In Memorium Archives - Wild About Utah

November 10, 2025November 10, 2025

Chasing a Legend: Eric Jones

Eric Jones (left) and the author, High on Borah Peak, Idaho Courtesy & Copyright Eric Newell, Photographer — Eric Jones (left) and the author, High on Borah Peak, Idaho
Courtesy & Copyright Eric Newell, Photographer

The Author's Journal Entry From Borah Peak 2003. Courtesy and Copyright Eric Newell, Photographer — The Author’s Journal Entry From Borah Peak 2003
Courtesy & Copyright Eric Newell, Photographer

Eric Jones closing in on the summit of Borah Peak
Courtesy & Copyright Eric Newell, Photographer

Eric Jones leading the way to Dromendary Peak in Little Cottonwood Canyon 1995
Courtesy & Copyright Eric Newell, Photographer

Little Cottonwood Canyon 1991, The Thumb, S-Direct
Courtesy & Copyright Eric Newell, Photographer

Eric Jones on a ledge
near the Gate Buttress
Little Cottonwood Canyon 1991.
Courtesy & Copyright Eric Newell, Photographer

White Pine with Gary and Eric Jones circa 1988
Courtesy & Copyright Eric Newell, Photographer

Eric-Jones-closing-in-on-the-summit-of-Borah-Peak. Courtesy and Copyright Eric Newell, Photographer — The Author’s Journal Entry From Borah Peak 2003
Courtesy & Copyright Eric Newell, Photographer

Eric Jones closing in on the summit of Borah Peak
Courtesy & Copyright Eric Newell, Photographer

Eric Jones leading the way to Dromendary Peak in Little Cottonwood Canyon 1995
Courtesy & Copyright Eric Newell, Photographer

Little Cottonwood Canyon 1991, The Thumb, S-Direct
Courtesy & Copyright Eric Newell, Photographer

Eric Jones on a ledge
near the Gate Buttress
Little Cottonwood Canyon 1991.
Courtesy & Copyright Eric Newell, Photographer

White Pine with Gary and Eric Jones circa 1988
Courtesy & Copyright Eric Newell, Photographer

I lost a beloved friend and mentor two weeks ago in a fluke canyoneering accident in Zion National Park.

I first met Eric Jones when I was four years old. My family had just moved to Sugarhouse, in the Salt Lake Valley. I rode my red, yellow, and blue Big Wheel Speedster down the sidewalk and skidded to a stop three houses away to talk to two bothers standing in their front yard. The much taller one asked if I was the new kid who just moved in. I said I was. He asked my name. I said, “Eric.” He smiled and said, “Hey, that’s my name too!” His younger brother—my age—said, “And I am Gary Jacob Jones!”

Gary and I became fast friends and Eric, five years older, was someone I perpetually looked up to. He was always taller than I, charismatic, funny, and true to himself to the core. One Saturday, while playing under an apple tree in the big sandbox in the Jones’ backyard, Eric came out to coerce Gary and I into hiking with him. We declined his initial offer but agreed when he promised 7-Eleven Slurpees on our way back. And so, we went. This scene played out many times.

Eric took us to fantastical places in the Wasatch. While we hiked, he would tell stories about wild animals, old miners’ tales, ghost stories, places he had been, and places he wanted to go. Each story, each place name, added to the intrigue and the places he talked about became the places I dreamed about: Grizzly Gulch, Sundial Peak, the West Slabs of Mount Olympus, Maybird Gulch, Cardiac Pass, Thunder Mountain, and on and on. When he described the largest Wilderness Area in the lower 48 states, the River of No Return Wilderness in central Idaho, I knew I had to get there someday. It’s a place where I have spent much of my adult life, including a long backpacking trip with Eric.

One time, he told us about an invention called a mountain bike that was a cross between a BMX bike and a ten-speed, and then, on cue, a mountain biker appeared heading down the trail. Eric drew a map of the Wasatch from memory on a blank piece of paper once, naming all the
side canyons within Mill Creek, Big Cottonwood, and Little Cottonwood Canyons. He labeled each summit, with its precise elevation. As a kid, I was amazed that all this information was just in his head, literally at his fingertips.

