Volunteer divers searched the inky depths of Red Fleet Reservoir hunting for dinosaur footprints tossed in by Boy Scouts — then found most of the prints in shallow water Tuesday.
It was an upbeat twist in a story that brought national shame to the Boy Scout organization. Kay Godfrey, information officer for the Great Salt Lake Council, Boy Scouts of America, confirmed that the incident did involve a Scout group.
"They were a registered Varsity team," he said Wednesday. The group, from West Valley City, had registered with the Boy Scouts for the outing.
When the incident became known, Godfrey was not yet certain that the boys were Scouts. He condemned the damage.
According to the Boy Scouts, Varsity Scouting is a program for young men who are at least 14 but not yet 18, providing "rugged high adventure and challenging sporting activities."
On July 19, four of the Scouts were awaiting their turn water-skiing in Red Fleet Reservoir. Looking across a channel, park manager Curt Sinclear saw the four in the area of a dinosaur footprint trackway.
He heard a big thud and a splash and realized that some of the Scouts were throwing rocks from the dinosaur walkway and hitting a buoy. He and a Scout leader raced to the scene. He discovered that sections of slickrock had been pried up, including footprints of a predatory dinosaur that walked there 190 million years ago.
They were part of a suite of footprints that included about 200 dinosaur tracks. The ones pried up and tossed into the reservoir were in a rare trackway of a 12-foot carnivore, where several strides could be followed.
Sue Ann Bilbey, curator of the Utah Fieldhouse of Natural History State Park Museum, Vernal, consulted photos taken before the incident. "There were three of an eight-print trackway damaged," she said.
According to Sinclear, three of the boys faced juvenile court charges of destroying the footprints. The fourth was not involved.
On Wednesday, two scuba divers from Vernal — Michael Weyland and Paul Carroll — offered their services in searching for the rock pieces.
Weyland, who operates the Atlantis Divers shop in Vernal, said he dives at Red Fleet Reservoir on a regular basis. Looking where they believed most of the rocks were thrown, they went into deep water.
"We're at 56 feet in black water, and brought up everything that felt like it hadn't been there very long," he said. That amounted to rock fragments that were sticking out of the silt on the bottom.
After searching much of the day, the two were about to give up.
"We went over to basically take some pictures of the area and some of the damage," Weyland said. "I spotted some rocks in the water" where the reservoir was so shallow that he could see the bottom.
He waded to the rocks and retrieved them. They seemed to have indentations.
"The drier they got, you could see there were recesses in them that looked like some of the footprints."
Sinclear began turning the pieces and putting them together, and several fit perfectly. About 90 percent of the damaged footprints were back where they belonged.
"We're all pretty tickled about it," Weyland added, speaking of the paleontologists, volunteers, park staffers and visitors on the scene Wednesday.
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