Community Involvement Chamber Service Project

Chamber Service Project

On July 12, the Lincoln Point shoreline area of Utah Lake was overgrown with weeds and willows, preventing access to what used to be a popular recreational area.

The next day, all that changed.

About 50 volunteers spent several hours on July 13 cleaning up the area, opening up trails and areas for fishing. They also picked up and hauled out a considerable amount of trash.

It was all part of a service project organized by the Natural Resources Committee of the Utah Valley Chamber of Commerce with assistance from the Utah Lake Commission.

“We used clippers and went to town cleaning the old trails, and we created some mountains of brush clippings and tree clippings” that were later mulched by the county, said Eric Ellis, executive director of the Utah Lake Commission and a member of the Natural Resources Committee.

Lincoln Point is located on the south end of Utah Lake in the Lake Shore area near Lake Mountain. Utah County acquired the property within the last two years.

“It has a lot of cool history,” Ellis said of the area, which was once home to a variety of resort amenities. These included a marina, a couple of boat ramps and a jetty — all of which were overgrown.

The volunteers focused their efforts on clearing out brush from these facilities and old trails in the area while also picking up garbage from about 15 acres of the point.

“It was amazing to see how busy everybody was during that time, especially considering it was a hot July day,” Ellis said.

Opening the area up will now allow local residents to more easily use it for recreational activities. Lincoln Point is beautiful, Ellis said, and offers great fishing and duck hunting. There’s even warm springs in the area that keep the water from freezing, allowing fishing throughout the year.

“All year round, it will be a popular place, and the more we can do, the more accessible it becomes and the more people can come and enjoy it,”

Ellis said.

The Utah Lake Commission was eager to see the Lincoln Point area cleaned up as it will be submitting a grant application to obtain funding for improving roads in the area, allowing access to potential camp sites. Clearing out the brush and trash made it easier to see the area’s potential for recreational opportunities.

As a whole, Utah Lake is full of promise, and with improvements, it will explode in popularity, Ellis said.

“I think the main vision is that Utah Lake has so much to offer. It is an enormous lake that is drastically underutilized because of one reason or another,” he said. “We have very limited water resources in our mountain reservoirs that are at or beyond capacity (for recreation) and yet have so much capacity at Utah Lake, both on the shorelines and out on the lake.”

During the 2021 Utah legislative session, the Utah Valley Chamber worked with state and local leaders to encourage allocation of state dollars to improve the quality of Utah Lake to help it become a recreational hub in the state.

“We believe that the business community not only employs the workforce, but we need to give back to the community so those who we employ can enjoy the high quality of life we have here in Utah Valley,” said Steve Lockhart, director of government affairs for the Utah Valley Chamber of Commerce. “This service project is one of the ways our business community can show its concern for the preservation and protection of our natural resources.”

The Utah Lake Commission provide ongoing opportunities to volunteer at the lake, including through its Adopt-A-Shoreline Program. For more information, visit utahlake.org or find the Utah Lake Commission on Facebook.

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