One June, after luring Gary and I from the sandbox once again, we attempted to climb the 11,045 foot Mount Superior. Eventually we reached a place on the knife-edge ridge where there was too much snow to safely proceed—at least for Gary and I. Eric probably could have crossed it safely and headed on to the summit, but we were his companions, and he wasn’t going to put us in danger or abandon us. So, we turned around and headed for the 7-Eleven at the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon.

Eric always wanted to see what there was to see around the next bend or over the next ridgeline. He planted seeds of mystery and awe in my core.

Before we were old enough to participate, Gary and I heard stories of Eric’ s feats in the mountains with the older scouts. The troop had planned a week-long 50-mile backing trip in the Uinta Mountains that included, at Eric’s instance, a layover day and extra mileage to climb Kings Peak, the tallest mountain in Utah.

When they arrived at the lake for the layover, the leaders—trail-weary from backpacking with a bunch of teenagers—announced that they wouldn’t be going to King’s Peak the next day. They would have a rest day instead. The other boys seemed happy enough to loaf around. Not Eric.

He got up before dawn, packed his day pack, and headed off to the summit on his own. I don’t recall if he woke up his tent-mate to tell him where he was going before he left or not. Either way, the leaders were not happy with him when they figured it out hours later. Gary thinks Eric was 14 years old at the time.

Eric told a funny tale from that trip. One of the other boys, Nathan Cornwall, had pre-made all his lunches for the week, which consisted of eight sardine and mayonnaise sandwiches on Wonder Bread, which he had carefully packed back in the bread sack. You shouldn’t need a food handler’s permit to know this is a horrible idea. Eric couldn’t stop laughing when he described Nathan pulling the smashed mass of soggy, stinky sardine sandwiches out of his pack the first day of the trip.

During his life Eric hiked, climbed, camped, canyoneered, skied, and rowed thousands of miles throughout west, from the Cascades to the Tetons to the red rock deserts of the southwest, and beyond. He was a keen writer and a profound thinker. He worked hard, loved deeply, and he stood for the things he believed in. He was fine friend to many.

When we were finally old enough backpack with Eric and his friends, Gary and I literally ran with our full packs on, to keep up with Eric’s long, easy strides. That’s the image I have of Eric Jones in my mind. I was just trying to keep up, chasing a legend into the wilds.

I am Eric Newell, and I am wild about people who inspire others to get outside and see what there is to see.

Eric Jones (left) with my friend Issac in the Lost River Range in Idaho Courtesy and Copyright Eric Newell, Photographer — Eric Jones (left) with my friend Issac in the Lost River Range in Idaho
Courtesy & Copyright Eric Newell, Photographer

Credits:
Images: Courtesy & Copyright Eric Newell, Photographer
Featured Audio: Courtesy & © Shalayne Smith Needham & Courtesy & Copyright © Anderson, Howe, Wakeman
Text: Eric Newell, Edith Bowen Laboratory School, Utah State University
Additional Reading: Eric Newell & Lyle Bingham

Additional Reading

Wild About Utah Pieces by Eric Newell

Obituary, Eric Lynn Jones, 1967-2025, https://www.memorialutah.com/obituaries/eric-lynn-jones

The Standard Thumb, Little Cottonwood Canyon, The Mountain Project-OnX&amp, https://www.mountainproject.com/route/105741170/the-standard-thumb
S-Direct Variant: https://www.mountainproject.com/route/105740579/s-direct-variation

Mount Borah: Peak Information and Climbing Guide, IDAHO: A Climbing Guide (Tom Lopez),
https://www.idahoaclimbingguide.com/bookupdates/mount-borah-12655/

Author’s note: “Eric also edited my Salmon River Guidebook before I sent it off to the publisher years ago. He went through it with a fine-toothed comb and picked up on so many details others missed, including myself. He influenced me to be a better writer.”
https://blackcanyonguides.com/

December 30, 2019November 10, 2025

Legacy Beyond Memory

My mother’s father died of cancer three months before I was born. From his memory, I carry his first name as my middle: Orville.

For most of my life, this was all I had of his. Others had stories of him, photos, old reels of film. Through these means, I began over the years to better understand, perhaps not my grandfather as he was, but certainly as he was remembered. I began to see the meaning of my name but only within the memory of others.

