Q1: And you went over Elephant Hill again then?

F: Oh heavens! Many times, many times, and Salt Creek many times. I had two couples with me one day going with me up Salt Creek to Angel Arch and we were coming out and it was real dry sand. And I guess with the tires round, it was about 6 to 8 inches deep, so you can see it was pretty deep sand. And I says to my guests, I says, “What would you say if I picked up a man’s wallet?” They says, “What?” I says, “Yeah, what would you say about that?” And I stopped and got out of my vehicle, went out in front and there was this wallet, just barely stuck out of the sand. And I got it and took it down to the Headquarters and I told ‘em who I thought it might be, this guy with a red Jeep with no top, and all that stuff. And so he took my name and everything. The next day I was going over to the resort. And a lady was a-wavin’ me down. I stopped and I says, “What can I do for you?” And she handed me five dollars. And I says, “What’s this for?” She says, “Well, you found our wallet yesterday and I wanted to give this to you.” I said, “ I don’t want your money. Sorry.” And anyway, I got a nice Christmas card from ‘em the next Christmas. But you could find anything out there.

Q1: All those years going into the Maze and the Dollhouse, did you ever run into anybody else, any other people camping or exploring out in there?

F: No. We were just on our own. That was the best time. We usually had, oh maybe two vehicles going but we spent a lot of time without anybody. We went down the Mormon Trail and that was our last exploration. Down to Hole in the Rock, Cottonwood. That was Kent’s favorite.

Q2: I’ve walked out there to Wilson Mesa and I don’t think I’d care to drive it.

F: Oh? Oh by the way, I was the very first person and a woman to ever drive a vehicle down to the Cottonwood Canyon. Kent and another guy walked and showed me the trail but I drove every bit of it.

Q2: I guess you’d drive to the top of Cottonwood but not down those others

F: Yeah, we’d go down to the top of Cottonwood.

Q2: We went down there and there’s a BLM sign that says it’s the old Mormon Trail. And I told my wife, I says, “well, this is in an odd position” because, looking right from the canyon. And then we went down and hiked up and I found out later that’s the old minerals road. We missed the Mormon Trail. So I gotta go back out there. We walked out from camp and then we went from there on a day hike from there to Wilson Mesa and back and that was really great.

F: The last time I was down there I said, “This is it. No more” I’m not going down there anymore, the road’s getting worse and worse.

K: Well, yea that was about three or four years ago and it was pretty rugged then. That old Blazer would just barely make it, I thought.

Q2: Well that’s after we did it. We walked before that and it was maybe seven years ago and there was a place where the sand was so soft that it looked like every vehicle that ever tried to go by there would get caught in it, you know. Then there was another place that I don’t even know how you’d get off, it’s just a ledge, sloping. And that wasn’t even the part that most people describe as the rought part of it, you know?

F: Kent and I went down there by ourselves one time and he had a metal detector. And we decided to metal detect a cave that was down there in Lake Canyon. So he used that and got a couple of pieces of metal off of a wagon. I says, “I’m going up here along this here, north of Lake Canyon, up on those rocks. So I went up there and do you know what I came up with? An 1872 dime! The dime looked like it had been tipped over and sandblasted on both sides but you can tell it’s an 1872 dime. And they came through there in 1880 so I know they dropped it.

Q2: So were you out there when the old sand dam went across the canyon, that they used?

K: That washed out in 1916.[New addition: The story I hears was that Al Scorup was camped by the lake when it washed out because livestock had destroyed all the grass and vegetation on the sand dam. K.F.]

Q2: Oh, okay.

F: What’s his name? Corbin? Corbin was it? That seen it go out?

K: Well, now this J.A. Scorup was down there the time of the cowboys and they watched it flood out. But that’s amazing that all the way down that canyon, see there’s been… some places have silt banks for a 100 feet high. And where the dam was it must have been about three hundred feet deep. That whole canyon was filled with that sand about three hundred feet deep. That’s all washed out. I been all the way down that to the Colorado River and you couldn’t believe how deep that sand was through that canyon. But it washed out to bedrock most all the way down to that lower part, before the lake came up.

F: Kent is the great-grandson of Mons Larsen that came through there with his second wife, Kent’s grandmother went south through Lee’s Ferry and Snowflake. But this here Olivia she had her baby up on Grand Mesa in the storm. And so he’s the great grandson of that Mons Larsen.

Q2: Is that why you…in your book you start off you were in Bluff.