Gary Lankford and Morgan Latta Interview. Jan. 2007.

(Gary Lankford went to Skinners as a camper in 1998, the summer after 8th grade. Morgan Latta went as a camper the summer after 5th grade. They both returned to become counselors. They interviewed together.)

GARY: Monte’s sheep wagon is always parked at camp at Burnt Lake and he always sleeps in it when he’s there. There were a bunch of people with dogs. Usually the only dog was Bullet who belonged to Don, the head wrangler. Bullet was cool. He hunted a lot of gophers. Well, dogs were running all around camp.

MORGAN: And one night the dogs got into Monte’s sheep wagon. You could hear this racket, everything rolling around. We walked out of our tepees and Monte’s standing in his wagon going, “OUT! O-U-T! OUT! Goddamn it, OUT!” These dogs were everywhere. Underfoot. Monte would start screaming and cursing. He would just cuss like an old sailor. But you couldn’t tell if he was mad at you or just couldn’t hear you.

GARY: Colt bet me I couldn’t swim to the island at Burnt. It was only about a mile there and back, so I took off. He followed me. There wasn’t anyone else on the dock. I kept turning around to make sure Colt was coming. One time I turned around and saw a boat. Courtney had come after us. He picked me up and was telling me what a stupid idea that was. I said, “But nobody was following except Colt.” Courtney said, “All those kids got their swim trunks and were following after you left!” So, I got into trouble for that one.

Morgan: Brian Skinner had night vision goggles.

Gary: He would sit in the tree in the middle of camp. He was like the Camp Security Guard.

Brian would climb up in this tree after dark and watch over camp until 12:30 or so. If you wanted to get out, you’d have to peek up and see if Brian was in the tree. If he was you had to go to the back of the tepee, roll out under the back, go down the hill, walk past the horse corrals, and this is to get to the girls side of camp.

Excalibur was the name of Courtney’s axe. He made up a legend about it. Said he found it in a clearing in a stump. We were eating it up. Now we look back and think…

Morgan: Courtney, you’re full of it!

Gary: They were very entertaining stories.

Morgan: The Six-Shooter! That was the 6-stall bathroom, a wooden piece of crap. Somebody found a stray cat one time and stuffed it down the Six-Shooter. So, you’d be down there doing your business and hear this yowling and everyone thought it was a ghost. Finally Monte or Courtney found out who it was and made him climb down and get it out. There was another cat always around camp. Six Toes.

Gary: But we weren’t ever suppose to pet Six Toes. Six Toes had mange and you could tell it did.

Morgan: The Pancake Pole. It was at Horseshoe Lake. They had this big wall tent and in the middle was this big tree pole. You had to eat something like 20 pancakes to get your name on the pole. That’s a lot of pancakes in one breakfast. I’m not sure it was 20. But, it was a lot. There were a bunch of signatures on it.

Morgan: Catching gophers up there. THAT was the thing to do in (Burnt Lake) camp. There were a bunch of long, iron pipes up there. The dogs would chase the gophers into these pipes. So, we tipped them on end and rocked them a little ways until the gopher would squirm to get his head out. Then we’d rock it back. SQUISH. We’d let the dogs have to. Jesse caught a bunch one day and I have no idea what he was thinking. He put them in this pillowcase, hung it from a tree and was just whacking the thing. We were sick little kids.

Gary: The rule was that if you shot something in camp you had to eat it. It was a safety rule. We were at the shooting range and a gopher ran across. Cory shot the gopher and was very proud of himself. Brian was the instructor. He says, “Well, you know you kill it, you eat it.” So, Cory had to eat this gopher. Everyone had a bite. There isn’t much meat on a gopher anyway. Oh, I’ve have eaten gopher too. It is not a delicacy.

Morgan: I ate mine on survival.

Gary: When we went out on our Survival Hike we camped at the head of Burnt Lake for 3 days. You have to build your own shelter and you can only pack what you can carry on your back. Make your own backpack. You’re allowed to take your sleeping bag, a tarp, 2 pancakes, an apple or orange, a piece of cheese, a fish hook and a 22 shell. On your pant legs, if you cut that seam, you can stick 22 shells in the seam of your pant leg.