Orv was an avid outdoorsman and hunter in the north woods of Wisconsin. He loved nothing more than setting out with his firearm and kit, and coming home with game from that still wild mist. My grandmother refused to clean his wild harvests, and his children, my mother and her sisters, refused as well. Orv’s tradition was not their own.

So my grandfather always cleaned his harvests himself. Each feather he’d pluck and each hide he’d skin defined how others remembered him and how I would know him. He always completed the hunt. This was the only way. When he passed, his ways did as well.

Now, growing up after Orv’s death, my family’s meat came from the grocery store already butchered; no longer an animal: just a morsel for consumption. There was no understanding of life attached to the chicken breasts and the ground beef. Orv’s progeny had no interest in striking out into the woods or marsh before light, or in the taking of a life, even though that take always gave to good cause. They had no interest in cold hands, cold feet, blood, bile, and organs. Why then did Orv? What called him to this tradition, to keep it, to provide by its ways? I felt an indescribable pull towards my lost grandfather, and such the lost grandfathers before him who shared in this tradition of provision.

So one winter, I found Orv’s firearms in my aunt’s basement closet by chance, neglected of care, much less use, for 30 years. Seeing them there I knew that they needed to be used and no longer lay wrapped in an old sheet hidden behind older luggage. I did not want my grandfather to be an artifact of the past. I wanted him to be still of use: to be a grandfather. I wanted to be connected to the man I never knew.

And so I inherited his firearms that he used to provide for his family, my family, for so many years. After good repair, Orv, held in those heirlooms for so long, became alive again and a future opened back up for him. By reliving his ways, I could resurrect him from the stories, photos, and film reels. Together, we could see the world, hunt, and better understand what is beyond life and death.

So with my grandfather’s firearms revived, I began to learn how to hunt from experienced ethical friends. I learned how to aim to kill so that no animal may suffer. I learned my bag limits, my off limits, and the eternal unwritten rules on how to consider the life of another living thing with the greatest respect. We hunt for the necessity of food, tradition, and remembering where we come from and must one day go.

It has been years since Orv’s guns came to me, and I to them. Since then, I have learned from more friends how to lay in wait in Cutler Marsh for ducks, or where to walk in the Cache for grouse. I have discovered that Utah is more than its cultures, its economy, its governments. I have discovered that this land called Utah allows me chances like no other to walk with my grandfather: to feel my cold hands and cold feet as his must have been, to have the shared blood on my hands symbolising that highest tradition of provision, respect, and admiration for life.

This land called Utah is magical. Utah allows ghosts to escape the purgatory of memory for life renewed. Utah allows invisible and forgotten families to be whole again. Utah lets us better live a life of respect and gratitude for every living creature, harvested, missed, or let on by.

From my grandfather, I now can hope with great joy that one day I will be able to live beyond my remembrance as well, guiding from the grave those who come next on what it means to live with the land as my grandfather did, and giving eyes to see the real Utah, the land, as beautifully as we do.

I’m Patrick Orville Kelly, my grandfather is Orville Carl Knutson, and we are Wild About Utah.

Legacy Beyond Memory-Credits:

Images: Sunrise image Courtesy Pixabay, Public Domain
Audio: Contains audio Courtesy & Copyright Friend Weller, Utah Public Radio includes audio courtesy and copyright Kevin Colver
Text: Patrick Kelly, Director of Education, Stokes Nature Center, https://logannature.org
Included Links: Lyle Bingham, Webmaster, WildAboutUtah.org

Legacy Beyond Memory-Additional Reading

Patrick Kelly, Director of Education, Our Team, Stokes Nature Center, https://logannature.org/staff [referenced 8 Jan 2020]

Legacy Beyond Memory
Legacy Beyond Memory

February 3, 2017November 10, 2025

Albert Perry Rockwood

Albert P. Rockwood, Public Domain, courtesy Wikimedia

On May 12, 1871, Albert Perry Rockwood, the recently appointed Territorial Fish Superintendent of Utah, arrived at Silver Creek, a small tributary of the Weber River near present-day Rockport Reservoir. After setting up camp, Rockwood went to work catching native Bonneville cutthroat trout, which he placed in crates and milk cartons and loaded on wagons bound for Salt Lake City. This was no vacation. Rockwood was on official business on behalf of Brigham Young and the newly created Zion’s Cooperative Fish Association, Utah’s first fish-culture company. Rockwood’s mission was to transport as many live cutthroat as possible to rearing ponds in Salt Lake City, get them to spawn, then put the fry in Utah Lake. The project didn’t go as planned. Many of the fish died from lack of oxygen in the cramped storing crates, the bigger fish ate the smaller fish, and the cutthroat that made it into the rearing ponds alive wouldn’t spawn.¹

