Farmington Canyon Lakes Monster

Have you ever had an experience in life where you were not sure if you would survive an experience? Maybe you were so scared that you thought your best option was to make a run for it and hope for the best. All of us who camp or hunt have had at some point an experience that has left us wondering who or what was outside or tent during the night.

I realize that in the quiet solitude of the mountains that even a squirrel can sound like a grizzly bear but when re-telling a story some three decades later can still bring tears to the eyes I am pretty sure that it was not a squirrel outside of the tent.

It started out as a normal camping trip with three brothers looking for adventure. We wanted to stay for 3 days with mom finally whittling it down to just an overnight campout. Our camping location is up Farmington Canyon heading towards Bountiful at a place called Farmington Lakes Utah. We carried our gear about a fourth of a mile away from the main road and waved goodbye to mom and dad.

I was 9 or 10 and my oldest brother was 16 but with the sun shining and fish to catch we were hardly worried about being alone. Besides we had dads blank gun and our trusty hunting dog Rusty that was the feared dog of the neighborhood. Many people would not even come up to our front door but would instead stay in their car and honk so that we would come out and save them from our dog Rusty.

The place that we camped was surrounded by thick brush with only a small area to place a tent on top of a little knoll overlooking the lake. It seems like we did not catch any fish so we spent the rest of the afternoon exploring and hiking. This was back in the early 70's and I am not sure we heard or saw another person all day long. We were just three boys alone in our little camping world or so we thought.

The evening was uneventful and was spent like any normal camping trip where we sat around the fire roasting marshmallows and looking at the stars. We finally went to sleep and took Rusty in the tent to stand guard. I remember walking to the sound of the tent door being unzipped. I then heard my older brothers asking each other if they had gotten up and gone to the bathroom and felt the hair rise up on the back of my neck as I realized that we had just heard the tent door start to unzip.

As I started to contemplate who or what was outside our tent our trusty hunting dog Rusty started growling in that deep, low in the back of your throat growl and even though it was dark I knew that his teeth where bared because I had seen him in that mode before and it was a mood not to be reckoned with and then that was when we heard footsteps outside of our tent.

My oldest brother took my dads blank gun and fired off a round or two and we could hear whatever had been outside of our tent run away through the brush. As we lay there on the point of hysteria and grateful that the gun had scared away whatever person or beast that had been outside of our tent we heard the footsteps return.

At this point even for a young boy it was not hard to draw some reasonable conclusions that if it was a person outside of the tent that the gun would have seriously discouraged anyone from returning back because they would have had no idea that our gun was only shooting blanks. The gun sounded like my dads police revolver so who or whatever was outside of our tent was not intimidated by the noise of our gun which became apparent when we fired two more rounds which scared the thing away again, only to return at some point, so we fired the last two rounds from the gun. Again the thing ran away but was back within minutes. It came and circled the tent as you could hear it walking around and in the dim light to my horror you could see it push on the side of the tent.

Our dog Rusty continued to growl in his vicious tone but would not bark at whatever was outside. With the blank gun empty it was decided to sacrifice our trusty hunting dog Rusty and have beast go against beast. When we tried to get Rusty to leave the tent he dug in his heels and wouldn't budge. This was a very upsetting thing for me because I had often come home late walking down our long driveway in the dark and had Rusty charge down the driveway towards me. I always thought he was going to eat me until at the last second he would realize that it was me and then to my relief he would switch from barring teeth to wagging his tail so when he was unwilling to leave the tent I became convinced that whatever was out there would eventually come inside the tent and would kill and eat us.

For the next two hours we endured the noise of the thing walking around or tent, listing to our dog growl, me bawling my eyes out and thoughts of hanging upside down bleeding in some cave waiting to be eaten alive. During those two or more hours after the gun was empty when the thing would push on the side of the tent we would throw something at it and it would run away for five or so minutes and then would come back and stalk again.

This routine was repeated over and over and we finally reached a point that we decided that we were going to die that night and that we should probably make a run for it by throwing ourselves out the tent door and then running in different directions and hope that one of us would survive. As we contemplated our fate the thing simply just did not return having run away again after throwing something at the side of the tent to scare it away.

It never did return again that night and the ordeal ended sometime after 4:30 am in the morning but I am pretty sure we did not sleep again that night. The next morning the sun came up and it became kind of surreal that we had survived a horrific experience during the night so contrasting was the daylight to the dark long night. If we would have gotten our wish to stay another night I am pretty sure we would have hiked up over the top and then down the face of the mountain to the valley because there was no way we were staying another night in that place.

Growing up at the base of those mountains was pretty much my backyard and I have hiked and hunted that area many times since then and to this day some 30 years later I still do not know what thing was outside of our tent but even today driving or hiking in that spot I still get the same chills on the back of my neck just like I did that one horrific night!