The worked valley and what it grows
Tremonton and Garland Bothwell and Thatcher Private working land
The Bear River Valley is the wide, worked floor north and west of Brigham City, and its towns are farm towns. Tremonton and Garland sit at the center, with the smaller crossroads of Bothwell and Thatcher out on the flats. This is irrigated crop country, green rectangles of field running out to the mountains, and it has grown food since the water arrived more than a century ago.
What comes off this ground is a long list. Wheat and barley, field corn and oats, alfalfa and grass hay, onions, dry beans, potatoes, peas, sugar beets, tomatoes, sunflowers and safflower, with cattle and dairy alongside the crops. From the 1940s into the 1960s the valley also ran a sizable turkey-farming business, one of the older chapters of its farm economy. The mix shifts field to field and year to year, but the identity holds: this is working cropland, not scenery.
Almost all of it is private, best seen from the public highways rather than up a farm lane. What the farm country gives a visitor is the context for the whole valley. The fields, the canal banks and the grain trucks on the state routes are one system, and they are the reason the towns are here at all.
The details
Getting there
From Brigham City, SR-13 and I-15 run north into the valley in about twenty minutes; Tremonton and Garland sit at the center, and the side roads off the state routes are where the fields open up. It is easy paved driving, with the mountains on the horizon and the crop land stretching between.
Before you go
- The fields are private; enjoy them from the road and leave farm lanes and equipment alone.
- Spring green through the first hay cutting, then harvest color into October, is the valley at its fullest.
- Grain trucks and slow farm equipment share the state routes in season; give them room.
- Fuel, groceries and services are in Tremonton and Garland; plan your stops in the towns.
The 1892 canal that made it
John R. Bothwell Canal completed 1892 The town of Bothwell
There is a valley to farm here because someone brought it water. The land was dry sagebrush flat until a canal system engineered and promoted by John R. Bothwell was completed in 1892, pulling Bear River water out onto thousands of acres and turning open range into cropland. The small community of Bothwell, west of Tremonton, still carries his name.
The other force that shaped the fields came a decade later. The Utah Sugar Company built a sugar factory at Garland in 1903, bought up land, and encouraged growers across the valley to plant sugar beets, which set the cropping pattern for generations. What became of that factory is Garland's own story; here it is enough to know that beets, and the canal water before them, built the farm economy you drive through today.
Together the canal and the beet years explain the valley's shape. The straight section-line roads, the long canal banks running beside the fields, and the green crop ground where a map of the raw country would show desert are all the mark of that engineered water.
The details
The lay of the land
The canals are easiest to read from the roads west of Tremonton toward Bothwell and Thatcher, where the ditches run straight beside the fields they feed. It is a slow, quiet drive through the ground the 1892 water turned green.
Before you go
- The 1892 canal is the reason the fields are green; the irrigation water is still part of what farm ground here is worth.
- The town of Bothwell is a farm crossroads, not a tourist stop; there are no visitor services out there.
- Sugar beets set the valley's cropping after 1903, and you still see beet ground among the wheat and hay today.
- Straight canal-bank roads make good slow drives, but many are gravel and some are private.
The Bear River, and where it ends
Past Corinne Into the Great Salt Lake A river with no ocean
The valley takes its name from the Bear River, which is often called the largest river in the Western Hemisphere that never reaches an ocean. It rises in the high Uinta Mountains, loops through Wyoming and Idaho, and returns to Utah, coming into Box Elder County to make its final run across the farm valley.
Below Cache Valley the river slips through a gap in the Wellsville Mountains that old maps call the Gates of the Bear River, then spreads out across the flat valley floor, passes the farm town of Corinne, and loses itself in the marshes and open water of the Great Salt Lake. It reaches no sea; the lake has no outlet, so the water simply evaporates. That is the whole point of the superlative, a real river that ends in a landlocked lake instead of an ocean.
For a resident the river is less a destination than a presence: the water that fills the canals, the green line of cottonwoods across the fields, and the reason the bird marshes at the bottom of the valley exist at all.
The details
Following the river
The easiest look is from the state-route bridges around Corinne, where the Bear crosses the valley on its way to the marshes. The lower banks run through private farm ground and the remote wildlife areas, so the river is more often glimpsed than followed.
Before you go
- The river rises in the high Uintas and loops through Wyoming and Idaho before returning to Utah to end in this valley.
- It reaches the sea nowhere; the Great Salt Lake has no outlet, so the water evaporates instead of flowing onward.
- Lines of cottonwoods across the fields mark the river and its old channels from a distance.
- Most of the lower bank is private farmland or remote marsh; view it from bridges and the public edges.
The bird marshes and the waterfowl areas
Public Shooting Grounds Salt Creek Locomotive Springs
Where the Bear River loses itself in the lake, it makes some of the most important migratory-bird habitat in the West. The mix of fresh river water and salt lake, spread across miles of shallow marsh, draws enormous numbers of ducks, geese, shorebirds and wading birds through the migration seasons, and the National Audubon Society flags the wider marsh complex as an Important Bird Area.
Out on the remote west and northwest edges of the valley, toward the lake, sit three state Waterfowl Management Areas run by the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources: the Public Shooting Grounds, Salt Creek, and Locomotive Springs. They are managed first for waterfowl and upland-bird production, and they are open to the public for hunting in season and for wildlife viewing the rest of the year.
These are working marshes, not developed parks. There are few services and long gravel roads to reach them, and access and conditions shift with the season and the water, so they reward a prepared, self-sufficient trip far more than a spur-of-the-moment drive.
The details
Reaching the marshes
The wildlife areas lie well west of Tremonton and Corinne on gravel roads that cross open farm and range country. Confirm current access and road conditions with the Division of Wildlife Resources before you go, and treat any drive out there as a remote-country trip.
Before you go
- These are primarily hunting and viewing lands; know the season and the rules before you visit.
- Roads out to the marshes are gravel and can be rough, muddy or closed with the weather.
- There is no fuel, water or cell service out there; carry what you need and tell someone your plan.
- Spring and fall migration bring the biggest numbers of birds; a midsummer midday is quiet.
The valley edges and Belmont Springs
Plymouth and Portage The Malad Valley Toward the Idaho line
The farm country does not stop at a fence; it thins out at the edges. At the far north end of the valley, the Malad River drains the Malad Valley down toward the Bear, and the small towns of Plymouth and Portage sit on that arid northern ground, the last Utah farmland before the Idaho line.
Up near Plymouth there is one more oddity worth a survey mention: Belmont Springs, a small public golf course paired with a warm spring, where the spring has been used on a limited basis over the years. It has changed hands more than once, so anything about hours or what is open is best confirmed directly before you count on it.
These edges are quiet farm-and-range country, not attractions in their own right. They matter mostly as the frame around the worked valley, the dry ground that shows what the canal water changed.
The details
The north end
US-91 runs north from Tremonton up through the Malad Valley toward the Idaho line, passing the farm ground around Plymouth and Portage. It is an easy paved drive with long open views, and it is the dry edge the 1892 canal never reached.
Before you go
- The north-end towns are small farm communities; do not expect visitor services.
- Belmont Springs has changed operators over the years; confirm anything current directly before a trip.
- US-91 north is a quiet paved route with big open views toward the Idaho line.
- This is the dry ground the canal did not reach, a good picture of the valley before the water.
