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Show Page 10 Wednesday, May 3,1978 People, Places And Things By Doc Murdock The last week of skiing. A little article on the front page of the Newspaper announced the end of winter ; skiing at the resort ends Sunday. I'd better write something about it, I thought. The end of the season. And it was an especially good season after the dry year of '76-77. 1 should write something quiet and nostalgic with lots of visual memories about how great it all was: The S-curving snowplowers coming down the main street run; the hooting beer drinker laughing at their own skiing pratfalls on the big screen at Potato John's; the laid back lift operators and the lonely wind up on Jupiter. So, if you don't like that kind of mushy, nostalgic writing or, especially, if you don't like skiing, now's the time to stop reading. The ski season is over. A nervous shiver goes through the town. Summer is pleasant, but tough on business, in a ski town. Stores and restaurants geared for thousands of free-with-their-money snowbirds during ski season must now sit back and wait for the occasional stray summer sparrow. How many tourists (on the road, two weeks vacation to see Yellowstone, Disneyland, and Mexico) are going to sacrifice their schedule to drive up a dead end canyon? Besides, it's uphill! When you are pulling a 26-foot, fully loaded trailer with a Ford station wagon full of kids you never go uphill. Sunday night, before dark, I decided to take a walk up to the resort and see how it looked without all the commotion. Several dogs came out to say hello and check out my scent. When you live in a world of smells, even passersby can be exciting. When I reached the resort I was, once again, surprised by how large and barren the parking lots look. Without the mad jam of cars and buses the miles of asphalt seems an extravagent waste of space. As I walked across the pavement my foot dislodged something. I picked it up. A ski glove, black as the asphalt, squashed flat by the thousands of cars that came and went every day. It had been a good one with fancy orange stripes. ; Now it was muddy, waterlogged and useless. I dropped it and moved on to the resort. As I entered the deserted courtyard in front of the Silver Mill House, the first thing I noticed was that the air did not smell like charcoal broiling hamburgers. They were not cooking burgers in front of the Corner Store, It was like that old joke about the man who lived next fcthe. "railroad tracks; ; when itheii regular train doesn t come by; on time he jumps up from a sound sleep yelling, "What was that? " Gone also were the throngs of skiers, and without their bright colors the whole place looked gray and flat. The long ski racks were A LP II W lined up across the bare pavement, empty. No, not quite empty; one old pair of Head Standards was locked in the middle of the row. No kidding, a pair of beat up, black Head Standards. I had the strangest feeling that they had been there for ten years, peacefully unmoving as the seasons came and went. I walked through the mud up to the bottom of the mountain. The resort had set out wooden bridges so people wouldn't have to get their yellow ski boots dirty, I guess. I walked in the mud. The bridges looked too new, too contrived. There should be either snow or mud; not bridges. Two little kids were still trying to ski on the bottom of the Payday run. Nothing else moved on the mountain. The two kids had a thirty yard long patch of snow all to themselves. All else was dirt. They would ski down and then take off their skis and run back up again on the dirt. The little patch of snow looked icy and bumpy but they were doing all right. "How's the skiing?" I yelled as they were removing their skis for about the hundredth time. "Great," they hollered back and were off up the hill again. A fuzzy brown dog happily chased after. As the sun set, the valley became lonely and cold. The wind whistled through the cables of the gondola above me. The gondola cars with their many scarred sides and fading colors creaked as they swung back and forth in the wind. One of the kids dropped his little skis in the dirt and walked over. "Hey mister, you ever been up there?" He pointed at the distant ridge where the string of gondola cars disappeared over the top. "Sure," I said, "lots of times." ; "Think if I went up.I could get back down? " he asked squinting as he looked into the distance. "I mean, could I ski good enough?" "You'd probably do better than half the people up there." I answered. "Goon. Really?" 1 I nodded. A gust of wind made the gondola car above us creak, as if in agreement. "What's it like up there?" he asked quietly. I looked up toward the top, remembering the cold clear view from the top, the tough, icy days on Thaynes, the long fast ni to the triple chair, the powder mornings through the trees. jU; "It's just like down here," I told the kid,! nod ding toward his ninety foot practice run, "except yuu uau sec x iut idi uict ,( . !