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 visitors coming to the lake each weekend than ever before, more and more garbage is being left behind, and the year-round resident of 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 director for Bear Lake Watch, a nonprofit that helps collect and fund data on the health of the lake. He said an uptick in tourism has brought a great deal of trash to the shorelines and body of Bear Lake.
“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,” Long said. “It’s really simple. It just needs to be picked up.”
But while trash is the most visible and obvious thing impacting Bear Lake’s ecosystem, there is a bigger culprit taking over the Caribbean blue waters. And it isn’t the infamous Bear Lake Monster.
On Monday morning, Long went out with the Utah Bear Lake State Park’s 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 introduced to the lake just in the past couple of years, and could damage not only the ecosystem but the recreation on the lake.
Eurasian watermilfoil grows quickly and densely, Long said. It is capable of destroying a jet ski, entangling a swimmer, and can plug up irrigation pipes for ranchers and farmers. Its tentacles reproduce and spread rapidly, creating mats that block out the sun and choke out native plants and fish — four of which are unique only to Bear Lake. These mats also happen to be the perfect habitat for mosquitoes.
“When you’re at Bear Lake, people think of clarity of color, 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. This weed spreads by fragmentation — meaning boat propellers are causing the plant to take over the whole lake. He said visitors should not pull the plant or disturb it.
Ty Robertson, an employee of Bear Lake Rentals — which rents out recreational equipment said the invasive plants create extra work for employees when it jams up the company’s jet skis.
“That stuff’s nasty,” Robertson said. “It makes all of our jobs harder out here.”
The lake’s clear water has another enemy — sediment buildup. For 11,000 years, Bear Lake was isolated and fed by clean mountain streams like Swan Creek. But about 100 years ago, a power company turned the lake into a reservoir. They made a hole in the natural dam that separated Mud Lake, a wetland, from Bear Lake. Mud Lake is fed by the Bear River, and this change made the river flow directly into Bear Lake, bringing in sediment.
Studies show that sediment and nutrient accumulation in the area is most pronounced from April to September. Mud Lake, which has served as a natural filter for Bear Lake for over a century, is now oversaturated and unable to cope with the increased pollution. This has led to visible sediment swirls in Bear Lake in recent years, resulting in cloudy water.
It wasn’t very noticeable until the past two years, when high snow runoff increased the amount of sediment the Bear River brought into the lake. During the runoff season, Utah State University researchers estimated that thousands of tons of sediment flow into the lake. They also discovered during this peak time, about 5.5 Olympic swimming pools of sediment enters the lake on any given day.
“When you think of how much sediment comes in now, over the coming years, it will no longer be able to absorb or filter out that 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.”
Park Manager for Bear Lake State Park’s Idaho side, Andrew Stokes, said the sediment is entering the lake right next-door to North Beach — the lake’s most popular day-use area. He has noticed a difference in the water’s clarity in that region.
“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,” Critchfield 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.”
