Cisco's Sonar by Bryce Nielsen

Car Bodies in the Lake

When I first came to Bear Lake as a fisheries biologist in 1974, I heard about the car bodies in Bear Lake. A few years later I acquired an X15 chart recorder sonar which showed the lake bottom and decided to go out and try to find them. I knew they were off USU fish lab in Garden City so that's where I started to look. They were placed in 1965, but the biologists were mistaken about the food habits of the fish in the lake. The cars would have been good habitat for bass and bluegill but not trout. Bonneville Cisco feed primarily on zooplankton and the rest of the fish either eat eggs or other fish. During the summer they supplement their feed with terrestrial insects found on the surface of the water and invertebrates on the bottom.

As I was searching for the cars, I found what appeared to be another structure on the bottom off Sweetwater Resort. I later determined that it was rocks that had eroded off Gus Rich Point for thousands of years. They had been encrusted over the eons with calcium carbonate and were called stromatolites. They look a lot like brain coral and they are an excellent spawning substrate. I called the area the Rockpile.

Since there are no rocks on the bottom of Bear Lake, this discovery was extremely important. Studies have shown that it is an important spawning area for cisco, whitefish, and sculpin. During the winter, large numbers of fish congregate to spawn, eat eggs or prey on other fish. This has resulted in the area being one of the most popular spots to fish on Bear Lake. As far as the cars were concerned, they have probably all eroded to nothing by now due to the erosive nature of Bear Lake’s water. At least they led me to the Rockpile which has provided countless hours of fishing and harvest for anglers on Bear Lake.