Moon Lake Monster

Moon Lake is a deep glacial lake high in the Uinta Mountains, in Ashley National Forest about 32 miles north of Duchesne, Utah. It is a natural lake that was enlarged by a dam built during the Depression, and a 1989 Deseret News feature noted that its depth is uncertain and that some visitors say the bottom has never been found. The same article records that stories of a Moon Lake Monster circulated among visitors and that a ranger acknowledged “a lot of talk over the years.”

The creature’s best-known witness is Bill Reardon, who ran Moon Lake Resort and wrote about the legend in a 1998 newspaper article. According to the resort’s own telling, a guest named Gary Sutherland described a sighting to Reardon in 1994. Reardon later watched a V-shaped ripple travel across calm water in the early morning or at dusk, with no wake behind it, and could not explain it. He and his wife saw nothing in two full seasons at the lake. Other visitors have said something followed a boat, looking like a floating log with a fin and scaly water, or that a black, bumpy creature tried to tip a family’s boat until another boat arrived.

As with many lake monster tales, the story is entwined with older and more serious lore. Resort and wiki accounts describe stories that Ute people avoid the lake, which they associate with dangerous water spirits sometimes called “water babies.” The sources for these accounts are secondhand and commercial, and they cannot speak for the Ute Indian Tribe, whose own traditions about water and place should be learned from the tribe itself and treated as a living part of Ute culture rather than as monster lore.

Moonie, as some call it, is a smaller-scale regional cousin of the Bear Lake and Utah Lake monsters. It has never been photographed clearly, and the evidence remains eyewitness impressions of ripples, logs and wakes.

A dark, serpentine or log-like animal, put at 12 to 15 feet long and likened to a “bumpy log” with scales; most often noticed as a V-shaped ripple moving across still water at dawn or dusk.

Moon Lake, at roughly 8,000 feet in the High Uintas of northeastern Utah; reported on calm water in the early morning or evening.

The Moon Lake Monster is a staple of Moon Lake Resort’s history pages and of Utah ghost-and-legend roundups, which often link it to a story of a ghostly girl at the lake. It belongs to the broader Utah tradition of lake monsters that began with Bear Lake in 1868.