The water Enterprise
Started 1893, finished 1909, and still stocked every spring
The Enterprise Reservoirs, and the sixteen years underneath them.
Two reservoirs in the Dixie National Forest ten miles southwest of town, with a boat ramp, stocked rainbow trout, smallmouth bass and a campground among volcanic rock. The dam under the lower one took sixteen years of hand labor and is the reason the town exists.
By Scott Buehler, Southern Utah local
Updated September 2026
The short answer
The Enterprise Reservoirs are two small mountain reservoirs about ten miles southwest of town, up in the Dixie National Forest where Shoal Creek is dammed twice. You can fish them, with rainbow trout stocked every spring and smallmouth bass in the mix, put a boat in at the ramp, and camp beside the water at Honeycomb Rocks. The reason to make the drive is what you do not get anywhere else down here: a stocked, boatable reservoir that stays quiet on a summer weekend. The road is paved most of the way and gravel at the end, an ordinary car handles it dry, and there is no water or shop past the campground, so you stock up in Enterprise first.
What is in the water
Trout stocked in the spring, bass that keep coming back, and a survey every other year.
Upper Enterprise has been managed for a long time as a put, grow and take rainbow trout fishery, with roughly 25,000 five inch fish going in during the spring to grow through the season. That is the backbone of the fishing here and it is the reason the reservoir is worth the drive from St. George or Cedar City.
The more interesting story is the bass. Smallmouth arrived in the 1990s and turned the reservoir into a genuine two tier fishery, popular enough that the state put them back after a treatment in 2002 and again in 2010, when the reservoir had been drained for dam repairs. Two deliberate reestablishments is a fair measure of how much anglers wanted them there.
Since then the state has tried to add variety. Bonneville cutthroat trout went in from 2013 to 2019 but did not establish, and kokanee salmon have been stocked since 2020. The reservoir is netted and surveyed in odd numbered years, which is why the published picture of what is in there shifts every couple of seasons rather than every decade.
Stocking programmes change. Check the current Utah Division of Wildlife Resources regulations and fishing report before you plan a trip around any one of these.
Check the current regulations rather than an older report. Species mixes, limits and any special rules for this reservoir are set by the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources and have changed several times in the last fifteen years. The state's own current guidebook is the only source worth relying on for a specific trip.
The campground
Twenty one sites among rock that looks like it was chewed.
Honeycomb Rocks sits beside the water at roughly 5,700 feet, and it is named for exactly what surrounds it: volcanic tuff weathered into pockets, hollows and arches over a very long time. There are 21 sites with picnic tables, fire pits and tent pads, drinking water, vault toilets and a garbage service, and one of the sites is tucked into a natural alcove in the rock, which is the one everybody wants.
It runs first come rather than on reservations, which makes a Thursday arrival a very different experience from a Friday afternoon one in July. There are no hookups, no showers and no shop, so plan on stocking up in Enterprise before you head out.
The nights are the thing people underestimate. At this elevation it gets genuinely cold after dark in any month of the season, and a summer sleeping bag that works in St. George is not the right bag up here.
Dispersed camping on the forest has its own rules on distance from water and roads. Check the current Dixie National Forest guidance before setting up outside a campground.
Why a reservoir is the town's founding document
The dam came first, and everything else followed it.
The lower reservoir is the original, and it is the reason there is a town here at all. Orson W. Huntsman set out in May 1892 to hold back the flood water of Shoal Creek. He bought 320 acres, had them surveyed into city lots, and named the townsite for the undertaking. The reservoir company was incorporated on 20 September 1893, foundation work began that October, and the cap stone did not go on the wall until the autumn of 1909. Sixteen years, worked in the gaps between farming seasons by people with almost no cash.
By 1922 the irrigation engineer Luther M. Winsor, born just west of here in Hebron, had come back to help build the Upper Enterprise Dam, and that is when the original became the Lower. When the 1902 earthquake shook Hebron apart, six miles west, its families moved here rather than rebuild, because the thing worth moving toward was already standing half built in the canyon.
