It has been a few years since I have ridden the Mirror Lake highway from Kamas to Evanston, Wyoming and with the return of hot weather, I wanted to ride someplace that would be as cool as possible. I even removed the lining from my coat and re-opened all the vents. I also took some water with me. As I ride up Parley's Canyon I am reminded that riding in heavy traffic on a motorcycle is a little like playing a giant game of chess. I plan my moves and passing and pick and choose empty pockets of traffic and in no time at all, I am again on the highway 40 exit from I-80 and heading toward the turn off for Kamas.
I decide at Kamas that I have enough fuel to get to Evanston and start up the canyon from Kamas. I am heading on highway150 through the area of the highest elevation in Utah and of course I will see King's peak, the highest point in Utah at 13, 528 off to the not so distant right. Fall is very noticeable, leaves turning and an abruptness to the cooler air. Most of the campgrounds I pass on this road have all ready closed for the season. The traffic is light in both directions and I try to ride not over 10 to 15 miles an hour of the posted limit. The lower part of this canyon is open grazing and there are still some cows that haven't been moved in anticipation of winter.
My sister Cynthia use to do some camping with her children in this area, and I am reminded by the name of several campgrounds she enjoyed., Soapstone and Christmas Meadows. I decide at Mirror Lake, not to turn off, on this road, if you stop you are supposed to pay a fee and also there is a part of me who has believed to one level or another that when you visit some places, you help destroy the very reason you wanted to go there in the first place. But the lake is very clear and I have memories from previous stops with others to suffice for today. Looking down at the GPS I see that I am over ten thousand feet above the level of the sea and as I behold the glacial spread of the Unita's, the only East-West Mountain chain in the Continental United States. I think about the process of glaciation and that leads me to suddenly thinking that Terminal Moraine, would make an interesting name for a female character in a short story. Now, all I need to do, is to come up with a plot line to fit the character's name. She would of course, besides being beautiful and smelling of both homemade bread and sage, be part French and I would try and find some fancy spelling of her first name, to make it sound more alluring. But the road beckons and as I get down to a lower Altitude and get closer to the Wyoming boarder, I am reminded of other things, and Termi-nal, ceases to occupy any part of my thinking.
The big flat valley in Wyoming between just beyond the boarder and just before you get to Evanston, is called Hillard, and although I can't tell you where Hillard proper starts or stops, I did in the mid 1970's spend many weekends in this area, moving cattle from the back of a horse. My family started running cows on some land north of the airport, as either a lark, or a fun weekend hobby, but like a lot of things my father did, it soon grew and took on a life of its own. The two main adages I remember from my days in the cattle industry were as follows: It doesn't take fancy barns and white fences to put fat on cattle, it only takes grass and water, and my favorite. The way to earn a small fortune in cattle is to start out with a large one! We decided in the fall of 1973 that we would increase the number of mother cows we were running during the next year. That also would mark the first summer that we would sub-lease some summer ranged near Croydon ,up Weber Canyon towards Lost Creek, from a neighbor. I remember that Bob, my father and that is what I called him my whole life, made me do up a business plan on this increase of cows and the leasing of summer range and I learned a lot in doing it. The first year I under estimated the weight gain of the calves and under estimated the overall expense of checking on the cows, and on the number of calves that we lost during the grazing period. We bought cows through the Producer's Livestock auction in North Salt Lake and had even joined the Coop. Bob knew one of the head people at Producer's , Van Moss, who had even passed out in a bathtub at one of my parent's parties in the 1950's. Van's son Russ was just a couple of years older than me, and was also one of the Auctioneer's at the Monday and Wednesday Auction. The term used to describe what an auctioneer does is Crying. He cries the auction. Van and Russ had some yearling heifers for sale and I went up to Hillard to look at them. We ended up buying about sixty five or seventy five of them with the stipulation that we wouldn't take possession of them until late October or early November of 1974. I don't remember Bob looking at them before I bought them, and I had agreed that I would help take care of them during the upcoming summer, the land up there is mostly irrigated meadows, courtesy of the Bear River and I went up many times that summer with Russ, and using a borrowed horse, I didn't at that time have a decent horse trailer, helped move the cattle, got a good feeling of the land up there and stayed several nights at a big ranch there owned by a man named Dick McGraw. The next year, because of a divorce, that place would be for sale, but things had changed by then. Bob and I also spent the summer looking to buy a ranch somewhere. I also ended up late in September in driving to beyond Dallas Texas to pick up a 20 foot Goose necked trailer to help in hauling cattle and calves. The ride to and from Athens Texas is a tale in and of its self. My good friend Robert Weyher went with me and boy was it a long trip back. I ended up bringing back all of the parts to make a 16 foot goose neck trailer for Ken Garff and coming back over Eisenhower pass on Interstate 70 my mileage dropped to about six miles per gallon. Thank goodness I had a main and two saddle tanks on the truck and gas was relatively cheap!
