Forget the Bear Lake Monster — This northern Utah jewel faces a bigger threat

Editor’s note • This is the first story in a two-part installment on the environmental threats facing Bear Lake. For Part 2, click here.

Bear Lake • Seven-year-old Amber Long begged her parents to take her to pick up trash around Bear Lake’s shorelines on Earth Day.

With more and more visitors than ever coming to the lake each weekend, more and more garbage is being left behind, and the youngster who lives year-round on the lake’s East Beach wanted to do her part.

“It helps the lake feel better,” Amber said. “You can do a lot of stuff by helping the lake when you pick up trash.”

Her dad, Brady Long, is the executive director for Bear Lake Watch, a nonprofit that helps collect and fund data on the health of the beloved northern Utah lake. He said an uptick in tourism has brought a great deal of garbage to its shores.

“While I was going out on the sea kayak, I looked down in the water and I could see hundreds, if not thousands, of pieces of trash in the water,” the elder Long said. “It’s really simple; it just needs to be picked up.”

While trash is the most visible issue impacting one of the state’s premier recreational jewels, a bigger culprit lurks, threatening the lake’s Caribbean-turquoise-blue waters.

And it isn’t the legendary Bear Lake Monster.

Aquatic invaders

Long went out last month with the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands to look for two plants taking over Bear Lake’s waters — Eurasian watermilfoil and curly leaf pondweed. These invasive plants were discovered in the lake in the past couple of years, Long said, and could not only damage the ecosystem but also threaten the recreation that occurs on the lake.

Eurasian watermilfoil, with its green, featherlike leaves, grows quickly and densely, Long said. It is capable of destroying a Jet Ski or entangling a swimmer and can plug up irrigation pipes for ranchers and farmers. Its tentacles reproduce and spread rapidly, creating mats that block the sun and choke native plants and fish — four of which are unique to Bear Lake. These mats also happen to be the perfect habitat for a pesky pest: mosquitoes.

Unlike in other areas where it has been documented, the Eurasian milfoil in Bear Lake grows horizontally instead of vertically, potentially affecting treatment strategies.

This plant may look benign, but it isn’t — and color Long worried.

“When you’re at Bear Lake, people think of color, they think clarity of water, they think of this unique ‘Caribbean of the Rockies’ experience,” Long said. “This plant could change all of that. It could be known as the ‘Swamp of the Rocky Mountains.’”

Long suspects the plant was introduced to the lake from the tiniest speck on a boat. The weed spreads by fragmentation — meaning boat propellers are causing the plant to take over the whole lake.

Visitors, he said, should not pull the plant or disturb it.

Ty Robertson — an employee of Bear Lake Rentals, which rents recreational equipment for use on the lake – said the invasive plants create extra work for him and his co-workers when it jams up the company’s watercraft.

The problem, Robertson said, wasn’t significant until this year.

“That stuff’s nasty,” he said. “It makes all of our jobs harder out here.”

Sediment swirls

At the same time, the lake’s clear water has another enemy: sediment buildup.

Nearby, Mud Lake, which has long cleaned impurities from the Bear River before water flows into Bear Lake, is now oversaturated and no longer capable of adequately filtering the sediment.

This has led to visible sediment swirls in Bear Lake in recent years, resulting in cloudier water. Studies show that sediment and nutrient accumulation in the area is most pronounced from April to September.

It wasn’t particularly noticeable until the past two years, when high snow runoff increased the amount of sediment the Bear River funneled into the lake. During the runoff season, Utah State University researchers have estimated, thousands of tons of sediment flow into the lake. During peak times, researchers discovered, about 5.5 Olympic swimming pools of sediment enter the lake on any given day.

“When you think of how much sediment comes through there and settles in right now, over the coming years, it will no longer be able to absorb or filter out the sediment,” Long said. “So that will come into Bear Lake without the same level of filtration that’s already happening. It’s a matter of time for us to address the issue.”

Muddy hot spot

Andrew Stokes, park manager for Bear Lake State Park’s Idaho side, said the sediment is entering the lake right next to North Beach — the lake’s most popular day-use area.

“When it’s actively flowing, there is a noticeable difference than when it’s not,” Stokes said. “We certainly want to reduce anything that might be a negative impact to the lake, and if there is a better way of allowing water to flow in and out of Bear Lake, we certainly would be in favor of exploring and supporting any of those ideas that would be beneficial.”

Bear Lake Watch scientist Gregory Critchfield, who has a background in medicine, said leaders should treat the issues of invasive plants, sediment and trash in the same way they would treat a disease.

“It becomes a bigger problem over time, and not addressing it allows it to be a bigger problem,” he said. “In medicine, you want to detect things early. You want to be able to intervene early. You want your interventions to be beneficial and promote the support of the environment that needs to be there. You want the native plants and fish and animals and birds — everybody. You want them to all be protected.”

Early intervention is just what the nonprofit is striving for, but the fate of the lake lies in the hands of everyone who touches its waters.

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