( , ... ... He looked up at the mountain trying to imagine it. Then he retrieved his skis and went back to practicing. The fuzzy brown dog chased after him, happily barking: "Woof, woof." Survey At ckpor !f I v. .... ' .... - Survey time at Rockport means finding the 'Sprvnir's n( unrlh reservoir's net worth. ByNanChalat It was overcast, damp and windy at the Rockport boat ramp where I met Steve Kearl, a conservation officer from the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources. Steve was preparing to pull the last of the gill nets used to survey the fish populations of Echo, East Canyon and Rockport Reservoirs. "We are still going to feel some of the effects of last year's drought," explained Steve when I asked him how the fishing looked for this season. "But Echo is just eight feet short of being full and there is still a lot of snow to come down from the Uin-tas." Uin-tas." Steve donned oilskinned foul weather gear. By now the weather looked -really ., threatening and Ro,ckport, ' 1 1 i , , seerneu ue a seacoasi nar-bor. nar-bor. Kent Summers, who is the regional fishery biologist, arrived with a small outboard and we set out to locate the gill nets. Marked by a plastic water bottle, the first net was a "floater" designed to sample sam-ple the population near the surface of the water. Steve and Kent worked together to carefully haul the net into the boat commenting all the while on their catch. The nets, approximately fifty feet long and two feet wide, are graduated with different sized mesh '2" to 1V2" wide. The fish are trapped by the gills and remain in the net virtually unharmed until it is pulled. Whitefish, chubs, cutthroat, cut-throat, rainbow, and brown trout appear in the net. I have a strong urge to rush home and grab my fishing pole. Steve releases a particularly par-ticularly healthy brown trout perhaps I'll see him again this summer. .... . Rockport is . planted with ' ' 150,000 fish each year from the Kamas and Midway hatcheries. hat-cheries. They are mostly young rainbow trout (cutthroat (cut-throat and browns are native to these waters) which reside peacefully beneath the reflection of the mountains moun-tains until opening day of fishing season, which is June 3 in Summit County. And then all those weeks of fish schooling in bait snatching, net dodging and lure tangling begin to pay off. The second net is a "sinker" and has trapped the fish that live along the bottom of the reservoir. Here we find suckers and chubs mostly, not good eating by most fishermen's standards. The nets are laid out on the concrete surface leading down to the docks where the fish are catalogued by weight and lpngth Some arc being sent to the University of Utah for a study on the selectiveness of gill nets and some of the fish are sent to the Ogden Rescue Mission. The Rangers came down to discuss the results of the survey. There was some concern as to whether all of the rainbows that were planted plan-ted last spring had lived and some concern about how last year's low waters had affected affec-ted the population of bottom fish. All I can say is that there is a good size trout with my name on it in there, I saw him and I'll be in line with my Utah fishing permit and my tackle box on opening day. Tennis Team Blanked The Park High tennis team suffered its first setback of the season Thursday against a senior-studded St. Joseph squad. The Ogden team posted a 5-0 whitewash of the local netters but Park City lost three tie-breakers and the match was more evenly contested than the score indicates. in-dicates. Dave Radford got off to a slow start in the number one singles match, losing to Roberto Nang 1-6. Faced with an opponent who plays a steady, return everything game similar to his own, the Miners' top player changed his strategy and suffered the consequences. Radford returned for form in the second set only to lose 6-7 in a tie-breaker. Park City sustained another tie-breaker loss in the number two singles contest. con-test. Russell Ratcliff fell to power hitting John Highland 4-6, 6-7. Ratcliff lost only one service during the two sets but his inexperience in tiebreaker tie-breaker situations cost him a chance for victory. '"' 11 ' ' ' 1 Number three player Seaton Prince had a strong showing against senior Steve Pom bo, losing 4-6 in the first set, but the sophomore wilted in the second set and went down 2-6. Moving from the basketball basket-ball court to the tennis court, the Jays' duo of Gilmore and Imhoff defeated Park City's combo of Louie Leatham and Kevin Wade 6-4, 6-3 in the number one doubles match. The Miners played well against the powerful doubles team that made it to the state finals last year but they couldn't muster enough winners win-ners to overtake their larger opponents. In the closest contest of the day, Chip and Paul Dyer were edged by Kenny and Nang in a 5-7, 6-4, 6-7 struggle. Once again, it was a tie-breaker loss that proved Park City's undoing. Following the match, coach Dave Chaplin called St. Joseph "The best team in the league without a doubt." The Miners will travel to Sweetwater, near Bear Lake, this Thursday to compete com-pete in the Region Eleven tournament being hosted by iorm men. cnapnn predicted predic-ted Park City will send several representatives on to the state competition if his netters play up to their potential. LAND DESIGN, CONSTRUCTION AND MAINTENANCE HANK VERRONE, PROPRIETOR Residing and operating out of Park City Over 20 years experience The Professional Giants INSTALLATION OF SOD, SHRUBS, TREES, PATIOS, SPRINKLER SYSTEMS, RETAINING WALLS & ROCK GARDENS TRACTOR SERVICE ALSO AVAILABLE GRADING AND RAKING See us for Spring Special! Call 649-8521 P.O. Box 1026 S A P I N J NURSERY l JJ design i 'Jl ll |
