Utah's backcountry, climbing, slackline and telemarking community

Freeloaders Corner, Maple Junkies

by Matt Cline, Staff Writer

In our high school days, my friends and I would often camp in Maple Canyon to do some sport climbing. On one particular trip, we stumbled onto a valuable resource: The Sanpete locals. Before our major discovery, we regarded them as loud ATV and dirt bike driving, keg-hauling party nuts there only to piss us off when we were climbing. On this trip, a few friends tagged along who weren’t into climbing. One of them was named Whitie. As we pulled into the campsite around 10 pm on Friday night, the locals were already getting sloshed. I began to make a fire with some pitiful kindling so we could cook our burgers and go to bed. I didn’t see this happening, but Danny and Mark saw something that is seldom seen. Whitie was thinking. He was actually driving a train of thought. He, out of all of us, had the balls and a low enough I.Q. to pull it off. “Hold on.” he said, and walked into the darkness in the direction of the partying, and we looked on, puzzled. I remember thinking “how the crap are we going to cook these burgers without any wood?”

A moment later, Whitie appeared out of the darkness, running with a huge load of chopped firewood in his arms. Needless to say, we ate greasy burgers and enjoyed our stolen fire that night. The next night, we decided to join in on the party, per se. As I have a knowledge that it’s easy to make friends when the other guy is drunk.

We became good friends with the locals. You know, buddy-buddy and the like. Anyway, I talked them into lending us some wood for our fire, and to this day, I still owe them wood, probably because I figure that they wouldn’t remember it anyway.
Tips to remember:

Never underestimate the power of the beefcake mentality.
Drunk people are easy to get stuff from.