Grizzly Bear Cabin

06/02/2024

Prepping for the 2024 season.

06/10/2023

Mowing once a week isn't nearly enough this year...the grass is growing too fast and thick. Twice a week will be pushing it.

06/06/2023

Update: No private beach this year, unfortunately, unless it recedes later in the summer.

Original post:
It looks like we may have a beach this summer! Contrary to early estimates, the current thinking is that Bear Lake will only rise to about 5,916-5,917 ft., which is the maximum height to still have some exposed beach at Grizzly Bear Cabin. The current elevation (June 5) is 5915.56 ft., and, as the graph below shows, most of the snow on the mountains has melted.
We love to see a beautiful deep Bear Lake, but we also like our beach. This year appears to be the perfect balance.

05/29/2023

Getting ready for the 2023 season. It's been an extremely wet, cold winter. Everything is very green. Temperatures remain nice and cool, with highs in the high 60s.

The lawn is very lush and green, but it has more weeds (mostly dandelions) than I'd like. Working on that.

The cabin got water damage from ice dams, but fared much better than many structures in the area. We expect most repairs to be done by the second week of June, with some roofing work that can wait until the fall.

04/02/2023

Oh, good. More snow. 🙄

02/22/2023

We've gotten right around a foot of snow in Draper, Utah, so far (starting late last night), and it's still coming down. The fire hydrant in the middle of the picture is probably around 2' tall, for perspective. Snow is supposed to continue until around 7 pm.

The mountains already had a huge amount of snow--skiers are having a blast. We're almost exactly where we were in 2011 and just a little below 2017, when Bear Lake got filled close to capacity.

The first picture is our cul-de-sac at about 8 am this morning. The other two are the security camera pointed at our playset at Grizzly Bear Cabin...one this morning, and the other from October, so that you can gauge where the snow is.

01/30/2023

It's a bit chilly up at Bear Lake this morning. Looking forward to Spring!

06/05/2022

Prepping for the 2022 Summer season.

05/01/2022

https://kutv.com/news/local/bear-lake-state-park-to-begin-day-use-reservation-system-in-idaho

Bear Lake State Park in Idaho will soon begin a day-use reservation system. The lake's popular North Beach area will require visitors to use thereservation system for the season starting Monday. Officials on the state park's website said that North Beach normally reaches capacity on Fridays around 1...

10/27/2021

This site provides water and soil data and graphs for the Bear River Valley (and other watersheds):
https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/ut/snow/products/?cid=nrcseprd1329940

graph comparing the current snow water equivalent (in inches) for an individual SNOTEL site with all other years from the historical record. Graphs also include statistical background data, such as the maximum, normal, and minimum water years, as well as shading based on the 10th, 30th, 50th, 70th,....

05/31/2021

https://utahfamilyfunstuff.com/summer-things-bear-lake-idaho-utah/

Visiting Bear Lake in Idaho-Utah this summer? We have the mega list of 21 things to do!

05/31/2021

Getting ready for the 2021 Summer season.

05/22/2021

New furniture by Kirk Topham: Coffee table for the great room and tables for the loft bedrooms.

04/18/2021

New for 2021: Starlink satellite internet service.

Due to the location of the cabin, the best internet connectivity we could get previously was about 6 Mbps down/256 kbps up. Starlink generally provides 120-200 Mbps down/18-25 Mbps up. That's about 20 times faster download speeds, and about 100 times faster uploads.

This higher speed internet will allow all Grizzly Bear Cabin guests to connect to the internet over wi-fi (instead of relying on their cell phone data plans) and will also ensure reliable Zoom and Teams meetings for those who may need to work during their vacations.

Starlink is still in beta, which means that the connection gets lost for a few minutes at a time several times a day. If the connection is lost for more than 5 seconds, the wi-fi router will failover to the slower DSL connection until Starlink returns.

https://www.cnet.com/videos/testing-out-spacex-starlink-satellite-internet/

02/16/2021

We haven't gotten much snow this winter, but it looks like 3-4" dropped last night. (I haven't been at the cabin for a few weeks--these are from the security cameras.)