The Duck

It has become a tradition in our ward to take our young men to Duck Lake each year. It's a 3-day/2-night deal complete with hiking, fishing, and ghost stories. We take them at the end of the summer as a sort of "last hurrah" before school begins. We began at Washington Lake and hiked 3.1 miles to Duck. All the boys have to bring ALL their own gear including food. We pick Duck because there is a natural spring, though a trickle, which tastes DEE-LISH. Nothing like natural water that has been treated by mother earth! We also chose Duck because of the relatively easy hike. We begin at 10,000 feet, ascend to 10,317, and then descend to 9,875 feet. Not grueling at all....even with my 33 pound backpack. Enjoy another photo journal!

Departure


The flattest part of the trail


A dead tree with five .45 ACP rounds from yours truly. A nice grouping considering I was 50 feet away.


Bryce with Brad...getting ready to shoot the .22


Shhhhhh....don't tell anyone that we have a tradition of throwing boulders off of this 200-foot cliff. It sounds AWESOME from below...like thunder. We even had a large boulder roll all the way into the lake. WICKED!!!


Brad's first fish in 25 years


The scenery from the cliff to the lake below. Our camp is nestled in the trees near that log on the shore of the lake.


We have a tradition of telling a ghost story we call "The Duck Lake Clown." Supposedly there was a man who worked as a "Carny" here in Salt Lake when the circus came to town. There was a series of murders in the Salt Lake area. The way the police finally nabbed the guy was when they linked the murders to his clown schedule at the circus. While he was not working as a clown, he lived in the Duck Lake area on the remote cliff shown above. As the scoutmaster was telling this story by the campfire, I had slowly slid away from the fire and retrieved my elk bugle. I disassembled the call into its various pieces so that I could make some very strange noises. It totally worked. They were scared out of their gourds! One of the boys had gone to bed already and ran from his tent, screaming, and in his underwear, to get closer to the fire for fear of the approaching monster. Absolutely priceless!!!