The Oh-So-Bearable Bear Lake
Photo Courtesy of Bear Lake Convention & Visitors Bureau
Maybe you have to be from the upper Midwest to understand. Going to the lake for a summer weekend is like a birthright for those of us who grew up in the Dakotas, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, and their bordering states.
In Utah, “lake” has a far different interpretation. “Lakes” here are really water storage reservoirs, bordered by mud shorelines exposed as the water draws ever lower all summer long. Boaters have to line up at launch ramps, and keep a constant eye on other boats and zooming personal watercraft. About the only other Utah “lakes” are what we native Midwesterners call “ponds”—those pretty, but smallish waters in the mountains.
But there is one jewel in Utah—one true lake. It is unique in Utah, and it is a magnet for growing numbers of locals looking for a weekend “Out of the Park.” Bear Lake is an ancient lake, dating back at least 150,000 years and fed by the fresh snowmelt carried by the Bear River, which drains the North Slope of the Uinta Mountains.
“Make sure you tell them how awful it is,” my Bear Lake friends tell me.
“It’s far away and cold and mosquito-ridden—you really wouldn’t want to go!” The pleas come from a growing number of Parkites who’ve established their own beach heads on Bear in recent years and like its relative solitude.
Bear Lake is a big bathtub of a lake with a blue color that’s hard to describe. Microscopic dissolved rock solids worn from the Uintas float suspended in the water. Reflections from them produce, in the right light conditions, a Caribbean-like turquoise. It’s roughly eight miles wide and 20 miles long. The lake has 48 miles of shoreline and 112 square miles of surface water. It’s deep and amazingly clear, free of the seaweed which turns Midwestern lakes green. If you’re watching for other boats here, you’re watching to see if you can see another one. Weekdays, boaters feel like the water is all theirs, and on weekends, the boats spread far and wide.
“It’s very peaceful and quiet. It’s just so unknown,” says Park City resident Teri Whitney, who with husband Doug, bought lakeshore land in 1989 and spends summer weekends there. “It’s a great place to recreate with the kids. We have skiers, wake boarders and windsurfers, and do a little fishing.”
“It’s a tremendous family gathering place,” says Park City banker Larry Bywater. His Bear Lake weekends started as a kid on family camping trips which led to cabin construction by his parents a few years later. “It provokes vivid childhood memories; we’d get all excited when we started up the canyon.”
Bear Lake is a two-hour drive from Park City. The first hour is on Interstate 80 east to Evanston, Wyoming. Then you head north on a ranch-lined, two-lane highway to Laketown, Utah. As our family descends the last steep, twisting canyon road, one curve provides the first distant glimpse of the shimmering lake and we all let out a collective sigh. “Ah … the lake!” The feeling of relaxation is immediate.
Visitors don’t need a cabin to spend the weekend. Both Idaho and Utah have state parks spaced along the shoreline, from primitive campsites with pit toilets to sites with full RV hookups. Private campgrounds bring the number of total campsites around the lake to about 800. A growing lodging community along the south and east shores provides greater creature comforts, including the posh Harbor Village at Garden City, Utah, the town which is the commercial hub of the lake. The east side of the lake is more primitive, with no services, a few scattered subdivisions, and several Utah state park campsites with minimal amenities.
Halfway up the 20-mile eastern shoreline you cross into Idaho, which has a highly developed gem of a state park, the Idaho East Shore State Park. With an elevation of 5,900 feet, it takes until late June for the water to get comfortably swim-able, but in July and August, water sports of every description keep Bear Lakers busy. Calm mornings keep the massive lake generally flat for water skiers and wake boarders, and by afternoon, winds generally rise, bringing out windsurfers and a large, Garden City marina-based sailing community, where some sailboats are live-aboard ocean-capable rigs. Several vendors rent all kinds of watercraft for those who don’t bring their own.
Golfers have two nine-hole layouts to choose from, each built on a hillside with a spectacular lake view from every hole. The Bear Lake Country Club is open to the public above the southwest corner of the lake, and the Bear Lake West layout is on the Idaho side’s western hills. Bear Lake West has a clubhouse with a bar and restaurant. Harbor Village has a bar and lakeview restaurant in Garden City, perched just above the Bear Lake State Park and Marina. Most other dining options involve pizza or burger drive-ins, spread from Laketown to St. Charles, Idaho. Pickleville, a dot of a town four miles south of Garden City, has the Pickleville Playhouse featuring melodrama served with barbequed steak and chicken, and all the drive-ins serve up raspberry shakes. (The western hills are dotted with commercially farmed raspberry patches.) The queen of all shake and burger places is Garden City’s legendary LeBeau’s, where summer shake seekers don’t mind waiting in long lines for their Bear Lake raspberry concoctions.
Park City lodging executive Kim McClelland’s first trip to Bear Lake involved a stop for a LeBeau’s shake, and soon he was scouting for property for his family’s log cabin. “We went up for a weekend and fell in love with it.
I grew up in Michigan and we always spent summers at the lake. Out here in the high desert plateau, we started looking for a natural lake. Bear Lake was the only one.” Kim and his wife, Park City High School math teacher Judy McClelland, settled on the southeast shore. “It’s spectacular—the color and clarity of the water are unbelievable.”
Minnesota native and fellow Park City lodging executive Rob Slettom agrees. He and his wife Faye’s log cabin is a mile south of the McClelland’s. “For us it’s quiet, there’s no phone and no TV. I like the boating and the neighborhood scene.” Slettom has friends who’ve offered to fix his broken TV, but he declines. Like nearly all Bear Lake families, he considers this a place to reconnect with others. Adds banker Bywater, “It’s a tremendous family gathering place.”
They’re right. And that’s why a growing number of Park City families now can’t wait to “go to the lake.”
Park City writer Larry Warren’s childhood summers were spent at Fish Hook Lake in Northern Minnesota. He’s been a visitor to Bear Lake for over two decades, and started building his own family cabin on the east shore starting in 1998. (It will likely never get finished!)
Aside from the lake scene, the Bear Lake region offers other diversions ...
Bear Lake National Wildlife Refuge: 1,760 acres of marsh bordering the north side of Bear Lake features open water and grassland that is home to sandhill cranes, blue herons, snowy egrets, white pelicans and several varieties of ducks and geese. Walking trails access viewpoints.
Minnetonka Cave: St. Charles, Idaho is at the northwest corner of Bear Lake. A few miles up St. Charles Canyon leads visitors to the nine-room Minnetonka Cave, where guided tours take visitors on a half-mile walk underground past spectacular stalactite formations.
National Gon/California Trail Center:
A branch of the Oregon Trail passed around the north end of Bear Lake. This museum in Montpelier, Idaho highlights the lives and sacrifices of pioneers who packed their possessions in covered wagons and headed off to new lives in the West.
Logan Canyon and Logan:
From Garden City, it’s a spectacular one-hour drive down Logan Canyon (a nationally designated Scenic Byway) to the Northern Utah city of Logan and the scenic dairy farming region called Cache Valley. Logan is home of Utah State University, an historic Mormon Temple and Tabernacle, a charming old Main Street, and a must-stop for lunch—The Bluebird, a Main Street mainstay since 1914, complete with marble-topped soda fountain and homemade candies.
For help planning your trip and reserving summer campsites and motel rooms (Essential!), consult www.bearlake.org, or 1.800.448.BEAR.
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