Strawberry - Mud Creek

Strawberry Reservoir's Mud Creek area in Wasatch County, Utah, offers freshwater divers access to one of Utah's largest and most productive mountain reservoirs—a high-elevation impoundment in the Uinta basin that combines excellent fishing, adequate water clarity, and the scenic character of Utah's elevated interior plateau country. At nearly 7,600 feet elevation, Strawberry Reservoir occupies an unusual position in Utah's freshwater diving landscape—high enough to maintain cool water temperatures year-round and to create the water clarity that cold, less productive high-altitude water typically achieves, but set in a landscape of open sage steppe rather than the forested mountain terrain of lower-elevation Wasatch Front reservoirs. The Mud Creek area takes its name from the creek drainage that enters the reservoir's main body at this location—a naming convention that suggests the area may experience some turbidity during high-flow periods when creek inflows carry sediment into the reservoir. This characteristic is worth accounting for in site visit planning, as entry points near tributary creek mouths often show the most seasonal variation in clarity depending on recent precipitation and flow conditions upstream. Visiting Mud Creek in the late summer or early fall low-flow period typically produces the best clarity conditions for diving. Strawberry Reservoir is most famous among Utah anglers for its exceptional cutthroat trout and kokanee salmon fishery—species that thrive in the cold, productive water of this high-elevation reservoir and that reach impressive sizes supported by the zooplankton-rich water column. For freshwater divers, these same fish provide wildlife encounters of outstanding quality in the reservoir's clearer sections. Encountering large Bonneville cutthroat trout—a subspecies native to the Bonneville basin drainage—in relatively clear water represents an encounter with one of the Great Basin's iconic native fish species in a setting that showcases why Strawberry has been one of Utah's most important cutthroat conservation projects. The high-elevation landscape surrounding Strawberry Reservoir—open steppe country, scattered aspen groves, the broad plateau character of the Uinta basin—creates a diving context quite different from the canyon and mountain reservoir settings typical of Utah's Wasatch Front sites. The open sky visible above the reservoir's surface from any dive entry point, the smell of sage and distance of the nearest significant settlement, and the wildlife that inhabits this high plateau country—pronghorn antelope, mule deer, raptors—add the character of genuine Utah backcountry to a dive experience that, on the right day in the right season, provides freshwater diving of genuinely high quality.