Find out how a season of terrible floods left Salt Lake City residents with a memorable scene: their neighbors packing sandbags to create a river running down State Street.
When Utah joined the nation's crusade against polio in the 1950s, officials weren't sure what to do about public pools. Were they a place where children got relief from their symptoms or a nexus for mass infection?
Dams are a vital part of Utah's water infrastructure -- but they sometimes fail. A breach of the Mammoth Dam in 1917 sent millions of gallons of water rushing downstream, and exposed its poor conditions of construction and operation.
Utah has an insatiable demand for water, and the Bear River is one of northern Utah's most abundant sources. Despite this, efforts to fully develop it have long been stymied by a combination of geography and politics.
Recreational boating became popular on Utah's lakes during the late 1800s, and some entrepreneurs took major risks to make a profit. Learn about one captain who even went down with his ship!
Utah Lake was once an important and abundant source of fish and wildlife for the Timpanogos Ute people. But by the turn of the twentieth century, Utah Lake's native fish species had almost completely vanished.
Stocking Utah's waterways with sport fish is a practice that goes back more than a century -- so long ago that many people may think these introduced species are native. Find out how this impacts Utah's true native fishes.
Stereotyped as dirty and dangerous, Salt Lake City's Westside was the last to receive sanitation improvements. The city's slow response to public health concerns helped make the area's bad reputation worse. Learn more about how public sewer systems affect communities.
For almost a hundred years, explorers and mapmakers recorded a river that ran west from Utah out to the Pacific Ocean, despite no such waterway ever even existing.
The Central Utah Project -- which is still under construction -- began with plenty of optimism and ambition. But politics and the inherent difficulty of moving mountains nearly sank the project. Learn how it survived.
The vast plumbing infrastructure of the Central Utah Project is the culmination of Utah's desires to move water to where we want it to be. Find out how complicated and contentious this endeavor has been.
When members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints first arrived in Utah in 1847, they set about changing Utah's arid environment with irrigation techniques and canals that affect our landscape today.
Utah's limited water supply needs to be closely monitored! But this is nothing new. In Utah's settler communities, the local watermaster was a vital figure, although not always the most popular one.
The search for more affordable, alternative energy sources is nothing new. Learn how a businessman in the late 1800s electrified rural Utah using a state-of-the-art hydroelectric system.
The colonization of northern Utah's Cache Valley escalated tensions that led to the horrific 1863 massacre of Shoshone people at their winter camp on Bear River. Learn how the Shoshone have returned to the river and are reclaiming it as a healing ground for the future.
Located along the Utah-Idaho border, the Bear River is the source of life for Northwestern Shoshone people. They know it as Boa Ogoi and for hundreds of years, winters spent along its edge offered respite and rejuvenation.
Frequent droughts and a growing population continue to raise the stakes for water access in Utah. Learn about a drawn-out conflict over water in Salt Lake City that shows how tensions between agricultural and municipal water users are hardly new.
What is it about a body of water that brings people together? Learn about an infrastructure project on the Little Bear River that helped the Cache Valley community of Hyrum to flourish -- in more ways than one.
In the late 19th century, a Utah newspaper announced that the two whales swimming in Utah's Great Salt Lake had added children to their family. Was this a scientific reality, or just a whale of a tale?
Winters in northern Utah's Cache Valley are harsh. To survive and thrive, indigenous Shoshone peoples and Mormon settlers were faced with the question of "Will the challenges of winter make you or break you?"
The Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge protects an important -- but incredibly vulnerable -- part of northern Utah's ecosystem. This is no accident. Learn how a mysterious illness and community activism led to its creation.
Anyone who lives near Utah's mountains knows how dangerous winter avalanches can be. Today, avalanches are closely monitored and relatively controlled. But it wasn't always so. Learn about the 1897 avalanche in Provo Canyon that ended in tragedy.
