By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Autumn 2026 brought me a once-in-a-lifetime sight. For the first time in almost one hundred years, the small fake but loved lake near my boyhood hometown is nearly empty.
I grew up in Ogden City in Northern Utah. Our home away from home, however, was at a small Catholic monastery just a short drive from the lake.
We reached both via the winding six-mile-long Ogden Canyon road. At the canyon’s crest, the rural and picturesque Ogden Valley opened up before us.
The lush mountain valley is nestled under two towering 9,000 foot peaks, one named Mount Ogden and the other Monte Cristo. Other summits are nearby, including the 8,000 foot Lewis Peak.
These days the Ogden Valley is named after the Catholic Canadian fur trapper and explorer Peter Skene Ogden (1790-1854). He led expeditions into the area two centuries ago.
Before then, the Northwestern Shoshone (the Newe people) called the place Ango-we-ya-dye (“where the red berries grow”). They named their summer camp grounds after the abundant berries that grow there.
For hundreds of years, three branches of the Ogden River ran unimpeded with water from the nearby mountain peaks. The melting snowpack coursed through the valley, down the canyon, and ultimately into the Great Salt Lake.
In the nineteenth century, locals called the area between the rivers “the Artesian Park” in honor of the many artesian wells dug there beginning in 1889. According to a contemporary local newspaper: “No one thing accomplished by the city administration promises more for Ogden than the development of the Artesian Wells and the making of plans to have Artesian Park one of the most beautiful outdoor spots in the Rocky Mountain region.”
That beautiful spot would soon change.
In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the Ogden River Project to help with local irrigation. Project managers built the Pineview dam in 1937 at the eastern end of Ogden Canyon.
Within a short time, the dammed river backed up over hundreds of low-lying agricultural acres to form the Pineview reservoir. The Artesian wells and several farms—one belonging to my law partner’s ancestors—flooded and disappeared.
I spent many happy days at the nearby Trappist monastery, which started in 1947. The aging monks left in 2017 and a few years later I remembered them in my Monastery Mornings book.
In addition to the old abbey, however, I also have vivid memories of Pineview reservoir. I swam, picnicked, and water-skied there. It was fun.
But danger and tragedy lurked within the sometimes murky waters too.
In 1974, the reservoir claimed the life of a young man who was to be the student body president at my high school. In 2011, a motorboat propeller struck and killed a woman swimming in the water.
And more than a few cars have tumbled over steep embankments into the deepest waters formed by the earthen dam. Some of them have been suicides.
Mostly, however, folks have just enjoyed the reservoir for its summer recreation and iconic scenic vistas. Some local Huntsville residents even take their final rest at a lovely spot overlooking the water called Cemetery Point.
For the last few years, Utah has suffered from serious drought conditions. Pineview and many other local reservoirs have hit record low water levels.
As a result, Ogden City—which operates the dam and distributes the irrigation water—decided that 2026 was a good time to fix the old pipe that runs below the lake bed. The city drained most of the remaining water and work started in the fall.
For the first time in a long time, much of the land that was below water is visible. Some of it became muddy quick sand, but some is covered with quick growing grass.
A few of the old Artesian wells reappeared. The drained lakebed revealed a couple of cars and some rusty guns likely ditched by criminal minds.
Officials even found an old hand grenade there, and just to be safe, munition experts detonated it on site. Local Ogden Valley residents have strapped on waders and cleaned up lots of trash left behind by the receding waters.
Tourists like me have flocked there to see the transformed hometown landscape. It is spectacular. A few photos I took in September 2026 illustrate this post.
Once the pipe is replaced in early 2027, fresh spring snowmelt will once again rush down the three forks of the Ogden River, fill Pineview, and reconstitute the lake.
And then a whole new generation will make its own Pineview memories over the next one hundred years.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022. Mike’s new holiday novel, tentatively titled “The Merry Matchmaker Monks,” will be published in time for a future fun Christmas read.
