Bear Lake is 'the Caribbean of the Rockies'

Bear Lake and Bear River share a name — but for 10,000 years, their waters did not mingle. Earthquake activity had shifted the course of the river that horseshoes around the lake, cutting off the lake.

In 1912, the two were reconnected in a move to turn the lake, one of the oldest bodies of water in the United States, into a reservoir for irrigation and power generation.

In the intervening years, Bear Lake has become "the Caribbean of the Rockies," a major recreational destination that straddles two states, and Bear River has served as a major source of water for the three states that claim its resources.

Both have been the subject of many stories and photos in the Deseret News. Photo researcher Ron Fox has retrieved many of these photos, which can now be seen in the online gallery at right.

Bear River was once a tributary to the Snake River, but lava flows north of Soda Springs, Idaho, diverted the river into what was then Lake Bonneville, and now it is the largest tributary to the Great Salt Lake.

In a story in the July 13, 1996, Deseret News, staff writer Karl Cates described the river's intriguing geography: "At 500 miles long, it is the biggest stream in North America that does not eventually reach an ocean. It empties into the Great Salt Lake, just 80 miles from its headwaters, after a serpentine journey that begins in the Uinta Mountains of Utah but crosses state boundaries five times before reaching its mouth."

Both Bear Lake and Bear River were resources for American Indians, and Bear Lake Valley and Bear River Valley attracted trappers in the early 1800s. In 1841, Oregon Trail travelers crossed the valley on a path that paralleled Bear River.

Mormon pioneers settled portions of the Bear River in Utah in the 1840s, and under the direction of Apostle Charles C. Rich settled Bear Lake Valley in the 1860s.

The two areas became inextricably linked in 1912 when the Bear River Canal was completed.

In an Oct. 1, 1902, story in the Deseret News, J.C. Wheelon, who engineered the canal more than a decade before it was built, noted that the "feasibility of utilizing Bear Lake as a reservoir was a subject that had been much discussed. The scheme, however, was not looked upon with much favor by the people of Idaho, for the simple reason that they would not be nearly as much benefited as the people of Utah, owing to the lava like formation of the country to be traversed."