The town of Heber is surrounded by hills on all sides. Those hills were a constant source of enjoyment and mystery when I was a kid. Even as a small boy, I was allowed to roam the hills and discover all the neat places. Usually when I roamed, it was with Charlie Riedhead or some other friends but more often than not, it was with just me and Charlie.
The hill we spent the most time on was the one north of town that has the “Big Cave”. It was just across the creek and we could be there within a very few minutes. All we had to do was tell Mom where we were going and when we expected to be back. Sometimes we took lunches so that we could spend most of the day up there. The Big Cave was usually where we started our wandering. From the cave we could see the entire town. Someone had built fires in the cave so the roof of the cave was black from the smoke. The cave wasn’t very deep but there were lots of very important writings on the walls. At least they are important to someone. Most of them were Ann + Bill or Sue + Bob. It seemed that everyone who had ever had a boy or girl friend had it noted on the wall of the Big Cave. The rock was soft so it was easy to scrape initials or names in the stone for all future generations to admire. When we grew older and braver, we used to let ourselves down over the face of the cave on a rope. It was a good place to discuss the world’s problems or other problems from the perspective of little boys.
Fairly close to the Big Cave is a smaller cave that is quite deep (ten to fifteen feet). It too had a black roof from the smoke but fewer people went there because it was not as tall and you had to stoop over to walk in it.
The hill on the north had lots of pieces of broken Indian pottery. Most of it was just the plain clay color but once in a while we would find painted pieces (black and white). We also found an occasional arrowhead on that hill.
The hill on the west was probably the next most climbed hill. When we were living in Mesa for two years, we lived in the summer in Uncle Alma Bigler’s house which was at the bottom of the west hill. As a result, we climbed on it a lot. It is the hill we would climb to fly the ducks but that is another story. The west hill was unique in that it had a cave that went through a part of the hill (two openings) that we could crawl through on hands and knees. It also had a formation that was unique. It was a sort of pillar that was all by itself and out about twenty feet from the part of the hill we could climb on. There were all sorts of stories about that pillar. From the hill we could see a small white bag of something that someone had thrown over there. There was also a piece of cable. I guess somewhere along the line someone tried to climb up there for some reason. We used to speculate about who had climbed it and why. As far as I know there were no dead bodies or human bones on the pillar but who knows for sure. We thought the bag contained poison of some kind.
The east hill was the one climbed less often because it was farther from home but every once in a while we would check it out. It had a “chimney” (an opening that went up between some rocks that had fallen together). A small person could climb up through the hole to get on top of the hill. We roamed that hill as well but it was not our favorite. It was probably the favorite for those kids that lived closer to it. From any one of the hills you could get a good view of the town and feel in control of our relatively simple lives. After all, we could see almost all of our world at once, from any one of the hills.