Category: Vertebrates

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Cache Valley Sugar Beets and German POWs

Abandoned Sugar Beet Factory, Weston near Franklin, ID Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer
Abandoned Sugar Beet Factory, Weston near Franklin, ID
Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer
When I started teaching at Preston High School, one of the first books my English class read was The Diary of Anne Frank. I remember asking the class if they had any family stories of their own to share about those war years. A young woman raised her hand and said her grandparents had a painting on their wall that had been given to them by a German Prisoner of War. This POW had worked on their Cache Valley sugar beet farm in 1945. He’d signed the painting, and had written a few words of thanks on the back for the kind treatment he had received

I was astounded. German POW’s in Cache Valley? This led me to ask more questions.

I found out in 1945 there were close to 400 German POWs living in tents in a work camp at the Cache Valley Fairgrounds. Local farmers contracted with the US Government to hire the POWs to work in the fields for 80 cents a day.

Each morning the prisoners would get loaded into trucks and driven to a sugar beet field. The work day didn’t end until 8 pm when the prisoners returned to the Fairgrounds, damp and chilled, from the ride in the open bed trucks.

Sugar Beet Knives Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer
Sugar Beet Knives
Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer
In 1945, sugar beets were a profitable crop, but labor intensive. In the Spring, the beets needed to be thinned and weeded. This work was done by a short handled hoe. In the Fall, the beets needed to be pulled out of the ground. This was done by a special beet knife with a big fish hook on the end. Once pulled out of the ground, the top leaves were sliced off and the beets tossed into a pile bound for the sugar factory.

At the peak of sugar beet farming in and around Cache Valley, there were 5 sugar factories operating. But by 1945 the factories were down to two – one located in Lewiston, and the other in Whitney, near Preston.

Native Americans came from Arizona to work the beets and set up their colorful teepees in downtown Lewiston. High school students were let out of school for 2-3 weeks in the Fall to work during what were called “Harvest Vacations.”

A friend of mine in Preston told me about a young man who went off the college in the Fall of 1945, but came home after a week. His father handed him a sugar beet knife and told him if he wasn’t going to go to college, he was going to work in the fields.

Everyone I met who once worked in the sugar beet fields told me all the work of thinning and harvesting needed to be done while bent over, and the resulting back pain was terrible.

Of all the stories I heard, my favorite was one of a Logan beet farmer who took his 3-year-old daughter with him to check on the work being done by the POWs he had hired. One day, he looked up and saw one of the German POWs holding his little girl in his arms. The farmer took his little girl by the hand, but the POW didn’t let go. A guard came running over. But both men stopped when they saw the tears running down the POW’s face. Somewhere, many miles away, they realized this German POW had a little girl of his own that he may or may not ever see again.

Today, all the POWs have long gone, as well as the local sugar beet farms. But if you drive north on Highway 89, just before you get to Preston, you can see the remains of the Whitney sugar beet factory. These huge crumbling buildings stand as a reminder that sugar beets were once king in Cache Valley.

This is Mary Heers and I’m Wild About Utah.

Credits:

Images Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer
Featured Audio:
Text: Mary Heers, https://cca.usu.edu/files/awards/art-and-mary-heers-citation.pdf
Additional Reading: Mary Heers & Lyle Bingham, https://bridgerlandaudubon.org/

Additional Reading

Wild About Utah, Mary Heers’ Postings

Powell, Allan Kent, Splinters of a Nation: German Prisoners of War in Utah (UTAH CENTENNIAL SERIES), University of Utah Press, January 1, 1990, https://www.amazon.com/Splinters-Nation-German-Prisoners-CENTENNIAL/dp/0874803306/ref=sr_1_1

Radford, Alexandria, The Old Sugar Beet Factory, Medium, Oct 7, 2021, https://medium.com/mind-talk/the-old-sugar-beet-factory-2e4b26f906d6

Arrington, Leonard J, Beet Sugar in the West A History of the Utah Idaho Sugar Company 1891-1966 University of Washington, 1966, https://www.amazon.com/-/he/Leonard-J-Arrington/dp/029574037X

Arrington, Leonard J, The Sugar Industry in Utah, Utah History Encyclopedia-website, Utah Education Network – UEN, https://www.uen.org/utah_history_encyclopedia/s/SUGAR_INDUSTRY.shtml

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A Day at the Chariot Races

Chariot Racing in Utah Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer
Chariot Racing in Utah
Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer
A few weeks ago, I met someone who mentioned she used to be involved in chariot racing.

Chariot Racing Team Courtesy & Copyright Wendy Wilker, Photographer
Chariot Racing Team
Courtesy & Copyright Wendy Wilker, Photographer
“Chariots?” I asked. “Like in ancient Roman days?”

“Sort of.” she said. She explained how today’s chariot racing in the Intermountain West involves two horses pulling a small aluminum chariot with the driver standing in the cart.

