More Dogs on Main: What’s in a name?

To her dying day, my aunt maintained that Clyde Lake in the Uintas was named for our family. It certainly seemed plausible. 

My great-grandfather was the chief engineer and construction manager on the early dams on Trial, Washington, and other lakes in that area around 1910. They stored water in the spring and dumped it down the Provo River in the late summer for irrigation companies from Provo to Woodland. The story got grafted into family lore as that sort of thing does, but there was no evidence behind it other than she said so. She was not one to be questioned.

We’ve all camped there through the years, and after a recent hike, a couple of family members started asking about it, and we began to do some digging. It turns out my aunt was wrong. 

One of the first forest rangers up there was John Maycock, and he named the lake after his son, who liked to fish there. The kid’s first name was Clyde. The Maycock cabin is still there on the bank of Trial Lake, one of a few surviving out of several that were built there in the early 1900’s. 

The correction doesn’t change anything. The big glacial slab of polished rock that slopes down into the lake is still as nice a place to each lunch as anywhere on earth.

While digging online for that, I came across a great memoir by the wife of the first dam keeper up there, Marion Clegg. The Clegg family, including little kids, lived there in the summers to manage the reservoir releases for 40 years, beginning in about 1920. 

There was a telephone in the dam keeper’s cabin at Trial Lake in 1913. That’s the year that the Kamas-Woodland Telephone Company was founded. It’s now All West Communications, and provides phone and internet service to a whole lot of people from Empire Pass to Wyoming. 

I don’t know if the phone line that ran 27 miles up the canyon from Kamas to Trial Lake was owned by the phone company or by the reservoir owners. The phone company went broke rather quickly, and if they ran a line 27 miles for one seasonal connection, it’s not hard to see why. But it’s a little hard to get my head around the idea that there was phone service up there in 1913, and there isn’t now. 

The Cleggs ran something of a lodge there in what sounds like a large cabin, originally built to house workers on the dam where you could buy a candy bar there if the squirrels that had free run of the house didn’t get to it first.  

I think of the Uintas as a vast, empty, wild space. 

It kind of is, now, other than it was pretty darn busy over the weekend. 

But 100 years ago, it would have been alive with loggers, road builders (by the 1920s you could drive to Trial Lake in a Model T Ford), livestock operations and recreation people. The cabins at Trial Lake would have been the center of the action.

There had been a history of ice jams clogging the spillways on the dams, causing the spring runoff to wash them out. The first attempt at dam building, an experiment that led to the name Trial Lake, failed. So they decided to inspect the dams in the winter and keep an eye on things. 

There was no winter maintenance on the very primitive road up from Kamas. The article said they instead drove through Woodland, where there was a plowed road (sort of), then snowshoed up the Provo River to Trial Lake. Must have taken days. Those guys were tough. Now they control the release gates on the dams from air conditioned offices in Orem. 

My niece bought a book called “Utah Place Names,” by John VanCott, looking for more documentation. The book says that Dean Lake was named for Dean Clyde without any further context. 

So who the heck is Dean Clyde, and why is there a lake named for him? That’s my grandfather, who was a sheep rancher. His father and grandfather were also in the sheep business, and had grazing permits on the Forest Service land in the general area. 

The Sunday hike was to explore Dean Lake, and it was spectacular, like all of the Uinta Lakes. It was off the trail and took some bushwhacking to get to. We missed it on the way in and had lunch at Bench Lake instead. Nothing wrong with that, and after studying the map a little more, found it on the way out. 

In reading on-line trail guides to find it, I kind of skipped over a weird reference.  There are actually two Dean Lakes in the Uintas, one in Four Lakes Basin and the other off the Bald Mountain trail. There are also two Nobletts Creeks in the general area. No wonder Search & Rescue is so busy. 

Turns out we hiked to the wrong one. The entry in “Utah Place Names” has the coordinates for the other one. That location makes more sense in terms of where the family would have been grazing. It looks like a much longer hike, maybe an overnighter, but I now need to go explore that one. 

I’ll be very disappointed if I learn that Clyde Maycock had a brother named Dean.

Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.