Morgan: When we were on Survival I’d eat the back ends of ants. They tend to be sweet. Unless they’re wood ants, timber ants. Those have an acidic base in their stomach. I got this blister from one. Didn’t have anything to put on it. We were stuck out there. We killed a duck and brought it back to camp. Courtney’s going, “Son of a bitch! I’m going to jail!” Then he says, “OK, guys, here’s the deal. This is a giant mosquito.” So, we had ‘Giant Mosquito’. It was delicious.

Gary: We did the same thing. We were up on the beaver ponds. It was on our Survival Hike. The counselors had radios. They got on the radio and called Courtney and said, “Gary shot a duck”. You could hear Courtney come across the radio, “Oh, I don’t think Gary’d do that. He mighta shot a big mosquito.”

Morgan: Don was the head wrangler. He ran that camp. He was the guy in charge. Well, the brothers were obviously in charge, but if there was something that needed to be done, Don was the one who did it. We were headed up somewheres this one time. Don was trying to get this horse ready for riding. We’d been on the trail for awhile and that horse would slip his pack about every 45 minutes. So Don looks at me and says, “If he slips that pack again, tell me.” About a half hour later it starts to slip. Don just jumps down, pulls that horse to about eye level and punches it right on the nose! Whacks him in the nose about 3 times. Horse starts snorting blood. His eyes are going around like that, around and around his head. We packed him again and he never slipped a pack the rest of the time I was up there.

Don taught us the Texas T. We all learned the Texas T from him. It’s a cinch knot for the saddle. They don’t use buckles. It’s all leather straps. Wrap once, wrap twice, cinch it tight, wrap a T. It’s a long leather strap – about 6 feet long.

Gary: We went up to Horseshoe with a pack line for some customers who owned a vineyard in California. We had a horse designated as the ‘cooler’. The mother of this group said she was going for a walk. She didn’t come back. Everyone went on a search. They put me on a fire that was up on a hill. My job the whole night was to sit by the fire and keep it going. So, I sat there and threw wood on it, made sure it always had a flame. I was 13 or 14 -by myself in the middle of the night up in the mountains. The fire was hot, so I sat under a ledge. I could hear crashing in the trees behind me. I saw it was a rabbit and felt relieved until I realized something was chasing it! Well, it flew over the ledge I was leaning on. It was Bullet, Don’s dog. Scared me! The lost woman was found. She’d gotten lost and spent the night out under a rock ledge. She wandered back into camp.

Morgan: The rafting trip was real cool. They had these old rafts – 4 or 5 big logs strapped together. It was the most awful engineering. Skinner rigged. That’s the term. Skinner Rigged. And Skinner Time. If they said, ‘We’re leaving at 8:00’, 11:30 would roll around before we got all the horses saddled.

Coffee? Skinner Coffee! We could never catch him, but we always swore that Monte put pine pitch in the coffee. I drank coffee from dawn til dusk. The year I worked there when I got home, I stopped cold turkey. That night I couldn’t eat, I was so tired. So I went to sleep and when I woke up it was still dark outside. My dad said, “You’ve been there all day.” I slept 24 hours.

Courtney called pine needles “Indian Kerosene’. He’d take everybody out and teach them how to make a fire.

Gary: He’d teach you how to make a one match fire. He’d take the red pine needles and you’d only have one match. He’d gather up a whole bunch of wood and put the pine needles on the bottom and then some dead dry tinder on top and then a tepee or log cabin (arrangement of wood). He lit the match and touched it to those pine needles and “BOOM!” you had fire. He had everyone go out and gather Indian kerosene and wood. He said we needed 10 good armloads of wood for an all-night fire. Wood as thick as your arm. We all had our separate fire areas and one match. We got our fires going and had to tend them. Courtney would wander around and check everyone’s fire. There was this one kid that gathered a few sticks and he burned through that, so he went off in the woods to get more wood. While he was gone Courtney walked over and stamped out his fire. The kid comes back and Courtney says, “That’s what’s going to happen to you if you’re stuck in the woods and you have to get more wood.”

We had a lot of fun at Skinners. They didn’t just teach us about hacking down old trees and making a campsite. They taught us where you could find food. They taught us about the native plants. We see Monte and Courtney around.

Morgan: I saw Courtney. I said, “Hey, Courtney, how’s it going?” He answers, “Oh, it’s going good. I’m out there on the mesa counting sage chickens.” It sounds awful to the majority of us, but he LOVES it. He loves it!

Gary: We always said Courtney spent too much time above Oxygen Level. He will openly admit this. When he was trapped on that bench on Everest.

Interview by Judi Myers