She mentioned the Regional Championships were coming up at the Golden Spike Arena in Ogden that weekend. So on Saturday, I jumped in my car . I got to the Arena just after the first race.

As I was strolling up to the rail running along the side of the racetrack, the horses in the next race shot by me. I was a little stunned by the hammering of the hooves on the dry dirt, the jangling of the harnesses, the strange whirring of the bicycle wheels — let alone the screaming of the spectators.

For the horses, it was an all out sprint for a quarter mile and it was over in 21 seconds.

In Roman times, the races lasted much longer. A typical race went 7 laps on a U-shaped racetrack with dangerously tight turns on both ends. Wealthy Roman Citizens owned the horses, but they usually sent a slave to drive the team. A crowd favorite was the daredevil slave charioteer Scorpius, who won 2,048 races before he died in a crash at the age of 26. Stories of chariot racing go all the way back to Homer’s Iliad where the Spartan king Menelaus was accused of cheating in a chariot race.

Rome’s racetrack was called the Circus Maximus and it could seat 250,000 spectators.

Back in Pioneer times in Utah, farmers liked to brag about how fast their horses could go, so challenges were made, and the issue usually settled by an informal race. The first official chariot race took place down the main street in Jackson Wyoming in 1950. For the following decades, chariot racing was very popular. Hundreds of teams would show up at the local races.

Going back to the Golden Spike racetrack, I walked up to where the races were starting. I asked if I could get close and climb up on the sidebars of the starting gate and they said ,”Sure.” From there I got an eyeball-to-eyeball view of the horses impatiently banging around in the starting chutes.

I think I was expecting a “Ready, Set, Go” and a starter pistol fired into the air. What I got was a mighty clang of metal on metal when the starter pulled a lever. The gates slammed open, the horses lunged forward, and dirt flew by me.

When the dust finally settled, the days winners were a team from Logan, who clocked in at 20.40 seconds – just 3 hundredths of a second off the world record.

On the way out I stopped to talk to three old timers still standing around chewing the fat.

“The sport is dying out,” one said.

“It’s getting expensive to keep a horse,” said the second.

The third summed it all up for me:
“Used to be you were really someone if you had a car. Now you’re really someone if you have a horse.”

This is Mary Heers and I’m Wild about all the horses in Utah.

Credits:

Photos: Courtesy and Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer
Chariot Racing Team, Courtesy and Copyright Wendy Wilker, Photographer
Featured Audio: Courtesy & Copyright © Anderson, Howe, and Wakeman Utah Public Radio upr.org
Text: Mary Heers, https://cca.usu.edu/files/awards/art-and-mary-heers-citation.pdf
Additional Reading: Lyle Bingham, https://bridgerlandaudubon.org/

Additional Reading

Wild About Utah, Mary Heers’ Wild About Utah Postings

https://www.facebook.com/reel/917556147927681 Courtesy Wendy Wilker

American Chariot Racing, https://www.goldenspikeeventcenter.com/event-details/acr-chariot-races-7

World Chariots, https://www.goldenspikeeventcenter.com/event-details/world-chariots-8

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A Long Winter’s Nap

Johnson Bottom on the Green River, Ouray National Wildlife Refuge, Courtesy US Fish & Wildlife Service, John Orlanda, Photographer
Johnson Bottom on the Green River, Ouray National Wildlife Refuge
Courtesy US Fish & Wildlife Service, John Orlanda, Photographer
One of the lesser-known natural, and underappreciated, areas in our state is found 32 miles south of Vernal in eastern Utah: the Ouray National Wildlife Refuge. My wife and I visited last July, hoping to see bird species we don’t find in other parts of the state. We enjoyed the birding, but what made the visit most memorable to me wasn’t birds, but fish.

Razerback Sucker Courtesy US FWS, Sam Stukel, Photographer
Razerback Sucker
Courtesy US FWS, Sam Stukel, Photographer

Humpback Chub Courtesy US FWS Humpback Chub
Courtesy US FWS

Bonytail Chub Courtesy US FWS Bonytail Chub
Courtesy US FWS

The refuge lies along the Green River, the largest tributary of the Colorado. If you drive far enough down the main refuge road, you’ll come to the Ouray National Fish Hatchery, dedicated to protecting three of the rarest fishes in North America: the bonytail, the humpback chub, and the razorback sucker.

All three of these species are confined to the Colorado River watershed, and all are on the federal Threatened and Endangered Species list. They’re desert fish, used to warm water. In fact, I learned that one reason why populations of these fish declined in the 1960s was that construction of the Flaming Gorge Dam upstream had made the Green River much cooler, as the water flowing through the dam was drawn from the coldest depths of the reservoir. That was great for trout, turning a 30-mile stretch of the Green into a world-renowned fishery. But it wasn’t so good for desert-adapted fish.

