Crossing Palisade lake on a raft
I have written about my cooking experiences at Palisade Lake in the Granddaddy basin of the Uintah National Forest and this story is of another exiting adventure of that week. Scouts are prone to get into trouble given a chance and well we were given a chance. We spent a lot of time that week running around the lake and fishing and playing. Someone at one point decided that we, and there were four of us, needed to return across the lake to camp and I thought we would be going back around on the shore but his idea was to go across on a raft. Now of course we had nothing to use to build a raft so we went back around the lake on the shore and over to where we were camped on a flat area above the cliffs which were on the one side of the lake. However a seed was planted and we just had to make a raft after that.
So we gathered up rope and went down by the water and gathered up logs that would float and then tied them all together with very sloppy pioneering lashings but it worked and we set off around the lake. Now I wasn’t a swimmer by any stretch of the imagination and still had visions of almost drowning in Moats pool so how they ever got me on that raft I don’t know. But I must admit that despite my fears I had a great time sitting on that raft and paddling the little thing, which barely held all four of us, around the lake. It was fun that is until it started to come apart and at that point I made sure I had a good strong big one that I could hang onto as I cautiously made our way back to shore so we could repair it. I think Brother Hansen found us at about that time and stopped us from going out on the lake again with it. It was fun but I know the bottom of that lake was a lot further than one could reach on his tiptoes while holding the raft and for part of the time that was exactly how we did it on the shallow side of the lake. Yes, left to their own devices, boys are their own worst enemy.
