Summer Science Camp: 1971

I'm pretty sure it was between my 8th and 9th grade years that my dad signed me up for Summer science camp.  A couple teachers from South Cache directed it.  One of them was Ed Jensen, who taught math.  It was a field program, where they took us to different locations in the environment every week.  One of the first trips we went up Wellsville Mountains, following a t.v. transmitter route.  We got on the hillside and looked at the plant life.  We saw a sego lilly, which had been important to the early pioneers for food and is now the state flower of Utah.  We went that way again, following the highway through Sardine Pass, and stopping almost opposite where Sherwood Hills is located, and climbed on a hill know as Coral Mountain.  We looked all over the mountain for fossils of horned coral.  I actually found one and brought it home with me. 

We made a trip up to Porcupine Dam.  I remember this trip as Dave Jensen, who was a Pony Baseball pitcher, threw a rock off the dam underhand, a lot farther then I could ever think of throwing. 
The biggest trip of the summer was to Minnetonka Cave over by Bear Lake.  That trip was an all day one and we had to take a sack lunch.  Minnetonka cave is very cool, even in the summer and it has lots of stairs and is a pretty good climb.  It is also very pretty inside the cave. 

Another trip was to Tony Grove, and this trip marks the time when I was lost in the wilderness.  We hiked from the parking lot to a lake a bit more than a mile away.  We used the buddy system.  I can't remember who was my buddy.  Going to was pretty well marked.  It was coming back that we had a problem.  Somehow we missed a turn,  My buddy and I continued following a creek when we should have crossed.  We continued walking to the East for some distance before we realized we had gone he wrong way.  By then every one else had passed, and we couldn't find the trail.  We continued following the way we were going, knowing we would come out eventually.  We had to wade through a couple of creeks.  We did cut across so we didn't have to walk all the way to the highway, but found the road going into Tony Grove.  This saved us time, because going cross country is slow going.  We weren't on the road long, when the bus pulled up, as they had been looking for us.  I guess we were pretty lucky, because people have gotten lost in the same area for days.