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Show Cut Over, Blown Bowe, Burned Up The Newspaper Thursday, January 29, 1981 Page (. By Frank Erickson The Murdock Basin Broadhead Meadows country coun-try certainly is scenic: forests, meadows and mountain moun-tain lakes, high peaks and ridges, and deep gorges. But it is not wilderness. Man-related Man-related activities, such as logging, forest fires and even the collapse of an irrigation dam, have significantly altered al-tered the country from its pristine state. Pre-dating most of these man-caused changes, however, how-ever, was a catastrophic wind storm in the early 1930s that leveled acres of timber near Broadhead Meadows. Early-day timberman Bun Williams was there when it happened, and he recalls the incident occurred in August of 1932. "The wind hit about midnight, mid-night, not more than one-half mile from our camp. It came roaring up the canyon like a small tornado. It whipped the tops right off the pine trees. We had to get ou' and hold down our tent." The next morning Williams and his companions rode down to investigate what became known as the Broadhead Blowdown. "There were trees tipped over with mounds of earth half as big as a house clinging to them. You could walk on downed timber and never touch the ground clear to the ridge, a distance of two or three miles." i The Great Lakes Timber Company salvaged the remains re-mains of the blowdown and continued logging in the area for many years. In 1954, when Glendon Jawkes, an English teacher at South Summit High School, took a summer job marking timber for the Forest Service, Great Lakes still was cutting in Murdock Basin "about four million board-feet a year" by Jewke's recollection. "A man named Bill Sweeney was in charge. They had three portable saw mills and a permanent mill at Hailstone Hail-stone Junction. The logs were skidded right into the portable mills and sawed into lumber, and when the skid became too far, the mills were moved." Sawdust and slab piles remain today as evidence of old mill sites. Great Lakes moved out in about 1958, and that was the end of logging in Murdock Basin, except for the sale to Leayitt Lqmber Company in "the early 1970s. ' . Jewkes was the Mirror Lake guard from 1961 to 1970, but worked early in the season for several years planting trees in the cutover areas of Murdock Basin. "One year we planted half a million trees between Marshall Mar-shall Lake and the Pyramid Lake turn-off," he said. "Most were Lodgepole pine, but we also put in about 75,000 spruce." The thick, young forest now growing is a testament to the success of this planting effort, although other areas in Murdock Basin and Broadhead Meadow Mea-dow reseeded naturally. Forest fires have increased in-creased both in frequency and intensity in the Mur-dock-Broadhead coui ry in recent years. Presently a fire guard, Glendon Jewkes has had the dubious honor of being the first man on the scene at many of these blazes. When he was Mirror Lake guard in 1961, a tourist, reported smoke below Bald mountain. Upon investigat-' ing, Jewkes and Forest Service employee Pat Davies located the blaze running up the hillside east of Broadhead Meadows. Davies dumped Jewkes off and went for help. "That was the first fire I'd ever been on, and I didn't have the slightest knowledge of what to do," Jewkes said. "I fought it for several hours alone and about burned myself up. One time I looked up and there were flames on all sides of me." With the help of 150 inmates from the Utah State prison, that fire was contained at 250 acres, and was the biggest fire recorded on the Kamas District until last summer. August 11, 1980, Jewkes received a call on his two-way radio from Ron Smith, timber technician. Smith reported a small fire, about Vi-acre in size, near the south end of Murdock Basin right along the road. Jewkes proceeded immediately immed-iately to the scene in his pumper truck, but already the fire, driven by the wind and spreading through heavy slash, had grown to 15 acres. "That was 2 p.m.," said Jewkes "and it was running like crazy. At 4 p.m. the Wasatch helicopter arrived ar-rived and Pete Pierson, a Kamas District Ranger, and I flew over the blaze to size it up, and we estimated 250 acres were on fire." It took 600 firefighters a week to stop the Murdock Basin Fire. More than 2,000 acres of young trees were destroyed at an estimated resource loss of $250,000. Cost to suppress the blaze was $750,000. The fire was believed to have been started by a fuelwood cutter. In an area whose history is marked with disasters, perhaps per-haps the most tragic was the collapse of the Little Deer Creekdam. .,...., .., t Little Deer Creek, a tributary tribu-tary of the Duchesne River, drains the south end of Murdock Basin. Farmers in the Kamas valley wanted a means to store the run-off of Little Deer Creek and funnel it through the Duchesne tunnel to supplement late season irrigation. The state of Utah contracted to have an earth-fill dam built, and in 1961 construction began. According to John Lambert of the Washington Lake Irrigation Company (one of two companies to benefit from the stored water), construction was overseen by the state with no inspection inspec-tion by the irrigation companies, com-panies, j The dam was completed in 1962, and over the winter of ,'62-'63, the floodgates were closed and it began to fill with water. The capacity of the reservoir reser-voir was 1,400 cubic feet. On Sunday morning, June 16, 1963, with 1,200 cubic feet of water behind it, the dam collapsed and a wall of water plunged down Little Deer Creek, uprooting trees and scouring the drainage to bedrock, and depositing the debris in the Duchesne river gorge. Downstream, a father and his two young sons were camped along the river. What was described as "a great, big, black wall of water, 16 to 20 feet high" swept through their camp. The father escaped, and one of the sons suffered injuries, but the other boy, trapped in his sleeping bag was washed away and drowned. Lack of inspection by the state and faulty construction procedures were blamed for the failure of the dam. Lambert was shaken by the death -of the boy. "His life was potentially worth that of seven or eight of we old men." The dam never was rebuilt. re-built. Little Deer Creek still bears the marks of that devastating flood, and looks much like a dragstrip for bulldozers landscaped only with a few struggling willows and pines. Cut over, blown down, burned up and washed away. Somehow this country has weathered these abuses and survived with at least a semblance of its original grandeur. and Washed Away t V . I ,1 , if ni - ! i ; - -j I si 1 - ''f - - .. ' - V "The wind hit about midnight . . . It came roaring up the canyon like a small tornado. It whipped the tops right off the pine trees. " 'A V, I . Pus- I'.i ' ' S 1r 1 AwB-- ft , hr U . y j v 1 . -v j?; j; . ... . , V. ,r-u, ii - V - A, - V , , v' I i TOP: In August, 1932 a small tornado whipped through the Broadhead country snapping pine trees like toothpicks and leveling acres of forest. LEFT: In the early days, portable mills sawed logs into lumber right on the spot in Murdock Basin. ABOVE : Logs not sawed in the forest were hauled to the Great Lakes Timber Company mill at Hailstone Junction. Photos courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service. The Newspaper There is a 50-cent service charge per person to be paid at the theatre. It Pays to Look In the Classifieds For Movie Passes ! The Newspaper Classifieds have always been the place to find a bargain on anything from a Honda to a Condo. Now they're even more of a bargain ! Look for your name in the classified section and win a movie pass to the Holiday Village Cinemas. Just Come to The Newspaper Office and pick up your pass for two. iaMeis gjia5g y&u tit Tel |