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The Strawberry High Line Canal is pictured on Wednesday, June 4, 2025.

Jacob Nielson, Daily Herald

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The Strawberry High Line Canal is pictured on Wednesday, June 4, 2025.

Jacob Nielson, Daily Herald

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Central Utah Water Conservancy District engineers Roger Pearson, left, and Derek Bruton explain the plans for the future Salem Water Treatment Plant on Wednesday, June 4, 2025.

Jacob Nielson, Daily Herald

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The Strawberry High Line Canal is pictured on Wednesday, June 4, 2025.

Jacob Nielson, Daily Herald

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The Strawberry High Line Canal is pictured on Wednesday, June 4, 2025.

Jacob Nielson, Daily Herald

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The future Salem Water Treatment Plant is pictured on Wednesday, June 4, 2025.

Jacob Nielson, Daily Herald

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The Strawberry High Line Canal is pictured on Wednesday, June 4, 2025.

Jacob Nielson, Daily Herald

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The assortment of fruit orchards that are scattered throughout Utah County’s southern fields serve both as cultural pillars and cash crops that power the region’s economy.

The county accounts for half of the state’s entire fruit production and is a national leader is cherry production while also churning out large volumes of peaches and apples.

The existence and success of these farms isn’t a product of happenstance or convenience but is a credit to the foresight and ingenuity of a group of Latter-day Saint pioneer settlers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Facing a limited supply of water from nearby streams to grow their crops, settlers in towns like Spanish Fork, Payson and Santaquin looked for a new source of water, and came up with the idea to turn Strawberry Valley into a reservoir that stored water from the Uintah Mountains.

To get the water to Utah Valley, workers blasted a 3.8-mile federally funded tunnel through the mountains that crossed the Wasatch Divide from the Colorado River Basin to the Bonneville Basin.

Completed in 1912, the water flowed from the tunnel into streams the led to the Spanish Fork River and into the valley.

In the century since, the reservoir has grown and new tunnels have been built, yet the settler’s idea still serves as the basis of how much of Utah Valley and the Wasatch Front receives its water.

Now a new plan is in the works to meet the water demands of a growing population of these once sparsely population southern Utah County towns.

The state-owned Central Utah Water Conservancy District, or CUWCD, is working on the Nebo Regional Water Project, a $1 billion-plus plan to turn the Strawberry High Line Canal into a pipeline and build a new water treatment plant in Salem by 2032.

CUWCD engineers believe these measures will service drinking water supply from Salem to Juab County while continuing to meet the needs of the region’s agricultural land for years to come.

And the plan, CUWCD Special Programs Manager Roger Pearson said, is not possible without the assistance of the early settlers.

“(We acknowledge) the foresight of the early pioneers, those who went ahead and paved the way, dug the tunnels, punched through the mountain, so we could utilize the water for the last 100-plus years,” Pearson said. “I’m hoping what we’re doing is carrying on a legacy, a vision and foresight for what they did, because that’s really what makes our project possible. We have no water supply for a water treatment plant if we don’t have that water.”

Building a pipeline

Built by the U.S. Reclamation Service and completed in 1917, the federally owned Strawberry High Line Canal begins at the base of Spanish Fork Canyon, winding southwest along the base of the mountain and providing irrigation water from Salem to Santaquin before jetting west to Goshen, CUWCD Project Engineer and Planner Derek Bruton explained.

Only 2,500 acre feet of the canal’s allocated 35,000 acre feet of water actually comes from the Spanish Fork River, Pearson said, and by early June this year that water has already ran out. The rest comes from the Strawberry Reservoir, serving as a direct use of the early settler’s Strawberry Valley Project.

But the canal is nearing the end of its lifespan.

Constructed with concrete and metal rods, the infrastructure is deteriorating. A drive along the canal shows chips in the concrete, exposed rods hanging out and in one spot a tiny leak.

As the urbanization creeps closer to the canal below, any canal breach would be catastrophic.

“There are risks to life and millions and millions of dollars of property damage, which an irrigation company can’t afford, obviously, so then the irrigation company would go bankrupt,” Pearson said. “Life is at risk. There’s just a lot of challenges with running what used to be a rural canal in an urban area.”

To solve the issue, High Line Canal is partnering with Central Utah Water Conservancy District to pipe the canal. CUWCD will transform the canal into a 72-inch, 18 mile-long pipe that will cost an estimated $300 million, Pearson said.

The new pipeline will be connected to an existing 96-inch CUWD pipeline that starts at Diamond Fork Canyon, Bruton added, meaning it will stay piped from the Strawberry Reservoir until it reaches its destination.

This makes the water free of sediments and debris that turn the current canal water dirty and murky, keeps the orchard’s drip irrigation systems from plugging up due to sediment buildup, and pressurizes the water all the way to the farms, saving operational costs, Pearson explained.

“Instead of dumping it into the Spanish Fork River and mixing with all the rivers, we’re going to bypass it, bring their water all the way down the pipeline and keep it piped all the way to here,” he said. “It’ll no longer go in this power canal. It’ll stay piped clean, pressurized water that can be delivered to their users.”

In exchange for building the pipeline, CUWCD will have rights to the water that is currently lost in the canal through evaporation, which accounts for approximately 15 percent.

It will be distributed to municipalities through the Salem Water Treatment Plant and other irrigation methods, providing efficient, clean water to fulfill both urban and agricultural needs, the engineers said.

“Our goal is to build a project that doesn’t price out the agricultural community,” Pearson said.  “They’re our partners. Agriculture is going to continue to be an important part of this project for generations.”

Water treatment plant

While southern Utah County relies on the various offshoots of the Strawberry Valley Project for its agricultural production, every city in the county south of Provo is 100% reliant on springs and well water for its drinking water.

But as the population of the area balloons — Salem City, for instance, said it’s population will grow from its current 10,000 residents to over 60,000 people by 2035 — the demand for this water is soon to exceed the supply.

The way to supplement this issue is to build a surface water treatment plants.

There are already several plants in Salt Lake County and one at the mouth of Provo Canyon. Building a new one in Salem signifies this new era of urbanization.

“It’s taking water that’s coming down the river and treating it in a treatment plant to clean it for drinking water,” Pearson said. “We can take this water to the Salem Water treatment plant, treat it and then just distribute it as a regional facility to multiple cities and in the county.”

The CUWCD purchased a plot of land in Salem at the base of Water Canyon, perched just above the High Line Canal near the Three Bridges luxury development currently under construction.

The land will serve as CUWCD’s future surface water treatment plant, with water from the new pipeline flowing in and being distributed across the area.

“Taking advantage of elevation, it will be built in multiple phases,” Bruton said. “Initially, it would be delivering a fairly small amount of water but eventually delivering upwards of 100 million gallons … We wouldn’t have to pump to get here. We wouldn’t have to pump to get to anywhere in south Utah County.”

When completed, the pipeline and the treatment plant combined will have the capacity to service more water than is needed by 2032.

But the idea isn’t to build out to 2032, but to plan for the century to come — and improve upon the efforts of the past.

“The fact is that this isn’t replacing any of that,” Bruton said. “It’s building on it, taking that foundation and allowing us to be ready for the next 100 years. We’re adjusting and adapting but not replacing.”

Two open houses will discuss the project next week. The first one will be held from 5-7 p.m. Tuesday at the Payson City Hall Banquet Room, followed by a 5-7 p.m. meeting Thursday at the Juab High School Gym in Nephi.