Bear Lake

Overview

Bear Lake straddles the Utah-Idaho border in the Bear Lake Valley, a natural lake about 20 miles long and 70,000 acres in size that reaches 208 feet at full pool. Its turquoise color comes from calcium carbonate suspended in the water, and the same cold, low-nutrient chemistry shapes the fishing: this is a forage-driven lake, not a hatch-driven one. Four fish live here and nowhere else, the Bonneville cisco, Bonneville whitefish, Bear Lake whitefish and Bear Lake sculpin, and the cisco and sculpin are what the trout eat. The Bear Lake cutthroat is a lake-dwelling form of the Bonneville cutthroat rather than a separate subspecies; it often lacks the red jaw slash and shows deep orange lower fins with sparse round spots concentrated toward the tail. Idaho's state record cutthroat, 19 pounds, came from this lake. Lake trout, stocked by Idaho as sterile triploids, grow large in the deep basin and spawn on the rock piles in fall, which is when both species move into water shallow enough to reach from shore off Cisco Beach, the North Beach jetty and the Utah state park marina. That fall window, and the weeks after ice-out, are when a fly rod makes sense: large sculpin patterns and articulated bunny leeches on a sinking line. The rest of the year is mostly trolling and jigging in 30 to 80 feet. In mid-January the cisco crowd the shallows to spawn and are dip-netted through the ice, and cutthroat and lake trout follow them in. The lake freezes over four years in five, and wind builds fast on open water.