How Many Years Has Your Lake Been Stocked?
A since-2025 figure on a lake page is how far this site has backfilled, not how long the lake has been stocked. Here is the difference.
Drafted by AI from the cited sources and checked before publishing.
How many years a lake has been stocked and how many years of it this site can show you are two different numbers, and the “since [year]” figure on every lake page is the second one. It is real and computed from real events, but it measures the depth of the stocking archive behind the page, not the age of the fishery. Read it as a floor. The lake has almost certainly been stocked longer.
The two states are backfilled to different depths
Almost every Washington lake page here reads “since 2025” (309 of the 314 lakes with a stocking record as of October 2026; the other 5 read “since 2026” because their first record is from this year), because 2025 is as far back as this site has loaded WDFW data so far. WDFW’s own catchable trout plant archive lists a separate report for every year from 2015 through 2025, plus a 2014 PDF, so the agency record goes back much further than this site’s copy of it. Mayfield Lake, a long-established Lewis County reservoir fishery, shows 43 plants over a short window on this site. Both are true at once, and only one of them is about Mayfield Lake.
Utah is loaded eleven years deep, 2016 through 2026, and Utah’s own stocking app is queryable further back than that. Strawberry Reservoir shows 625 stocking events across that window, which is a genuinely different kind of evidence than the short Washington window can offer for any single lake.
What this means in practice
Do not read a short “since” date on a Washington lake page as a sign the fishery is new or unproven. It is a statement about this site’s data, not about the water. A Utah lake with a decade of plants on record is showing you something much closer to the fishery’s real long-term pattern: restocking frequency, seasonal timing, typical species mix, because there is more behind it.
The honest way to use this stat
Treat “plants on record” and “since [year]” as a measure of how much verified history this site can show you for that lake today. The Washington history on this site starts later than Utah’s, so a shorter span can reflect a shorter archive, not a younger program.