When we took delivery of the cows, it was time to brand, and to check for pregnancy, etc. In those days some of the best cattle equipment was made by a company called Powder River, this was way before I even knew where the Powder River was located and they had a manufacturing facility in Provo. We ended up getting a parcel of their movable and interlocking 16foot panels, a cattle chute, a squeeze chute, complete with preg gate, and of course a calf table. We had both electric branding irons and a propane burner to heat up a metal wand to help de-horn calves, this was after giving them shots, castrating them if necessary and branding them as well. I have been kicked by both calves and cows so many times. We had a registered brand NT for Northpoint Towers and I even wore a Stetson hat, and listened to Charlie Daniels. I paid for the balance of the cows upon delivery and they were to start calving in mid February. Bob and I had a trip planned in January to look at ranch land in Costa Rica. One of my nieces and one of my nephews; brother and sister, and children of my deceased sister Cynthia, have both purchased property in Costa Rica. Bob loved both Costa Rica and Guatemala and I was looking forward to the trip, although I had mixed feelings about potentially living part of the year out of the US. We continued to look around Utah, Idaho and Wyoming at ranch land and I have always wondered where I might be today if we had purchased a ranch somewhere in the West. In early December of 1974, Bob dropped dead one evening.
The calving of these new mothers was bittersweet. I ended up having to aid a fairly large amount of these births by pulling the calf, and I would come out of the barn where I was calving them at two in the morning, the snow coming down, with my hands and arms still drenched in amniotic fluid, and suddenly remember that I could help a calf being born, but my CPR on my father had not worked. The next fall I spent several weekends traveling with Russ Moss in Nevada and Wyoming on cattle buying trips These were trips to established clients of Producer's to weigh and sort the cattle. I learned a great deal and met some very interesting hard core ranch people. I even got a chance to load cattle into rail road cars and by this time I was a veteran at loading semis with cows. Later in the fall of 1975 I attended a week long seminar at the famous Graham School for Cattlemen in Garnett Kansas. During that hands on week, I learned how to test a cow for pregnancy , which involves putting on a giant glove, and putting your hand up a part of a cow where the sun wasn't meant to shine, and then you push down on top of the uterus. If there is a calf there, it will bounce up against your hand. I also learned a great deal about herd management and artificial insemination. I also in 1976 attended the annual Livestock Show in Denver Colorado. Russ still is a cattle buyer for a large company and lives near Greeley Colorado.
We continued to run cattle until about 1984 and at the same time I was doing some real estate things, but would start out every morning and end up every evening feeding and checking on cows. It was a good balance to more cerebral undertakings and gave me a good balance in life.
I was pleased to see that the Hillard area is still very much farm and ranch country and there did not appear to be many new houses, and where there were, it was a case of probably building a bigger house, or a second house for another generation. There are a lot of gas wells around this area, and that has certainly helped in the stability of ownership. At Evanston I gassed up and then headed toward the boarder and the ride through Echo Canyon via I-80, this section of the road is called the Eisenhower Highway. In 1919 Ike was part of a military convoy that drove across the United States from coast to coast. It tested the feasibility and problems of doing this and it took 61 days to go from Washington D.C. To San Francisco. In 2009 a John Ryan rode a Big Honda from Pruhdoe Bay Alaska to Key West Florida, 5, 641 miles, in 86 hours and 31 minutes. The prior record was held by Salt Laker Gary Eagan at 96 hours and 1 minute. This is straight through with in reality, no sleep, and you would me a complete zombie by the time you were done. In 1945 on his first visits to Germany, Ike was impressed by the Autobahns and during his Presidency the Interstate Highway Act was passed. Ike was very proud of this legislation. Part of its financing was Pentagon related, to help get it passed, and that is why there is a small amount of Interstate Highway in Hawaii. I seem to remember that one of the last sections of the original Interstate to be finished was a section of I-70 between Green River and Salina, Utah.
I don't know why Echo Canyon has never been one of my favorite rides, certainly there are red rock canyons and one gets a sense of what it must have been like for the pioneers but it has always lacked something to me. Its always windy and since I have tended to ride it in summer, hot. At Echo I head towards I-84 and when I had stopped for fuel in Evanston I had clicked my way point for home and was pleased to see that it had me turning off at Henefer, which even without a GPS I had decided to take, and coming into the valley via East Canyon and Big Mountain. The water level of East Canyon, Little Dell and Mountain Dell reservoirs were all noticeably lower than earlier this summer. I elect not to continue to Emigration Canyon and spend the few miles until the mouth of Parley's once again playing the game of traffic chess. The ride was 217 miles.
