Rod Miller

The words “Goshen Bay” are seldom heard when talk turns to Utah Lake. But for a boy growing up in Goshen, the bay was the lake. Goshen Bay is the shallow, muddy, tepid southernmost extent of the lake as it seeps into Goshen Valley, bordered by gently rising land to the south and west, and on the east, oddly enough, by West Mountain. There were, and so far as I know still are, no improvements—no boat ramps, no beaches, no parks. The nearest attraction, Lincoln Beach, lies just around the north end of West Mountain, fronting the lake proper.

In years gone by there were high hopes for Goshen Bay. According to Raymond Duane Steele’s Goshen Valley History, an “all-water route between Goshen and Salt Lake City…would be established sometime in the near future. This proposed route contemplated a canal from the source of the Jordon [sic] River to Salt Lake City.”

There was no such talk during my boyhood in the nineteen-fifties and sixties. At least, no one in my community said much at all about the lake. But it was always there. In high water years, Goshen Bay would creep into cow pastures and hay meadows—its fluctuations likely among the reasons the town of Goshen relocated three or four times, each time moving south and farther from the lake. Most years, the bay would shrink in summer heat, leaving behind stained cattail reeds, soiled salt grass, and crusty mud flats.

But for the boys of Goshen Valley—residing in Goshen, as well as Genola, Elberta, and remote farms and ranches—Goshen Bay offered the occasional distraction. 

The invasive carp fouling the lake intrigued us. I remember wading through the mud and cattails to reach the shores of the bay during spring spawning season to spear the trash fish with a pitchfork. In water only half as deep as their bodies, the carp would splash and thrash around stirring up black mud. In places, it seemed they were so thick you could walk upon their backs and never get your feet wet, and spearing them was not necessary—you could hoist and fling them out of the water using the pitchfork like a shovel. 

After reading Where the Red Fern Grows, the classic novel by Wilson Rawls, I had, for a time, a fascination with coon hunting. I imagined tramping through woods at night on the track of baying hounds trailing shifty raccoons as they employed their wily ways to outsmart the pursuing dogs. I was surprised and delighted to learn that two brothers from Genola, a few years older and a grade or two ahead of me at Goshen School, ran hounds after raccoons, which were not common in our country. I was excited when they invited me on a hunt. Unfortunately, neither the boys nor their dogs had read Where the Red Fern Grows. Our hunt took place in the bright light of a summer afternoon. Rather than woods, the dogs were set loose in the brush and scattered scrubby trees on a little peninsula of sorts sticking its nose into Goshen Bay. The hounds did not flush a single raccoon. They did, however, upset a skunk sufficiently to taint the air and themselves. So much for coon hunting. 

In the coldest winters, the shallow water of Goshen Bay froze. Sometimes north winds would pile ice floes from the lake into the bay, creating jumbled canyons and crevasses among the stacked sheets of thick ice, some turned upright. One winter, an adventurous uncle of mine drove onto the ice in his car and towed us around on sleds. He died on that same ice a few years later. A heart attack felled him on the frozen bay while he was hunting geese. 

The easiest access to Goshen Bay, then and now, was from the road through Genola along the eastern shore. Goshen’s Center Street, which becomes Goshen Bay Road, peters out in the alkali and mud flats. On the west side, the highway is a few miles from the water, until the road reaches the Lake Mountains at the end of Goshen Valley. That road, Highway 68, is now labeled Redwood Road. Back then, we called it the West Lake Road. Before Interstate 15 opened, it was the quickest way to get to Salt Lake City, since the main road on the east side of the lake, Highway 91, slowed down for every city and town along the way, making the trip long and miserable. On the West Lake Road, however, we could travel as fast as we could talk Dad into driving, with the reward for speed a thrilling roller coaster ride over the ups and downs and humps and hollows of the old wagon road covered in asphalt. 

For years, Dad worked on a ranch owned by the Mormon church near the ghost town Mosida, on the western shores of Goshen Bay. He was a cowboy and later cow boss at the ranch, riding herd through the tamarisk brakes (incorrectly known as tamaracks to locals) lining the bay, where a good cow dog was as important as a horse in gathering cows and calves. One summer saw a makeshift rodeo arena staked out in a salt grass pasture, a steer slaughtered and roasted in a pit, and a summer afternoon of horsemanship contests, calf roping, steer riding, games and races, and picnicking on spread blankets. 

The ranch is gone now, forgotten like Mosida before it. Gut Goshen Bay is still there, waiting and hoping—along with the rest of Utah’s namesake lake—for a promising future. Whatever tomorrow brings, the boys from Goshen Valley will never forget our yesterdays at Goshen Bay.