Bonneville Cutthroat Trout Courtesy & Copyright Brad Hansen, Photographer

Although Rockwood didn’t have much success farming native trout, his subsequent efforts with fish stocking yielded fruit. After some consideration, he decided that the answer to Utah’s declining trout populations was not to replace dying native trout with more native trout, but rather import exotic fish species and let them fill in. It helped that he had the support of the Mormon Church, which funded his fish stocking escapades through Zion’s Cooperative Fish Association. Over the pulpit, Mormon leaders encouraged members to do their part and declared fish “to possess brain making material to a greater extent than any other animal food.” They even went so far as to approve the use of prison inmates to build fish ponds near what is today Sugarhouse Park.²

During his time as Territorial Fish Superintendent, Rockwood experimented with American shad, black bullhead catfish, king salmon, Sebago salmon, eastern brook trout, lake whitefish, lobsters, oysters, American eel, Asian carp and a host of other species.³ Many of the exotics came from Rockwood’s east coast friends, including the biblical looking Seth Green and pragmatic Spencer Fullerton Baird, Director of the newly created U.S. Fish Commission. Today we might think some of Rockwood’s experiments cruel, like the time he attempted to farm lobsters and oysters in the Great Salt Lake, but at the time it was cutting edge fish culture.

On the surface it is obvious Rockwood was attempting to improve Utah’s fisheries, whatever that may have looked like at the time. However, if you look closer you can also see a man trying to make Utah into something more familiar. Historians have long established that throughout the American West, settlers introduced nonnative plants, animals, and fishes in an attempt to make the foreign and wild landscape into something domestic and manageable. It’s not surprising, then, that Rockwood, an East Coast transplant from Massachusetts, would bring to Utah many of the fish he had caught back home. Rivers and lakes were laboratories, not ecosystems, and in the end, if a fish survived, Rockwood believed it meant God wanted it there.

Today, in a twist of irony, our values have moved toward valuing natives over nonnatives, and we’re trying to quickly undo what Rockwood and others did. For example, millions of dollars are being spent to remove carp from Utah Lake and restore Bonneville cutthroat to the tributaries of the Weber River, those same tributaries where Rockwood camped and caught trout 145 years ago. I think we are doing right by the world, but in his time, so did Albert Perry Rockwood.⁴ And in case you’re wondering, Rockwood eventually solved the mystery of the cutthroat trout that would not spawn. In his notes he wrote: “I was on the headwaters before the females arrived, consequently, caught nothing but male fish…This solves the problem, why my trout did not spawn…”⁵

For Wild About Utah this is Brad Hansen.

Footnotes:
1. Journals of the Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Utah, Twenty-Second Session, for the Year 1876 (Salt Lake City: David O. Calder, Public Printer, 1876), 101-102.
Journals of the Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Utah, Twenty-Third Session, for the Year 1878 (Salt Lake City: J.W. Pike, Public Printer), 97-110.
2. Ibid.
3. Journals of the Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Utah, Twenty-Second Session, for the Year 1876 (Salt Lake City: David O. Calder, Public Printer, 1876), 101-102; Boris Popov, “The Introduced Fishes, Game Birds, and Game and Fur-Bearing Mammals of Utah” (Master’s thesis, Utah State University, 1949), 38-77; Journals of the Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Utah, Twenty-Third Session, for the Year 1878, 97-110.
4. Anders Halverson, An Entirely Synthetic Fish: How Rainbow Trout Beguiled America and Overran the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 187.
5. Ibid, 102-103.

