Strawberry Reservoir

Overview

Strawberry Reservoir sits in Strawberry Valley at about 7,600 feet in Wasatch County, an hour and a half from Salt Lake City on US-40 past Heber. It is a Bureau of Reclamation project on the Strawberry River: the original reservoir covered 8,400 acres, and Soldier Creek Dam, finished in 1974 as part of the Central Utah Project's Bonneville Unit, enlarged it to about 17,160 acres at full pool. Locals call it the Berry, and it is widely regarded as Utah's top stillwater fishery. Its modern history starts in August 1990, when the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources treated the entire reservoir with rotenone to wipe out the Utah chub that had overrun it, at the time the largest such treatment ever attempted. DWR then restocked sterile rainbows, kokanee and the Bear Lake strain of Bonneville cutthroat, a fish-eating cutthroat chosen precisely because it keeps chub in check. Those cutthroat are the signature fish, protected by a slot limit and a request that anglers release them all. Kokanee are the other draw, fished by trolling in summer until they turn red in September. The lake thaws in late April or the middle of May depending on the year, and the first weeks after ice-off, when big cutthroat and rainbows prowl the shoreline for leeches, scuds and snails, produce the largest fish of the season on buggers and articulated streamers. Calm mornings from mid-August through September bring Callibaetis and chironomids; July and August push fish deep, where damsel and scud patterns on sinking lines along the weed edges keep working. The ice returns in mid-December.