That inheritance is still live. Shares in the Enterprise Reservoir and Canal Company convey with some properties in this valley, so a listing's water right can matter more than its kitchen. It is also why the state's groundwater management out in the Escalante Valley lands harder here than it would in a town that just happened to sit beside a river.
The plainest version: this is a farm valley that exists because a group of people spent sixteen years moving rock, and the descendants of that decision are still the first thing a buyer here has to understand. The mover page takes it from there.
Sixteen years is not a construction schedule. It is a generation deciding, over and over, that the valley was worth another season of hauling rock.
Scott Buehler
Moving Utah About Scott
Keep reading
More of Enterprise on The Local.
Things to do
The top 8, ranked
Eight picks, ranked, from a stocked reservoir to a ghost town an earthquake ended.
Read the guideThe site
Mountain Meadows
A memorial site ten miles south, and the markers that took 150 years to say it.
Read the guideThe ghost town
Hebron
A freighting town on Shoal Creek that lost its water argument and then its buildings.
Read the guideThe town holiday
Cornfest
The one Saturday a year this town has four thousand extra people in it.
Read the guideMoving here
Forty miles either way
An hour to either metro, and a state groundwater plan that decides the rest.
Read the guideThe companion
Enterprise, from a local
The reservoirs, the memorial site, the ghost town and the corn, in one place.
Read the pageQuick answers
The reservoirs, answered.
About ten miles southwest of Enterprise, inside the Dixie National Forest, in pinyon and juniper country surrounded by large formations of volcanic tuff. There are two of them, the Upper and the Lower, and the road out is paved for most of the way and gravel at the end.
Upper Enterprise has been managed as a put, grow and take rainbow trout fishery with roughly 25,000 five inch fish stocked in the spring. Smallmouth bass have been present since the 1990s and were reestablished after a treatment in 2002 and again in 2010. Bonneville cutthroat trout were stocked from 2013 to 2019 and kokanee salmon from 2020.
Yes. There is a boat ramp and both motorized and non motorized boating are allowed, along with kayaking and canoeing. It is a small mountain reservoir rather than a recreation lake, so match the boat to the water, and expect afternoon wind.
The settlers themselves, over sixteen years. Orson W. Huntsman planned to impound Shoal Creek in May 1892, the reservoir company's articles of incorporation were approved on 20 September 1893, the first foundation work began that October, and the dam was finished in 1909. The Upper Enterprise Dam followed by 1922, built with the help of the irrigation engineer Luther M. Winsor.
Yes, at Honeycomb Rocks Campground beside the water at roughly 5,700 feet. It has 21 sites with picnic tables, fire pits and tent pads, plus drinking water, vault toilets and a garbage service, and one site is set into a natural alcove in the rock. It runs first come rather than on reservations.
Not at the reservoir itself, which has picnic tables but no potable water. The campground next door does have drinking water. Anything else you need should come from Enterprise, ten miles back, because there is nothing between the two.
Roughly April to October in practice, with the campground open for the summer season and the road able to hold snow at either end of it. Confirm current campground dates and any fire restrictions with the Dixie National Forest before a trip.
Yes. A Utah fishing licence is required, and limits and any reservoir specific rules are set by the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources. Because the species mix here has changed several times in the last fifteen years, the state's current guidebook is the only source worth relying on.
Distance and expectation. They sit an hour from St. George and about fifty minutes from Cedar City on a road nobody drives by accident, in a county whose visitors are almost all aiming at red rock. A stocked, boatable reservoir that stays uncrowded on a summer weekend is genuinely unusual in southern Utah.
Water rights out here are the first question on a property, not the last.
Shares in the Enterprise Reservoir and Canal Company still convey with some parcels in this valley, and the groundwater picture underneath it is actively managed by the state. That is the sort of due diligence worth doing before an offer rather than during an inspection period.
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