In an average year, anglers will spend 1.5 million hours fishing on the state's oldest Bureau of Reclamation reservoir, most hoping to land a hard-fighting rainbow trout or a large Bear Lake cutthroat. A smaller group of anglers focus on the kokanee salmon.

More anglers head to Strawberry than any other Utah fishery, and they spend a substantial amount of money for everything from fishing gear to fuel for boats to food and lodging, generating an estimated $20 million a year for the state's economy.

A combination of rich nutrients and a healthy insect population allows the reservoir to grow big trout quickly, which makes it among the most important freshwater recreational fisheries in the U.S.

But anglers and state biologists have identified a possible threat to the fisheries of Strawberry Reservoir. They feel the successful reproduction of wild trout and salmon on tributaries flowing into Strawberry may be jeopardized by proposed oil and gas exploration, and drilling if the resources are found, in the surrounding Uinta National Forest.

"We have zero tolerance for any new sediment coming into the streams from the development of roads and increased traffic [associated with oil and gas exploration and mining]," said Alan Ward, Strawberry Project coordinator for the Division of Wildlife Resources (DWR). "[Sediment] definitely has an impact on production in those streams."

To illustrate the concern, Ward joined members of Trout Unlimited, a nonprofit conservation group, recently on a tour to Trout Creek, one of Strawberry's tributaries.

Trout Unlimited volunteers from the Stonefly Society, the Salt Lake Chapter of the organization, have built "fish coolers," which hold several thousand wild trout eggs that are fed by the stream. One such cooler near Trout Creek's source spring showed healthy eggs hardly affected by sediment.

Just downstream, however, near the junction of a pair of dusty roads, another fish cooler's eggs were covered with the dust and sediment, making hatching them a difficult proposition. Successful hatching of the eggs requires frequent trips to the coolers to flush the eggs clean of sediment.

Ward said there are at least 10 important Strawberry tributaries that could be harmed by oil and gas industry practices in a 57,000-acre area surrounding the reservoir known as the Strawberry Project Lands.

The USDA Forest Service received surface rights for the Strawberry Project Lands in 1988 in an arrangement between the federal government and the Strawberry Water Users Association.

The association, a private irrigation company that built the dam with a loan from the U.S. government, retained the mineral rights to the Strawberry Project Lands and recently entered into a lease agreement with Ensource, an energy company, that could search for oil and gas in the Strawberry Valley.

Kim Martin, forest engineer for the Uinta National Forest, said Ensource has not requested a federal special-use permit required to begin exploration activities on the Strawberry Project Lands. He said if the resources were discovered, the Bureau of Reclamation would then have to be involved in granting permission for drilling.

Ensource officials toured the lands last week but could not be reached for comment.

Trout Unlimited, founded in Michigan in 1959 with the goal of protecting streams such as those in the Strawberry Valley with the potential for growing wild trout, does not oppose oil and gas development, as long as it is done in a way that protects the streams and aesthetics of the valley, with important areas for fish and wildlife set aside from development.

Corey Fisher, energy field coordinator for Trout Unlimited, said the group would like a chance for hunters and anglers to comment before a decision on any special-use permit is made.

More than $34 million in taxpayer dollars, according to Trout Unlimited, has been spent since the mid-1980s to restore the health of streams that flow into Strawberry Reservoir that were heavily damaged by years of overgrazing.

The purpose of the money was to allow Strawberry's tributaries to recover to the point where they could raise millions of wild trout and kokanee salmon. And the removal of cattle and fencing of streams have helped some of the tributaries begin to produce wild fish.

"Every fish we produce on Strawberry helps the entire state," said David Serdar, president of the Salt Lake City-based Stonefly Society of the Wasatch, adding that hatchery trout for Strawberry might be used in other parts of Utah if healthy tributaries can produce more wild fish. "We need to protect [the tributaries] every way we can."

Strawberry has a long history of producing great trout fishing, although Utah chub and suckers, which outcompete trout for food, have forced wildlife officials to take drastic measures to restore trout numbers.

When officials chemically treated the reservoir in 1990 to remove all the fish, they replanted the fishery with Bear Lake cutthroat trout, which eat chubs, helping to keep their numbers in Strawberry under control.

In a normal year, Ward said, about one in five of the cutthroat or kokanee salmon caught by Strawberry anglers are wild fish produced in the streams. That number ran as high as 60 percent in the late 1990s. Utah simply doesn't have the hatchery capacity to replace those numbers of fish, officials said.

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Contact Tom Wharton at wharton@sltrib.com or 801-257-8909. Contact Brett Prettyman at brettp@sltrib.com or 801-257-8902.

Strawberry fishing facts