Mexico beach getaway, Oregon Shakespeare, cowboy ski challenge - includes related articles

Sunset, Feb, 1995

All seem to have been invigorated by the 3/4-mile ski up East Fork Road 472, through woods thick with ponderosa pine and lodgepole, to the one-room log cabin known as the East Fork Guard Station. It's one of 75 the Forest Service rents to the public in western Montana and eastern Idaho when they are not needed by rangers, trail crews, or game wardens. Last year, more than 9,000 people skied, rode snowmobiles, hiked, or drove to one of the 58 cabins and 17 lookouts in the region's 13 national forests.

Access, availability, and amenities vary by cabin. Remoteness ranges from the 1/2-mile ski in to Big Creek Cabin in the Gallstin Mountains to a 57-mile snowmobile ride to Horse Heaven Cabin in the Bitterroot Mountains. Most cabins are available from January through April, some year-round. Lookouts are available only in summer. All cabins have beds, woodstoves, and outhouses, but not all have electricity and piped-in water.

The East Fork cabin is primitive but adequate: it has two hard bunk beds, a propane cooking stove, a woodstove and wood, dishes, and an outside water pump. The cabin is clean, but many log entries describe a pack rat: "Pack rat subdued by Maglite." "Pack rat ate Sampson (our dog)." "Pack rat ate my dad."

For some cabins, you may need to make reservations six months in advance; prices range from $15 to $30. For detailed information, write for the cabin directory at the Information Office, Northern Region Headquarters, USDA Forest Service, Box 7669, Missoula, Mont. 59807.

GRANTSVILLE, UTAH

Make a winter dive into the tropics at Bonneville Seabase

Though the ski resorts in the Wasatch Range are deep in snow and the nearest ocean is some 900 miles away, you need not leave Utah - nor lose sight of the mountains - to don a wet suit and splash down in tropical waters.

Just head to Bonneville Seabase, a year-round snorkeling and scuba diving center in Grantsville. Linda Nelson and George Sanders have transformed geothermal springs there into a 4,200-foot-elevation diving oasis in the Rocky Mountain West. Eighty-degree water coming through rich salt beds deposited by the prehistoric Lake Bonneville has made the diving ponds as salty as the ocean, allowing fish, lobsters, and even shrimp to feel at home.

Enter the water, and you'll soon be ringed by football-size scat and azure and lemon yellow angelfish begging to be hand-fed lettuce. You'll also see porcupine fish, groupers, red drum, damselfish, French angelfish, and blue tang. Seabase's three nurse sharks skulk about rock caves and craggy ledges along the lower reaches of the 25-foot-deep ponds. While looking for the sharks, watch for the thousands of shrimp darting through the seaweed or for Nelson and Sanders, lobsters freed from Salt Lake City groceries and saved from their culinary fate.

You also can search Iron Bottom Bay for the wreck of the Sheer Joy, a sunken 16-foot pleasure craft that adds more realism to the Seabase, or explore the seaweed jungle of Grantsville Trench.

Seabase opened in 1989, offering scuba certification and recreational diving. It's framed to the west by the Stansbury Mountains and the Desert Peak Wilderness Area and to the east by the Oquirrh (pronounced oh-kher) Range. Beyond the Oquirrhs on the horizon looms the Wasatch Range.