Walking milestone

 This last week I reached something of a milestone in my rehabilitation efforts, which now mostly center on walking.  I now have the energy and endurance to walk several miles every day, along the Spanish Fork River Trail or around our neighborhood.  Here is my record:
Monday Sept 21, 11,013 steps
Tuesday Sept 22, 10,038 steps
Wednesday Sept 23, 10,088 steps
Thursday Sept 24, 10,200 steps
Friday Sept 25, 10193 steps
Saturday Sept 26, 10, 137 steps
10,000 of my steps is about 4 miles or more.

Recognizing President Moz Burles

 

     Working on my personal history, I decided that I would have a section on persons who had important influences on my life, persons that helped me develop values and take positive steps.  Aside from my parents, and especially my mother, I think the most influential person was Moz Burles, the White Salmon Branch President when I was a teenager.  He encouraged me in so many ways, such as when I brought him a tithing check from my summer haying work two years before I was a church-member, having long discussions about the Church and its teachings,  bringing our family Church related books to read, helping me to get baptized, arranging of me to receive the Aaronic Priesthood, giving me priesthood assignments, helping me to be called on a mission, and so forth.  I wrote a three page description of the ways he helped me in my life.
    After I served my mission and was living in Utah, I had very little contact with President Burles.  I knew that he continued to serve in various ways in the white Salmon Branch/Ward and in the community.  At some point I learned that he had lost his wife and in his old age was being cared for by a sister who lived in West Jordan and that he had passed away.  As I was writing about him, I decided to look up his record in FamilySearch.  I found there a fairly sketchy record added by a niece or nephew, that really didn’t do justice to him for his contributions to me personally or his positive influence in the White Salmon community.  I looked for information about him in Ancestry.com and found a nice obituary record that had been published in the White Salmon Enterprise.  I learned that he was buried in, of all places, in the town cemetery in Charleston, Utah, a little community in Heber Valley, which lay along the highway from Provo Canyon just at the top of Deer Creek reservoir.  He was buried by his sister Bessie and her husband, Neil Winterton, in the Winterton family plot in his hometown.  Several weeks ago, Wendy and I were able to locate his grave in that cemetery so far from the people in Washington state that he served and influenced and even from his wife, Valore, who was buried in a cemetery near their home.
    I then added three items to the memories section for President Burles in FamilySearch, that I hope adds to his luster.  First, there was his obituary, second my 3 page tribute to his life, and third a picture of his grave marker in the Charleston Town cemetery: Mozart Choules Burles, KW8L-8H1, born in Provo, UT 11 August 1902, died 2 April 1983 in Salt Lake City, UT

Walking again on the River Trail

 

 

    As we do walking for exercise, Wendy and I have been retracing our steps from several years ago, as I have gained strength to walk longer distances.  We have gradually increased the distance we can walk, we have gone back to the Spanish Fork River Trail and especially love the walk that begins at what we hade heard called the tree road going east to the park over a mile and then back.
    The city has been upgrading the trail and has just completed some trails coming down into the bottoms and has built a parking lot with restroom and grass at the river at the tree road now which is now called Poplar Road.
    We have had two mornings when we have run into David and Katie as they have been out for a run.
    There were two places on this stretch that we were attracted to in earlier years:
1) The home of the Rock Chucks.  Here is a picture of the river bank reinforced with big boulders that used to be the home of colony of Rock Chucks or Yellow Bellied Marmots. We would stop and watch them pop their heads out of holes among these rocks.

Looking the other way (west), one morning we saw a Rock Chuck mama and her babies crossing the trail right in the spot ahead coming back from an expedition in a corn field just across to the north.

2) A Beaver colony.  There was a time when we discovered a bunch of little trees that appeared to have been gnawed off by beavers at about this spot.  We looked further and found a palce in the River itself where it appeared that these animals wert starting to build a dam.

Unhappily, it appears that persons responsible for the river and the trail could not tolerate the presence of these beautiful wild things, and must have trapped or destroyed them

Here’s something else we are noticing.  We see lots and lots of people on the new trail system, running, walking, bicycling.  I said to Wendy, “It must be that Latter-day Saints are aren’t exercising, because most all of the people we see are in shorts or sleeveless tops” Wendy said, “No, I think their just all dressed in exercise clothes.  Its the new practice.”  

Could that be?