Summit Creek, and the water that made Summit

It comes off the Markagunt Plateau, the high country east of the valley. Almost all the water here starts as snow on that plateau, and Summit Creek is one of the small streams that carry the snowmelt down to the valley floor. It runs year round in its canyon. By the time it crosses the flat ground at Summit most of its water has been taken out for fields, and the channel can run dry. That steady canyon water is the whole reason a farming community sits here at all.

The irrigated ground at Summit. The creek feeds the fields that make up the community, and that irrigated land is still what the local economy runs on. Summit is fields and pasture rather than streets and storefronts, and the pattern of who waters what follows claims made when the first families arrived in 1853.

Yes. The U.S. Geological Survey counts five perennial mountain streams that enter the Parowan Valley: Parowan Creek, which is the largest, plus Red, Little, Cottonwood and Summit creeks. Together those five carried roughly 18,000 acre feet a year when the survey measured them in 2013 and 2014, and Summit Creek is the third largest of the five, far smaller than Parowan Creek.

Not really, and it is honest to say so. Summit Creek has no park, no creek trail, no fishing access and no reservoir open to the public on it, though a gravel backway climbs Summit Canyon to the mountain in summer and is closed in winter. It is working farm water, not a recreation stream, so treat the land around it as private and view the creek from the public road.

It sits on the low divide between the Parowan Valley and the Cedar Valley, and a summit is what that rise is. The name is about the ground, not the height, and the divide it names decides which way the water drains, where the freeway exit fell and how the snow sits. I cover that divide in full on the between two valleys page.

No, and the difference matters for anybody buying land here. Summit Creek is surface water you can see running in a ditch. The Parowan Valley aquifer is the groundwater stored under the whole valley, pumped through wells, and it is governed by a separate state management plan. I keep the two on separate pages, and the aquifer page is where the pumping and the plan live.

In its canyon, yes. The survey maps it as perennial there, which means it flows year round rather than only after storms, fed by snowmelt held in the plateau above. Where it crosses the flat ground at Summit it is mapped as intermittent, because in the irrigation season most of it is piped off at the canyon mouth, and the channel can run dry. Like every stream here it runs high in spring and low by late summer, and a dry winter on the plateau shows up as a thin creek the following year.

More than the house does, in a lot of cases. Irrigated ground here comes with water rights attached to it, and those rights, their priority date and how much water they actually deliver are often the most valuable thing about a parcel. If you are looking at acreage in Summit, read the water right as carefully as you read the deed, and get somebody local to help you check it.

There is no public reservoir on Summit Creek. In the irrigation season the water is piped from a diversion at the canyon mouth to fields west of the community, rather than stored behind a dam you can visit, which is different from Parowan Creek to the north, where Yankee Meadows Reservoir sits up the canyon above Parowan. On Summit Creek the water goes straight to the irrigated ground.