Learning this made me curious. The Ouray refuge is in the Uinta Basin. and it gets cold in the Basin in the winter. So, if cold water is bad for them, how have the bonytail, humpback chub, and razorback sucker survived there for thousands of years?

To answer that, it helps to understand the terms that anglers and fisheries biologists use. They refer to cold water species, like trout, kokanee, and whitefish, and warm water species like bass, perch, and catfish. The rare Green River species are warm water fish. But those labels aren’t about what temperatures the fish can survive, they’re about temperatures they experience when they thrive – during the warmer half of the year.

All fish are cold-blooded. More specifically, they’re ectothermic, getting their body heat from their environment, and poikilothermic, having a body temperature that fluctuates with the temperature of the waters where they live. To survive in winter, they go into a low-energy state called “torpor.” Their heart rate drops, their metabolism slows to a crawl, and their need for food is basically nonexistent. It’s like hibernation, except it happens in the deeper, slower water of a river instead of a cave or burrow.

That’s an important adaptation for the Colorado River fishes. Bonytail and humpback chub feed on insects, crustaceans, seeds and plants, occasionally small fish, all of which are much harder to find in the winter. Razorback suckers eat insects, plankton, and decaying plant matter – also less available in the winter months.

Now that we’re heading into springtime, when the weather gets warmer and the river along with it, both the fish and their prey are becoming active again.

Temperature is no longer a big threat to survival of these species. Flaming Gorge Dam has been re-engineered so that warmer water is drawn through its turbines. Also, flows through the dam are altered during spawning season to increase survival of fish larvae. The Ouray hatchery raises young fish to boost their population. The biggest threats to these species are habitat destruction and competition from non-native fishes. Those are challenges that are much harder to address. But it’s good to know there are biologists helping to recover the rare native fishes of the Green and Colorado Rivers.

I’m Mark Brunson, and I’m wild about Utah’s aquatic species and habitats.

Credits:

Images: Johnson Bottoms, Courtesy US FWS, John Orlanda, Photographer
Razerback Sucker, Courtesy US FWS, Sam Stuckel, Photographer
Bonytail Chub, Humpback Chub, Courtesy US FWS
Featured Audio: J. Chase and K.W. Baldwin as well as Friend Weller, https://upr.org/
Text: Mark Brunson, https://www.usu.edu/experts/profile/mark-brunson/
Additional Reading: Mark Brunson, https://www.usu.edu/experts/profile/mark-brunson/ & Lyle Bingham, Bridgerland Audubon Society

Additional Reading

Mark Brunson’s archive: https://wildaboututah.org/?s=brunson

Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, https://www.fws.gov/office/upper-colorado-river-endangered-fish-recovery-program/species

Ouray National Wildlife Refuge, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, https://www.fws.gov/refuge/ouray

Ouray National Fish Hatchery, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, https://www.fws.gov/fish-hatchery/ouray

Fish, Dinosaur National Park, National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/dino/learn/nature/fish.htm

Endangered Species Day: A look at how DWR, other agencies are helping razorback suckers in Utah, News, Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, May 14, 2020. https://wildlife.utah.gov/news/utah-wildlife-news/919-endangered-species-day-helping-razorback-suckers.html

Where do fish go when it freezes outside?, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/fish-freeze.html

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Elusive Wolves

Wolf Footprints in the River of No Return Wilderness Courtesy & Copyright Eric Newell, Photographer
Wolf Footprints in the River of No Return Wilderness
Courtesy & Copyright Eric Newell, Photographer
“A deep chesty bawl echoes from rimrock to rimrock, rolls down the mountain, and fades into the far blackness of the night. It is an outburst of wild defiant sorrow…. Every living thing (and perhaps many a dead one as well) pays heed to that call. To the deer it is a reminder of the way of all flesh, to the pine a forecast of midnight scuffles and of blood upon the snow, to the coyote a promise of gleanings to come, to the cowman a threat of red ink at the bank…. Yet behind these obvious and immediate hopes and fears there lies a deeper meaning, known only to the mountain itself. Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf.”
Aldo Leopold, Thinking Like A Mountain

In January three wolves were killed by the US Department of Agriculture and Food in Cache Valley, near Avon. The wolves wandered into a corner of northern Utah (more or less north of I-80 and east of I-84) where wolves are exempt from protection.

These were not the first wolves in northern Utah in modern times. I came across tracks in the Bear River Range a dozen years ago. There have been at least 21 documented sitings of wolves in Utah since 2004.

