paved path in Vernal, on the canal corridor, with no connection to the reservoir
Invasive quagga and zebra mussels. Possessing or transporting them has been illegal in Utah since 2008
Ice safety. The four inch and six inch thresholds, and the warning about stream mouths and underwater springs
Steinaker dam right abutment modifications. The operator's own account of the completion and the refill
Anglers saving fish at Steinaker, 30 May 2018. The only account of the salvage events: the bass salvage, the four day bluegill salvage, the free tournament, and the division's own framing of what would happen if nobody came
Mercury advisory for fish expanded, 2 July 2009. The original bluegill advisory at Steinaker and the largemouth bass advisory at Red Fleet, issued in the same action
Uintah County fisherman dies after fall through ice, February 2022. The only account of the fatality, quoting the county sheriff
Insights into Land and Water in Utah, 2024, the harmful algal bloom metric. It reproduces the state's own advisory dataset as day counts and nothing else
Rules for specific waters, the digital edition of the division guidebook. Used here only to confirm, alphabetically, that no Steinaker entry exists
Why the inflow card is a creek in a different valley
Steinaker is an off stream reservoir. Steinaker Draw drains 19 to 21 square miles , which cannot fill 38,000 acre feet. The water is Ashley Creek, taken at the Fort Thornburgh Diversion Dam and carried across by the Steinaker Feeder Canal . The inflow card reads the creek, gauged above the diversion, because that is the water that ends up here.
There is no gauge on the canal. The full county site inventory was searched across stream, canal and lake site types. How much water actually crosses into this reservoir, and when, is not published by anyone.
Percent of capacity is arithmetic, not a measurement. It divides the storage reading beside it by the 38,173 acre feet Reclamation publishes as total capacity . Two other capacities exist: the federal dam inventory publishes 40,358 as NID and maximum storage , which would make this percentage smaller, and the active storage at elevation 5,517.8 feet is 32,760 , which would make it larger. Utah State Parks publishes its own percentage on its park page and does not publish what it divides by .
The storage record goes back to 1 October 1961 and it is the record that shows this reservoir at minus 3,779 acre feet in December 2018 . It publishes daily, semimonthly and monthly series and all three work, in three different data shapes.
The snow card is Trout Creek, 833:UT:SNTL, at 9,440 feet , which sits in the Ashley Creek headwaters. A nearer snow station exists and it drains the wrong way.