Pruess Lake is a small spring-fed lake in Snake Valley

Snake Valley (Utah)

Snake Valley is a north-south trending valley that straddles the Nevada Utah border in the central Great Basin. It is bound by the Snake Range and the Deep Creek Mountains to the west and the Confusion Range to the east...

, Millard County, west-central Utah

Utah

Utah is a state in the Western United States. It was the 45th state to join the Union, on January 4, 1896. Approximately 80% of Utah's 2,763,885 people live along the Wasatch Front, centering on Salt Lake City. This leaves vast expanses of the state nearly uninhabited, making the population the...

. It is just south of Garrison

Garrison, Utah

Garrison is an unincorporated town in Millard County, Utah, United States. It is home to a Utah Department of Transportation yard and office, but other than that, offers no services.- Geography :...

 and north of Burbank

Burbank, Utah

Burbank is a small farming community in Millard County, Utah, located just east of the Nevada border. It is located in the southern part of Snake Valley, near the opening of Hamlin Valley. It was founded as a Mormon farming community in the 1870s, with an early post office located at the Dearden...

. It was named after Charles Preuss

Charles Preuss

George Karl Ludwig Preuss , Anglicized as Charles Preuss, was a surveyor and cartographer who accompanied John C. Fremont on his exploratory expeditions of the American west, including the expedition where he and Fremont were the first to record seeing Lake Tahoe from a mountaintop vantage point as...

, a cartographer who was on John C. Fremont

John C. Frémont

John Charles Frémont , was an American military officer, explorer, and the first candidate of the anti-slavery Republican Party for the office of President of the United States. During the 1840s, that era's penny press accorded Frémont the sobriquet The Pathfinder...

's first and second expeditions. Where or when the spelling error (Preuss vs Pruess) occurred is unknown, but all maps and official state naming documents mention the lake's name as Pruess. The area of the lake is about one square mile.

Several springs flow into the lake, including Big Springs in Nevada and Dearden Springs along Lake Creek, Nevada and Utah. The water in the lake and the creeks that flow into the lake are heavily used for agriculture, so the only spring that always flows into the lake is Clay Spring. The lake has also been modified to a reservoir by the Pruess Lake Dam for agricultural use.

The road that leads to Lexington Arch, part of Great Basin National Park

Great Basin National Park

Great Basin National Park is a United States National Park established in 1986, located in east-central Nevada near the Utah border. The park derives its name from the Great Basin, the dry and mountainous region between the Sierra Nevada and the Wasatch Mountains. Topographically, this area is...

, is just south of Pruess Lake. The lake is a popular local recreation spot for fishing and minor boating/floating, though one should use caution because the mud around the lake is easy to get stuck in.

Pruess Lake is a habitat for a bevy of wildlife. One of the most unusual is a mollusk called the California floater (Anodonta californiensis

Anodonta

Anodonta is a genus of medium-sized to large freshwater mussels, aquatic bivalve molluscs in the family Unionidae.-Species:Species in this genus include:* Duck mussel, Anodonta anatina Linné, 1758* Anodonta beringiana Middendorff, 1851...

), a species left over from Lake Bonneville

Lake Bonneville

Lake Bonneville was a prehistoric pluvial lake that covered much of North America's Great Basin region. Most of the territory it covered was in present-day Utah, though parts of the lake extended into present-day Idaho and Nevada. Formed about 32,000 years ago, it existed until about 14,500 years...

.