Utah Lake From the Porch

One of the things I've enjoyed about blipfoto is learning about things I see every day and don't really know anything about. Here is some information about Utah Lake taken from Wikipedia;

Freshwater lake located in Utah, USA. It's the third largest natural freshwater lake west of the Great Lakes. (Lake Tahoe and Flathead Lake are larger - oh, hello Patrice!). The lake's only river outlet, the Jordan River, is a tributary of the Great Sale Lake and is highly regulated with pumps. Evaporation accounts for 42% of the outflow of the lake, which leaves the lake slightly saline. The elevation of the lake is legally at 4,489 feet (1,368 m) above sea level. If the lake elevation goes any higher, the Jordan River pumps and gates are left wide open.

It is 24 miles in length, 13 miles wide, with an average depth of 10 feet.

The first European to see Utah Lake was Father Silvestre Velez de Escalante in 1776. Father Escalante stayed with the Timpanogots band of the Ute Tribe for three days. The Timpanogots were later moved out or integrated with the settlers between the 1850s and the 1870s.

The fish of the lake were overharvested by the settlers and restocked with non-native species. Although 13 species of fish are native to the lake, only the Utah sucker and the 'critically endangered' (give me a break) June sucker remain. By far, the dominant species in the lake is the common carp, introduced in 1883 as an alternative to the overharvested native fish. The carp is now estimated at 90% of the biomass of the lake. Raw sewage was dumped into the lake as late as 1967. Pollution problems still remain with phosphorus and mineral salt levels in violation of the clean water act. (Oh, sounds just lovely - I know that at times in the year you can smell the lake - people will smell something funny and say, oh, that's the lake). People waterski on the lake but hate to fall down because they don't know what's touching their legs....

Utah Lake is a remnant of a much larger pleistocene lake called Lake Bonneville. At its peak some 30,000 years ago, Lake Bonneville reached an elevation of 5,090 feet above sea level and had a surface area of 19,800 square miles.