Until her death, my aunt claimed that Clyde Lake in the Uintas was named after our family. That seemed quite plausible.
My great-grandfather was chief engineer and construction manager of the first dams on the Trial, Washington and other lakes in that area around 1910. They stored water in the spring and released it into the Provo River in late summer for irrigation companies from Provo to Woodland. The story was enshrined in family history as one of those things, but there was no evidence to support it except that she said it. She was not someone to be questioned.
We’ve all camped there over the years, and after a recent hike, a few family members asked about it, and we started doing a little research. It turns out my aunt was wrong.
One of the first foresters there was John Maycock, and he named the lake after his son, who enjoyed fishing there. The boy’s first name was Clyde. The Maycock cabin still stands on the shore of Trial Lake, one of the few remaining cabins of several built there in the early 1900s.
The correction changes nothing. The great glacial slab of polished rock that drops into the lake is still as beautiful a place for lunch as any place in the world.
While searching online, I came across the wonderful memoirs of the wife of the first dam keeper there, Marion Clegg. The Clegg family, including young children, lived there in the summer to monitor the outflow of the dam for 40 years, starting around 1920.
In 1913, there was a telephone in the dam keeper’s cabin at Trial Lake. That year, the Kamas-Woodland Telephone Company was founded. Today, it is called All West Communications and provides telephone and internet service to a wide range of people from Empire Pass to Wyoming.
I don’t know if the phone line that ran 27 miles through the Kamas Gorge to Trial Lake belonged to the phone company or the owners of the reservoir. The phone company went out of business pretty quickly, and if they laid a 27-mile line for a seasonal connection, it’s not hard to see why. But I can’t quite imagine that there was phone service up there in 1913 and not today.
The Cleggs ran a sort of hostel there, which sounds like a large hut and was originally built to house the workers on the dam. There you could buy a chocolate bar, if the squirrels, which were free to roam the house, didn’t get you first.
I imagine the Uintas as a huge, empty, wild space.
At the moment it kind of is, except that it was pretty busy over the weekend.
But 100 years ago, the area was teeming with loggers, road builders (in the 1920s you could drive a Model T Ford to Trial Lake), ranchers and recreationists. The cabins at Trial Lake were the center of the action.
There have been a number of ice jams that have clogged the spillways of the dams, causing them to be washed out by the spring floods. The first attempt to build a dam, an experiment that led to the name Trial Lake, failed, so it was decided to inspect the dams in the winter and keep an eye on things.
There was no winter maintenance on the very primitive road from Kamas. The article said that instead they drove through Woodland, where there was a cleared road (of sorts), and then snowshoed up the Provo River to Trial Lake. That must have taken days. Those guys were tough. Now they check the discharge gates on the dams from air-conditioned offices in Orem.
My niece, looking for more evidence, bought a book called “Utah Place Names” by John VanCott. The book states that Dean Lake was named after Dean Clyde, with no further context.
Who the hell is Dean Clyde and why is there a lake named after him? That’s my grandfather, who was a sheep farmer. His father and grandfather were also involved in sheep farming and had grazing permits on Forest Service land in the area.
Sunday’s hike was to explore Dean Lake, and like all the Uinta Lakes, it was spectacular. It was off the trail and you had to dig through the undergrowth to get there. We missed it on the way there and had lunch at Bench Lake instead. There was nothing wrong with that, and after studying the map a little more, we found it on the way back.
As I was reading online hiking guides to get there, I missed a strange note. There are actually two Dean Lakes in the Uintas, one in the Four Lakes Basin and the other off the Bald Mountain Trail. There are also two Nobletts Creeks in the area. No wonder search and rescue are so busy.
Turns out we hiked to the wrong one. The Utah Place Names entry has the coordinates for the other one. This location makes more sense considering where the family would have grazed. It looks like a much longer hike, perhaps an overnight stay, but I’ll have to explore that now.
I would be very disappointed to learn that Clyde Maycock had a brother named Dean.
Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.
