Bear Lake’s impossibly blue water carries a darker reputation to go with the scenery: locals have spun tales for generations of a serpentine beast lurking in its depths, anywhere from 40 to 200 feet long depending on who’s telling it, with tusks, teeth or conical ears added or subtracted with each retelling. This piece traces the legend from its campfire origins through the version passed down by the late Ted Alsop, a beloved Utah State University geography professor who used the monster story as a teaching hook for real science about the lake’s actual depth and geologic origins. Along the way, it considers why tales like this one — kin to Loch Ness and Sasquatch — refuse to die, and what our fondness for them says about older, more primal instincts still lurking in the backs of our minds. It’s part local folklore, part science lesson, told from the shoreline of one of northern Utah’s most scenic, and most mysterious, lakes.
Written by Jeremy Pugh for Salt Lake Magazine, Apr 22, 2021.