SUMMIT COUNTY, Utah — Unlike my usual camping trips hours from home, this time I stayed close — setting up camp at Rockport Reservoir for my first overnight there.
Friday evening, I met Cayden, a young fisherman paddling near my campsite. He'd caught one tiger trout so far. Cayden camps at the reservoir with his parents, and Rockport ranks as their favorite in the Wasatch Back.
"It's peaceful here, fishing, and coming up into the mountains," Cayden said before paddling back for dinner, "That's my church."
Saturday morning brought my kayak adventure.
I assembled my folding kayak and launched, immediately realizing I'd forgotten an anchor for fishing. My solution: a reusable shopping bag filled with shore rocks, dangling from a rope.
The anchor worked great, though I did most of an on-camera interlude talking about forgetting my kayak, not realizing one of my sunglass lenses was gone. (I really do these things a lot, despite my highly cultivated reputation of fastidiousness and aplomb.)
A generous interpretation of my appearance would be, "Hey, that man must be charmingly cavalier because he has turned his expensive glasses into a pirate patch! Arrgh! That be a good one ye' whimsical bloke!"
With thoughts like that in my head, and no glasses on my head, I paddled to the wetland delta where the Weber River feeds Rockport.
A mid-article thought from Max for you:
The highlight of so manyr eservoirs is the inlet.
Gather your friends around, set a timer for 15 minutes and discuss.
RING-A-LING-A-LING!
Time's up. Back to the article.
At the inlet, I met Benjamin Martinez and his sister, Selena Miranda, visiting for Mother's Day weekend.
"It's too hot for yard work," Benjamin explained. "For Mother's Day, she wanted to catch fish."
Selena, expecting her first child, does the family fishing. She prefers these mountains to city life and wants her child to experience the outdoors for developing social and motor skills and for encouraging a healthy imagination.
After kayaking back to camp, I drove to Oakley Diner for lunch. The restaurant buzzed around one particular booth where Tom and Norine Wrathall held court. The couple married five years ago, later in life — each had raised six children before meeting.
Norine has lived in Oakley her entire life. Her husband jokes that she knows people everywhere, even in "the black hole of Calcutta." When not visiting their combined dozen children, they travel to Hawaii, Cabo, or Costa Rica, where Tom deep-sea fishes.
From Oakley, I followed the Weber River upstream to Smith and Morehouse Reservoir in the western Uinta Mountains. Spring runoff created impromptu waterfalls and new stream channels through the snow-dusted canyon.
I searched for wildlife but found only evidence — a massive dirt excavation that likely belongs to critters common to Utah.
And now I'm kicking myself for never suggesting it to the Utah Hockey Club (now the Utah Mammoth). It could have been "BRING IT ON, UTAH, HOW BOUT THEM YELLOW BELLIED MARMOTS!"
