In the hardscrabble days of Utah’s frontier past, people lived lives that were hard, brief, and fraught with danger. Forty-nine years before Utah achieved statehood in 1896, the first white settlers in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake faced hardships of all sorts in a mostly arid land.  

One of the foremost necessities for any civilization, large or small — and the one most essential for life — is water. Fortunately for the early pioneers, and despite the presence of a large, dead inland sea, water was plentiful for a small population in those early years thanks to the seven canyon streams that tumbled freely from the Wasatch Mountains and flowed west across the valley floor to the Jordan River, then northward to the undrinkable saline waters of the Great Salt Lake. 

Along these verdant waterways grew an abundance of trees that provided lumber and other building materials, a bounty of fish and wildlife, and free-flowing sources of water for agriculture and industry. It was only after these riparian streams had been diverted and their timber felled to meet the needs of a growing city that large swaths of the valley became barren and desiccated before being reclaimed years later as residents expanded south and west, taking credit for making the desert valley “blossom as the rose.” 

A century later, with a burgeoning population exceeding hundreds of thousands of new settlers, water became an even more invaluable resource, and today, 177 years after the first wagon trains clattered and groaned down Emigration Canyon, water has become a critical concern, especially with the looming prospect of an under-appreciated, poorly managed, deprived and dying Great Salt Lake. The lake itself may not be drinkable, but it is vital to producing the precipitation that makes life possible in modern SLC, which relies on rain and snow for 95% of its water supply and to support its 1.2 billion dollar ski industry and the thousands of jobs that depend on it. 

Utah is a high altitude desert, and author Wallace Stegner warned us decades ago that an inadequate water supply would be the biggest impediment to sustaining large populations in the valleys of the west, and that these arid basins were never meant to support the more than two million inhabitants that occupy the Wasatch Front today. 

“Water,” Stegner told us, “is the true wealth in a dry land,” and Utah is the second driest state in the US. Only Nevada is drier.

Seeing the need for increased water resources in the 20th century, dams were built and reservoirs created to collect water in mountain basins for the benefit of valley inhabitants and to satiate their frivolous and thirsty Kentucky bluegrass lawns. 

One of these reservoirs lies at the base of Big Mountain above Emigration Canyon. The land was purchased by Salt Lake City in 1916, and Mountain Dell Reservoir was conceived and built between 1916 and 1917, with subsequent work continuing through 1939. As one of many dams designed by John S. Eastwood, the dam demonstrates an early use of multiple-arch reinforced-concrete engineering and construction. 

According to the Library of Congress, the dam was “Developed specifically for unstable bedrock conditions, eliminated upward pressure, resisted overturning or sliding on its base, and offered ready facilities for inspection. One of nineteen multiple arch dams designed by Eastwood and built throughout the world, Mountain Dell represents a successful solution to a difficult and potentially dangerous engineering problem.”

Historian John W. Van Cott informs us that, “The road through the canyon was built by Parley P. Pratt [of Parley’s Canyon fame] and was opened for traffic on July 4, 1850, under the name of the Golden Pass. In 1860, Leonard G. Hardy opened a rest stop known as Hardy’s Place.”

In the early 1860s, long before the dam and reservoir existed, the basin where the reservoir now lies was known as Big Creek Canyon or Hanks Canyon, later named Mountain Dell by Ephraim Knowlton Hanks. The canyon was the site of a way station for travelers on the Overland Stage, as well as a Pony Express station — a vital link in the communication chain between the civilized east and the untamed west.

In 1870, Mountain Dell became a summer farm for Francis Armstrong and his wife Isabelle Siddoway Armstrong, replete with a stone farmhouse which stood for 129 years until it was demolished in 1999.  

Commemorative signage explains that, “In good weather, relay riders were able to cover the entire Pony Express Trail, from St. Joseph Missouri, to Sacramento, California, in about ten days, an amazing achievement at the time. Previously, mail arriving from the east usually reached Utah in three to six weeks.”

In the 1940s, the need for another reservoir was anticipated, but it wasn’t until the Salt Lake floods of 1983 that the project to build Little Dell Reservoir was approved. 

The Salt Lake City Department of Public Utilities, which owns and operates the reservoir, states the following on their website: “The Little Dell Reservoir was built in 1993 for drinking water supply, flood control, and wildlife enhancement as a joint venture between the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, the Metropolitan Water District of Salt Lake City, and Salt Lake County. 

“While water quality preservation is the primary management goal of Little Dell Reservoir and the Parleys Canyon Protected Watershed, it also provides the added benefit of a pristine natural habitat and recreational escape from the city within 20 minutes of the Salt Lake Valley.”

As a protected watershed, motorized craft, paddle boards, dogs and swimming are not allowed. 

Today’s visitors to the area may have a hard time trying to picture life for the early settlers who tamed such a remote and challenging place, and the seemingly endless resources that existed for our ancestors are not as abundant today. We need to take better care of our natural resources — especially water — because no matter how many dams we build, we still live in a desert.

Feature Image: Little Dell Reservoir in January, 2024. Photo by David E. Jensen