From Neil

October 27, 2009

Dear Family
This past month has gone every bit as fast as the others and like the others it has been both a good month and a challenging month. The good part was the time we were able to spend with family and the challenging part was due illness in the family.

It has been great having Jerry and Marylyn here for the past two months and for LaVora's short visit. We were able to spend time with each other at three temples, Chuck A Rama, Myton, Jerry and Marylyn watching "Miss Potter" and eating their good food and a number of pleasant drives. While at Myton we did a lot of work, as usual, and after a nice lunch at the Frontier Café we even got to spend some time with Uncle Clyde and yes we did get to relax just a little. The temples we visited were the Provo, Draper and Oquirrh. Thanks for a pleasant and fun time, LaVora, Jerry and Marylyn

On the other side of the coin we had some anxious days as Nicole and Abby were ill. Nicole spent several days in the hospital with some painful problem that the doctors were never able to diagnose. She is home now feeling much better for which we are thankful. Our Abby had a bout with viral meningitis. She was a very sick girl for a while. Reed told me that she was able to return to school Monday.

Except for the fact that his mail seems to be getting lost, things seem to be going well for our missionary, Joshua, who is serving in Florida. He tells us, he think the reason he is not getting his mail is because the government is confiscating it for grandpa's jelly.

Love, Neil

Story Time

The High Uinta's

This bit of history took place at a time when the horseless carriage was really coming into its own. Yet there were areas of the country where there were no roads. As a matter of fact, where this event took place (I say this with tongue in cheek) there are no roads to this day. That's because now, as then, the area known as the High Uinta's has and was set aside as a Wilderness area.

When the homesteaders came to the Uintah Basin they found an area similar in appearance to what the Salt Lake Valley area must have been to the pioneers when they first entered that valley. (Grandmother Atta Armelia Murray said "All you could see was sage brush and Indian Tepees") They found the soil, where they planned to farm, in and around the Altonah area quite sallow and very rocky. The water supply for the area depended entirely on snow melt from the snow pack that accumulated, during the winter, in the Uinta Mountains. The amount of water that a settler would receive depended on their decreed water right. It simply amounted to the fact that "first in time, first in right." Since the Indians were in the area first they owned the first water right. This meant that the settlers could only file on what was known as flood or high water. On a good water year the water in the stream would stay at high water stage into August. On bad water year when the snow pack was light the high stream flows would dwindle until the homesteader's water right was either nonexistent or gone by the last of June. This would mean that even in a good year they probably only got one good cutting of alfalfa hay, a light yield of grain and as a rule no corn.

As the settlers could only use a small part of the flood or the high water that ran off in the spring the bulk of the water ran on down stream and in time ended up in the Ocean and later in Lake Mead. So the settlers in an effort to make their water right more nearly meet their crop growing period looked for ways to store some of the flood and high water so they could hold it back and then release water from the storage areas when needed.

In the Uinta Mountains there were and are many lakes. Many of these lakes were formed by glacier activity. The glaciers as they grew would push ahead of them, depending on their size, mounds of rock, silt, sand and other materials. Then at that time when the area where the glaciers were, began to warm (global warming I guess) and the ice began to melt, the glacier would recede. As it did the glacier left the mound of rock and soil it was pushing. This would form a terminal moraine or sort of a dam. These areas or terminal moraines became many of the lakes of the Uinta Mountains. (Next month – Water storage)

A view from King's Peak

Lake Atwood - Uinta Mountains - on way to Kings Peak