A shaded lawn with picnic tables marks the old property of Doc Inglesby, a retired dentist and rock collector whose house drew the attention of the state's WPA guide. Restrooms and water run in season. Easter picnics once filled this valley. The river beside the lawn is unsafe for swimming or wading.
Leave the river alone here. You can't see this one, and that's the trap. Testing has shown elevated E coli in the Fremont River and in Sulphur Creek, which joins it near here, so no swimming, no wading, and keep it out of your mouth. If I go quiet when you shut off the engine, tap play. The man who owned this lawn is the better story. Doc Inglesby was a retired Salt Lake dentist and a rockhound, and in nineteen thirty-six he bought just under six acres here. He built his hobby into the walls, a house of logs, petrified wood and ripple-marked sandstone, with a fence of great stone slabs bolted together. His two small cabins were for rockhounds only. And when the Work Projects Administration's guide to Utah came through, it called Fruita an eleven-house village of many orchards and found exactly one building worth a note. Doc's. You've got tables, a lawn, water and restrooms in season. Easter belonged to Fruita. Over fifteen hundred people came on Easter Sunday of nineteen fifty-four. They picnicked in the valley and up in the canyons, and they rolled colored hard-boiled eggs down the slopes.
Photo: The Dye Clan / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0 (cropped)