The Willows

In about 1986 we planned a camping trip to the Willows campground at the south end of Bear Lake at Rendezvous Beach. Curtis, Matthew and I packed up our little Honda station wagon with the tent and all the camping gear and headed out. We had invited their friend Ben Gowans, too. We put up the tents–one for the guys and one for me–and set out the cooler, the Coleman stove, some lawn chairs, the six dollar hammock we got at Allied, and then headed for the water.

Our camp site backed right up to the white sand of the beach. So we just walked about fifty yards down to the water to swim and play. We took inner tubes and a bike pump to blow them up with. We also had some other float toys. But the thing that seemed to be the most fun for the boys was digging in the sand. That evening they started a digging project in the sand up near our campsite and it kept them busy for a long time. I was making up some dinner and when I walked over to see call them to come eat, I saw Matthew and Curtis but I didn’t see Ben. And then I saw him–but only the top of his head. He was standing in a hole they had dug and he was in as deep as he was tall–about five feet. Yikes! My first instinct was “What if it caves in? He will be buried alive.” But they all thought that was so fun to get a hole that deep. Before they came to eat, they covered it over with my beach towel and pulled a picnic table over it so nobody would fall in. They planned to work on it some more the next morning.

But during the night it had been quite windy and the towel had blown into the hole and a lot of sand had been blown in over it. We were finishing breakfast and getting the camp taken down when they went to check on their hole project. By then, it was too late to dig it out again. So my beach towel will forever be hidden somewhere under the sand at the Willows campground. We had a lot of fun on that trip. Good memories…