EDEN — It must have been a serious rivalry. At least it seemed that way last week when I finally found the trophy bell, a few hundred yards above Wolf Mountain ski area. It had a red frame, green base and "Rio Grande Railroad" engraved on its face.

Just below, in faint lettering, it said "University of Utah" and "University of Denver" and something nearly illegible that might have said "Trotsall Trophy."

Six months, two 150-mile driving trips, a couple of uphill hikes, and conversations with 10 people had finally yielded what I wanted to see. The bell wasn't in pristine condition. It had been marred by thousands of camp kids who probably should have been hiking or playing capture the flag. On the back side were two bullet holes; the crank was broken off.

Most of the writing had been scraped, worn away or tarnished.

Still, it was apparent the bell was once the symbol of football supremacy between Utah and Denver universities.

What it was doing there in the forest, at an LDS summer camp, I had no idea.

U. of Denver U hasn't had a football team in a half-century. Rivalries can come and go, but if someone isn't the keeper of the flame, not only the rivalry, but the reminders vanish. Before you know it, five decades have passed and nobody cares.

I'm thinking the bell should someday end up back at its old residence — in the Utah trophy case.

Or Denver's, whichever won the last game.

Actually, we know who won the last game. Their final meeting was in 1960, with Utah winning 49-16 — which might have been what convinced the Pioneers to drop football at the end of that season.

The teams first met in 1903, when Utah football was just 11 years old. They played 43 times, with Utah winning 28, losing 10 and tying five. That's one more game than Utah played against BYU before 1960.

Denver never beat Utah by more than 16 points, but Utah won by a combined score of 132-0 during one span in the 1930s.

I started thinking about writing a column on the bell back in November. A reader e-mailed me to say he had notice the inscriptions several years earlier, during a break in a youth camp. The bell was used to summon kids from surrounding campsites for meals and meetings.

The reader said he wondered how it ended up where it was. So did I.

Denver and Utah were in the Rocky Mountain and Skyline conferences together. Today, the scores from the 1955-57 games remain faintly visible. Utah won two of those three games. Other scores are partially or completely obliterated.