The first job of the spring season on the ranch is inspecting the main irrigation canal.  It’s about two miles long from where it picks up the water at the river to fields it irrigates.  Some years, it makes it through the winter without a problem. Other years there can be anything from ro ckslides to beaver dams. This year it was a 3-foot diameter tree that smashed some of the flow regulating controls.  You never know, but if there is trouble, I need to line up the right equipment to maintain it before the water gets turned on. The canal was dug by several Potts brothers and a brother-in-law in about 1883. One wrote that they spent two winters digging it. They were too busy farming in the summer. They surveyed it with a carpenter’s bubble level, and dug the whole thing with a pick and shovel. The canal clings to the contour line with just enough slope to keep the water moving, while the river drops quickly, still gouging out the canyon below.  The Potts brothers gave it a shot, but after about 10 to 15 years of ranching, they sold the land to the family we eventually bought it from. They packed off to the Alaska gold rush on the advice of a friend who had apparently made out pretty well.  The Alaska adventure proved to be as unremunerative as farming at 7,200 feet, and a whole lot colder. Most of them came back within a year. A couple of them ended up in Park City working in the mines.  One came back and spent around 15 years managing the ranch for the people he sold it to before quitting to build the telephone company in Kamas. That grew into Allwest, which provides phone and internet service to a large area, from Evanston to Empire Pass. That seems like a radical change in career paths, but digging post holes to string phone lines isn’t much different from digging post holes to string barbed wire fences.  They were clearly made of tougher stuff than me. On the hike to the head of the canal, the double track trail passes a small cave up on the mountain side. When I was in third grade, we had a school unit on Native Americans. That, followed by a summer trip to Mesa Verde, had me believing that any two rocks stacked on top of each other must be Indian ruins.  In the cave, there is a weird splotch of ocher color on the wall that doesn’t match anything else. I was sure it was a pictograph. All the adults said I was nuts. Sixty years later, I got the state archeologist to come and look at it. “Yep, Fremont,” she said. “Probably around 1,000 years old.” Vindication. She also found another panel that I would never have spotted. This has a whole bunch of signatures from the Potts brothers and a few names I don’t recognize, signed in pencil. They must have been exploring the cave, taking shelter in a thunderstorm, maybe a lunch break, who knows, but they decided to sign their names on the wall.  I detoured up to the cave partly to see the pictograph, which frankly isn’t much — apparently not all Fremonts were skilled artists — and pay homage to the Potts boys. I got thinking that the view from the cave isn’t materially different today from what the Fremont painter saw a thousand years ago.  None of the ranch buildings is visible from there, just the double track road. I’m sure the forest must have burned a few times over a thousand years, and maybe the vegetation mix is a little different. But the Fremont painter would look at the view from the cave this afternoon and feel right at home. That really hit me driving into Park City later that day. There are buildings popping up everywhere. Houses all over in Francis, some of them huge, and the Ritz Francis hotel (which is looking a lot better than I had feared). Victory Ranch has sliced up a lot of country below there, and other developments lining Highway 32 have changed the landscape.  The entire topography has been strip-mined and rearranged with roads spiraling up the mountains like grain augers. The Fremont guy wouldn’t recognize anything there.  Same thing along Highway 248 from Tuhaye all the way into Park City. Houses everywhere, a terrace of newly cut roads at Sky Ridge. East Village’s cranes and ski runs. The new Maverik station that will totally confuse traffic at Quinn’s Junction is moving along rapidly, so is Studio Crossing. And of course there’s the reservoir itself. To paraphrase Old McDonald, “with a townhouse here and a high rise there, here a condo, there a condo, ee-yi-ee-yi-OMG!”  The landscape has turned inside out. It’s obvious that it has changed a lot since the Fremonts were here. It’s changed a lot since last Wednesday, and will be materially different, maybe unrecognizable, a month from now.  Obviously the world can’t stand still, untouched for a thousand years. We don’t want to live in caves, or even the homesteader shacks the Potts brothers built. Fremont ski lifts were really bad. But it’s pretty jarring to go from the pictograph cave into the development gold rush in within a matter of a few miles.  Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986. The post More Dogs on Main: Old neighbors appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less