Moon Lake is shrouded with history of Spanish mining and Indian lore. Many interesting things can and have been found in this area, and we hope to someday find the secret it holds.

Looking North West over Moon Lake to Round Mountain

 

The cliffs just East of the dam are covered in caves and grottos from top to bottom. If you are skilled enough to rappel into them, you may find something worth finding!

Timber Mine
Gale Rhoades recounts this story on page 65 of his book “Lost Gold of the Uintah”.
“I knowed Old Cale Rhoades for lots of years. Back in ’78 him and me and Pardon Dodds chased some renegade Utes from old Colorow’s band all the way from Kamas Valley to where Whiterocks is today before we lost them. We traveled through some chest-deep snow all the way to Vernal – it was called Ashley then. That’s when Cale Rhoades told us where one of his famous mines was; or, at least, pretty near did. We stopped in the timber way up near Moon Lake, just on the crest of this ridge, and Cale said, ‘You guys wait for me, I’ll be only a few minutes’. Sure ’nuff, in about five minutes – maybe ten at the most – he came backpacking a buckskin sack full of pure gold ore. He told us, ‘This will sure pay our expenses’.     Says I, ‘Yeh, but don’t worry about us coming back and locating your gold mine?’ ‘Hell no’, says he, ‘you’ve been riding circles around it all day and you could ride right over it and never see it!”
 
Ice Cave
A friend of mine grew up at Moon Lake in the small white house by the dam while his father served as the water master for Moon Lake Power and Electric for many years. He remembered going in an “ice cave” near the dam when he was a kid and said that the construction workers would store their food in it to keep it cold. Well, as a caver and having spent many weeks fishing at Moon Lake, I was very intrigued by the possibility of a natural cave in the area. A few months later that year we were able to locate it and get a few pictures inside. It turns out that it is not a natural cave at all, but was created as a test tunnel for routing of the pipes to the flume. It was abandoned early on and used as a storage place for the dam workers’ food. The tunnel is partially collapsed about 25 ft back, but it is nearly 350′ long if you can get past the cave in. You can see the old shelves they used on the left half of the tunnel. The ice in the mouth of the tunnel usually remains until the late part of August.

Powder Cabin
On one fishing trip, we were hiking through the trees near the dam and came across this old cabin. When I asked my friend who grew up there about it he said that it was the “powder cabin” where they stored the dynamite for the dam. Hopefully, they didn’t leave any buried in there! 🙂