Wolf Footprints Courtesy & Copyright Eric Newell, Photographer
Wolf Footprints
Courtesy & Copyright Eric Newell, Photographer

Wolf Footprints in Snow Courtesy & Copyright Eric Newell, Photographer Wolf Footprints in Snow
Courtesy & Copyright Eric Newell, Photographer

In the winter of 2002, on the last day of a four-day, fifty-five mile ski tour, deep in Idaho’s River of No Return Wilderness, a friend and I were setting a skin-track (a backcountry skiing term for breaking a trail) from the Salmon River up to the canyon rim. We traveled through spaced-out ponderosa pines through light snowflakes until we topped out on flat ground, 5,000 feet above the river. The forest abruptly transitioned to thick lodge pole pines. At our feet, all the snow was packed down with fresh wolf tracks. There was no new snow in the tracks, yet snow continued to fall from above. A pack of wolves had coalesced where we stood moments before our arrival.

Though I had seen wolf tracks before, I was still taken aback by the sheer size.

There are only two known cases of wolves killing people in the last century in North America. Statistically, you are more likely to be killed by a dear, an elk, a moose, a snake, a falling tree, an insect sting, lightening, or just about anything else than you are to be attacked by a wolf. Even with that knowledge, we could not escape a feeling of vulnerability. We looked around cautiously.

Five sets of evenly-spaced wolf tracks, parallel to one another, lead down the trail—the trail we had to follow. After about one hundred meters of skiing, one set of tracks peeled off to the left, disappearing into the lodgepole pine forest. A hundred meters later, a second set of wolf tracks turned off, this time to the right. A hundred meters more, and another set peeled off to the left. Consistent with pattern, a fourth set veered off to the right one hundred meters later, once again.

The wolf pack undoubtably watched us from all points of the compass. On high alert, we scanned the woods constantly for flashes of movement, for golden eyes peering from behind the timber, but saw nothing.

The middle set of tracks—the fifth wolf’s tracks—continued for another mile down the snow-covered trail before they too, turned off into the forest and vanished. We never caught a glimpse of any of them.

I think about those elusive wolves frequently. A wolf encounter is an zenith wilderness experience.

In Thinking Like a Mountain, Aldo Leopold described his younger self shooting a wolf and coming upon it in time to watch it die:
“I was young then,” he wrote, “and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die [in the wolf’s eyes], I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.

I’m not suggesting wolves shouldn’t be managed, but I would like to see wildlife biologists making those decisions and that they are applied with consistency.

Leopold concluded,
“…Too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau’s dictum: ‘In wildness is the salvation of the world.’ Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.”

I am Eric Newell and I am wild about Utah.

Credits:
Images: Courtesy & Copyright Eric Newell, Photographer
Featured Audio: Courtesy & Copyright © Hugh Jones (Rubber Rodeo-Before I Go Away) and to J. Chase and K.W. Baldwin
Text: Eric Newell, Edith Bowen Laboratory School, Utah State University
Additional Reading: Eric Newell

Additional Reading

Wild About Utah Pieces by Eric Newell

Moilanen, Samantha, State officials killed three wolves in northern Utah. Here’s why., The Salt Lake Tribune, Jan. 27, 2026, 4:09 p.m., Updated: Jan. 28, 2026, https://www.sltrib.com/news/2026/01/27/utah-officials-kill-three-wolves/

Lofton, Shelby, 3 wolves killed in Cache County; picture prompts concern over ‘lethal removal’, KSL.com, KSL Broadcasting Salt Lake City UT, Deseret Digital Media, Jan. 28, 2026, https://www.ksl.com/article/51439305

Allen, Corbin, USU ecologists weigh in on wolves killed near Avon The Herald Journal a.k.a. HJNews, Jan 30, 2026, https://www.hjnews.com/news/local/usu-ecologists-weigh-in-on-wolves-killed-near-avon/article_8132fca5-2ca1-4d69-9ae7-3107b4008f52.html

Gilbert, Lael, USU Ecologists Offer Expert Perspective About Gray Wolves Found in Cache Valley, Land & Environment, USU Today, Utah State University, January 29, 2026, https://www.usu.edu/today/story/usu-ecologists-offer-expert-perspective-about-gray-wolves-found-in-cache-valley/

Leopold, Aldo, Thinking Like a Mountain,, Ecotone, Inc, https://www.ecotoneinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/aldo-leopold-tlam.pdf
See also this copy on the Sierra Club website: https://www.sierraclub.org/sites/www.sierraclub.org/files/sce/rocky-mountain-chapter/Wolves-Resources/Thinking%20Like%20a%20Mountain%20-%20Aldo%20Leopold.pdf

The Yellowstone Wolf Reintroduction: A Timeline, The Greater Yellowstone Coalition, https://greateryellowstone.org/yellowstone-wolf-reintroduction

Wolves in Utah, Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, Utah Department of Natural Resources, Last Updated: Tuesday, September 9, 2025, https://wildlife.utah.gov/wolves.html

History of Wolf Management, Yellowstone National Park, National Park Service, US Department of the Interior, https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/historyculture/wolf-management.htm