Credits:
Photo: Courtesy and copyright Brad Hansen
Text: Brad Hansen

Sources & Additional Reading

Hansen, Bradley Paul, “An Environmental History of the Bear River Range, 1860-1910” (2013). All Graduate Theses and Dissertations. 1724. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/etd/1724/

Bonneville cutthroat trout, US Fish and Wildlife Service, Endangered Species of the Mountain Prairie Region https://www.fws.gov/mountain-prairie/species/fish/bct/index.htm

June Sucker, US Fish and Wildlife Service, ECOS Environmental Conservation Online System, https://ecos.fws.gov/ecp0/profile/speciesProfile?spcode=E050

DuHadway, Kate, Groups continue effort to re-establish Bonneville cutthroat trout in Logan River tributary, HJ News, 22 June 2012, https://news.hjnews.com/features/groups-continue-effort-to-re-establish-bonneville-cutthroat-trout-in/article_99b87942-bbd5-11e1-ae71-0019bb2963f4.html

October 3, 2013November 10, 2025

William Swainson and His Namesake Hawk and Thrush

Swainsons Hawk, Buteo swainsoni, Photo Copyright 2010 Eric Peterson — Swainson’s Thrush
*Catharus ustulatus*
Copyright © 2004 Jim Bailey

Swainsons Hawk
*Buteo swainsoni*
Copyright © 2010 Eric Peterson

What links this melodious thrush of northern Utah forests
(Kevin Colver: Song Birds of Yellowstone)
with a hawk that soars over farms, range lands and prairies in western North America?

Both Swainson’s Thrush and Swainson’s Hawk are named after the 17th century self-taught British naturalist, William Swainson. He was a contemporary of John James Audubon. Like Audubon, Swainson was a passionate solo collector, taxidermist and skilled illustrator of birds. Unlike Audubon, Swainson’s single intensive field expedition took him far to the south, sailing to eastern Brazil. During his two year stay, he amassed a collection of 20,000 animal specimens, including 760 bird skins. Swainson ultimately named 20 species new to science. Although he never visited North America, he nonetheless co-authored an encyclopedic four volume treatise about North America’s fauna.

Swainson’s Hawk and Swainson’s Thrush share another similarity, this one biological. Both birds migrate long distances to escape winter’s cold and hunger. Swainson’s Thrush winters in balmy tropical forests of South America. Swainson’s Hawk soars farther, all the way to the arid Argentine pampas. There this large slender hawk dines mostly on big flying insects, particularly grasshoppers and even dragonflies. Swainson’s Hawks migrate in groups, often along regular corridors. Every September, Hawkwatch volunteers and hardy birders have reported hundreds of Swainson’s Hawks rocketing past the Wellsville Mountains of northern Utah, flying amid several thousand migrating raptors of all kinds.

Birds migrate to avoid the snow, cold and lean times of northern winters. Migration poses natural risks, of course. Hawkwatch ornithologists also suspect that widespread use of two deadly organophosphate insecticides on Argentine crops kills many insect-eating Swainson’s Hawks. The plow, pavement and subdivisions have also reduced this hawk’s historic northern range, especially in California. In addition, foolish people still shoot this relatively tame hawk, not caring that its diet of rodents and grasshoppers benefits our farmers and ranchers.

Professional disappointments drove the quarrelsome William Swainson south as well, to New Zealand, where he died in anonymity. His namesakes, Swainson’s Hawk and Swainson’s Thrush, live on to cross and recross the equator in pursuit of perpetual summer and the feast it provides.

This is Linda Kervin for Bridgerland Audubon Society.

Credits:
Pictures: Swainson’s Hawk, Courtesy and Copyright © 2010 Eric Peterson, as found on utahbirds.org
Swainson’s Thrush, Courtesy and Copyright © 2004 Jim Bailey, as found on utahbirds.org
Bird Recordings: Kevin Colver https://wildstore.wildsanctuary.com/collections/special-collections
Text: Jim Cane, https://bridgerlandaudubon.org/
Voice: Linda Kervin https://bridgerlandaudubon.org/

Additional Reading:

Swainson’s Hawk, Fieldguide, Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, Utah Department of Natural Resources, State of Utah, https://fieldguide.wildlife.utah.gov/?species=buteo%20swainsoni

Swainson’s Hawk, All About Birds, The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Swainsons_Hawk/overview

Swainson’s Thrush, Fieldguide, Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, Utah Department of Natural Resources, State of Utah, https://fieldguide.wildlife.utah.gov/?species=catharus%20ustulatus

Swainson’s Thrush, All About Birds, The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Swainsons_Thrush/