This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2012, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Four Boy Scouts from Troop 604 in Tooele decided for their Eagle Scout Project to build and install 140 metal posts at campsites in the Little Sahara Sand Dunes campgrounds in Utah's west desert and mark each with the designated campsite number.
The idea was to have an identity marker at each campsite to make it easier for emergency medical technicians to respond and for campers' friends and family members to find where they were camped.
They got permission from the Bureau of Land Management and after years of planning and gathering the materials, they placed the poles at the campsites last summer under BLM supervision.
Then just before Easter, less than a year after the markers were placed, the BLM pulled them out because some campers had backed into them and complained.
Don Yei, Troop 604 scoutmaster and father of two of the boys, said the markers were placed exactly where the BLM instructed — 5 feet off the main camp loop road and 5 feet in from the campsite. The Scouts and their family members went around each of the four loops at the campground, measured the dimensions and spray-painted the ground. BLM workers followed them and augured the holes. The Scouts then returned and secured the 6-foot steel bollard poles in the ground with concrete.
Yei said the four boys — Darek and Parker Yei and Zack and Dillon Bates — gathered the steel two years before the markers were actually installed. They climbed into an abandoned building he owned, torch-cut and demo-sawed pieces of sprinkler pipe, and dropped them to the ground — about 200 pounds in all. They later cut the pipe into 140 6-foot poles.
That preparation took more a year, but by 2009, they had all the materials ready and hauled them to the campground, only to have the BLM tell them they had to pick everything back up because the campground was going to be repaved that spring.
The poles couldn't be installed in summer 2010 because two of the boys spent much of that summer at a Scouting event, so they completed the project in 2011 with the help of the BLM, which picked up the pipes and material and delivered them to the campground.
Yei said the Scouts and their families saved the BLM about $42,000 in labor and materials it would have spent had a commercial contractor done the project.
I was unable to reach Mike Gates, head of the BLM's Fillmore Field Office, for comment. But I did listen to a voice message he left for Yei in which he apologized for removing the campsite markers, but said campers had complained about hitting the poles with their vehicles, so officials decided they needed to go.
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The Pavlov effect • In response to my Monday column about the Secret Service hitting on Parent Teacher Association moms at a PTA convention in New Mexico in 1983, Don Thomas, former superintendent of the Salt Lake City School District, shared this anecdote:
Thomas attended the convention and was at the luncheon where President Ronald Reagan spoke.
At one point, he said, Reagan declared: "I will put God back in the classroom," and everyone cheered.
Thomas wondered who had taken God out of the classroom and what power Reagan had to put him back in.
He asked one woman sitting next to him what that meant. She said, "I don't know." He asked why she was cheering. She said, "I don't know. Everyone else is."