Administrators at Utah's newest state park on Thursday braced for what could only be called a run on the reservoir as campers swarmed the gates and anglers prepared for an all-night vigil before Friday's fishing opening at Jordanelle State Park.
The Hailstone portion of the attraction - designed with weekend crowds from the Wasatch Front in mind - was formally dedicated in a Thursday morning ceremony three hours before overnighters poured in to claim all the park's 250 camping sites.Thursday's occasion marked the culmination of $19 million in public, federally funded recreational development around the Jordanelle, a manmade lake that began filling in the fall of 1993.
"From all indications, it's looking like a great turnout," said park manager Steve Carpenter, noting the Jordanelle's two campgrounds already are booked solid for the next three weekends and that the reservoir's 300-boat limit will probably kick in within hours of the fishing opening.
"We are expecting turnaway crowds," said Carpenter.
The project, on U.S. 40 about 10 minutes southeast of Park City, was open to the public in a limited sense last year when the Rock Cliffs recreational area near the Summit County town of Francis was christened.
Hailstone's campgrounds were scheduled to open at 2 p.m. Thursday, and park officials planned to allow fishermen into the area at 6 a.m. Friday, onto the water at 7 a.m. Carpenter said he expected a sizeable waiting line to form overnight, an expectation shared by Nicole Mallory, a receptionist at the state's Parks and Recreation Division in Salt Lake City, who said she handled a "ba-zillion calls" this week about the Jordanelle.
"We've been bombarded with questions . . . people are asking if they can camp in their cars Thursday night so they get a good spot," said Mallory.
The answer is yes, said Mallory, though police may limit the waiting line to a couple of hundred vehicles at the Mayflower exit of U.S. 40.
Hailstone's dedication ceremony shortly before noon honored the first camper, Alvin Hailstone, whose great-grandfather settled the area and for whom a local town was named. The historical crossroads village of Hailstone today is under about 250 feet of water, however, as the Jordanelle continues to raise at about a foot a day from snowmelt of the High Uintas of northeastern Utah.
The lake by the time it is full - probably in late 1997 - will be 296 feet at its deepest point, storing 320,000 acre-feet of water and covering 3,000 surface acres.
The Hailstone area features an amphitheater, marinas, a restaurant, boat ramps and a visitors center. Sport fish in the lake include three kinds of trout - rainbow, German brown and cutthroat - and smallmouth bass. Wintertime activities will include cross-country skiing and ice fishing.
The 300-foot-tall Jordanelle Dam, built at a cost of $114 million, is a cornerstone of the Central Utah Project, a U.S. Bureau of Reclamation effort to bring water from the east side of the Wasatch Mountains to the western slope, which includes Utah's most populous areas.
On the upper Provo River above the Heber Valley and Deer Creek Reservoir, the Jordanelle is touted by water managers as a multiple-use lake that offers flood control and an unprecedented supply of freshwater storage for the Wasatch Front, growing by 40,000 people per year.
Park managers note the presence an hour away of most of urban Utah, where 1.5 million people live in a narrow band at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains from Span-ish Fork to Brigham City. The Jordanelle is at an elevation of about 6,200 feet in a climate zone cooler than most of Salt Lake or Utah counties.
Land speculators have long anticipated the park and its accompanying infrastructure will fuel proposed development that includes 8,000 housing and lodging units, ranging from single-home sites to condos and hotels.