The organizers and athletes who made the 2002 Winter Games such a success share their firsthand accounts of how they pulled it off.
Nicknamed “Arch Enemy No. 1,” pilot Tim Martin defies death as he flies his airplane through southeast Utah’s natural stone arches.
Beaver native Philo T. Farnsworth was a 14-yearold farm boy when he was struck with the idea that led to his world-changing invention.
Accomplished nature photographer Jeff Foott shares some of his most remarkable images from Lake Powell and its side canyons.
Becoming part of history
WHEN I WAS younger, I considered everything that happened before I was born to be history. Everything that happened during my lifetime, meanwhile, was simply current events.
But if we live long enough, we reach the point where events we personally experienced – and that we often still remember as though they happened yesterday – start drifting into the realm of history. This occurred to me while we were putting together this issue’s story looking back on the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, which marks its 20th anniversary this year.
I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling incredulous that two whole decades have passed since Utah hosted the Olympics. Yet, as I reflect on that era in our history, I realize that it truly does feel like it happened in a different time and place. In my mind, the 2002 Winter Games are inextricably linked to the sense of national and, to some degree, international solidarity we felt in the months following 9/11 – a brief window in time that somehow feels both recent and ancient.
One of my favorite quotes about history comes from the novelist William Faulkner, who said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” It’s particularly apt in the case of Utah’s Olympic experience. We interviewed six people connected with the 2002 Olympics for this issue’s feature story. Not only did the Olympics still remain fresh in their minds – nearly all of them were actively working to get the Olympics to return in 2030 or 2034.
Fraser Bullock, who worked closely with Mitt Romney as chief operating officer of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee for the 2002 Games, is now president and CEO of the Salt Lake City-Utah Olympic Games Committee, which is campaigning to bring the Games back. When Bullock’s group conducted a poll of state residents several years ago about the possibility of Utah hosting the Olympics again, they found that 89 percent of Utahns were in favor.
“In today’s world of division and conflict, the Olympics has the power to unify humanity in a special way,” Bullock said. “It’s a special experience for our people in Utah, but we would also be helping fulfill an important role for the world by hosting the Games again.”
He also has personal reasons for wanting to return the Olympics to Utah.
“When I think about my grandkids who did not get to experience 2002,” Bullock said, “I am so excited for them to be able to see the world welcomed here again.”
Indeed, there are many children and even young adults living in the state today –about one in three Utah residents – who are too young to have any memory of the 2002 Winter Olympics.
As you read our 2002 Olympic retrospective on page 14 and marvel at some of the incredible photos, I encourage you to drop me a line to tell me about your favorite memories of Utah’s Winter Games – and let me know if you are as excited as I am at the prospect of their return.
Utah Life Magazine c/o Subscriptions Dept PO Box 430 • Timnath, CO 80547 (801) 921-4585 UtahLifeMag.com
SUBSCRIBE
Utah Life is a bimonthly print magazine about the people, places, history and culture of Utah. Subscriptions are 1-yr (6 issues) for $25 or 2-yrs (12 issues) for $44. Please call, visit UtahLifeMag.com or return a subscription card from this issue. For fundraising or corporate rates, call or email subscriptions@utahlifemag.com.
ADVERTISE
Advertising deadlines are three months prior to publication dates. For rates and position availability, please call or email advertising@utahlifemag.com.
CONTRIBUTE
Send us your letters, stories, photos and story tips by writing to us, visiting UtahLifeMag.com/contribute or emailing editor@utahlifemag.com.
COPYRIGHT
All text, photography and artwork are copyright 2022 by Flagship Publishing, Inc. For reprint permission, please call or email publisher@utahlifemag.com.
THE BUZZ AROUND UTAH
The eagles have landed in Utah
by ALLIE WISNIEWSKI
When winter comes swooping in at Farmington Bay, so do the bald eagles. America’s national bird is easy to spot in Utah during January and February, if one knows where to look.
Bald eagles spend most of the year living in Montana, Idaho and other northern locales, where they prey on fish, as well as ducks and other waterfowl. When northern lakes freeze over, the eagles lose most of their food sources – the fish are sheltered beneath the ice, and the ducks
fly south to find open water. The eagles follow them south into Utah.
Temperatures in the Salt Lake Valley don’t get quite as cold and bitter as they do up north, so the birds take refuge in its wetlands for most of January and February.
The Eccles Wildlife Education Center, located on the Farmington Bay Waterfowl Management Area, is one of Utah’s eagle-watching hot spots. From inside the center, visitors keep nice and warm while looking through enormous picture windows to spot bald eagles. For those willing to brave the possible cold, there are also
hiking trails that lead to outdoor viewing platforms.
Billy Fenimore, coordinator at the center, points visitors in the right direction, from recommending the best wetland driving routes for viewing, to explaining the difference between bald eagles and golden eagles.
At the Eccles Wildlife Education Center in Farmington, visitors learn about bald eagles while watching the birds through the facility’s large picture windows.
While teaching visitors about eagles, Fenimore also teaches them about the birds’ Great Salt Lake wetlands habitat. “The wetlands are important,” he said. “If they were an organ, they’d be kind of like the kidneys,” as they both filter out nitrogen, phosphorus and other harmful waste products.
The Great Salt Lake region isn’t Utah’s only bald eagle hub. The birds are often found in the Cedar City area, Sanpete County and along the Green River. Visit wildlife.utah.gov for a full list of viewing locations in Utah – and don’t forget to bring binoculars or spotting scopes
Ballenger/Alamy Eccles Wildlife Education Center Coordinator Billy Fenimore shows people how to spot the bald eagles that arrive in the area each January and February.
Located on an ordinary residential street in Salt Lake City, this pyramid is the focal point of the Summum religious community, which practices modern mummification.
A visit to the pyramid next door
by ALLIE WISNIEWSKI
Peach trees and sunflowers line Genesee Avenue, a residential street on the west side of Salt Lake City. At the end of the road there’s a neighborhood coffee shop, more sunflowers – and a 26-foot-tall pyramid.
This impossible-to-miss landmark belongs to the Summum religious community. It may seem a curious gathering place, but since 1979 it has served as a venue for studying, meditating and mummifying.
After leading visitors through the beautifully manicured grounds, Summum President Su Menu asks them to remove their shoes before entering the pyramid. Those bold enough to step inside are immediately overtaken by a sense of mysticism. Cat statues, bouquets of peacock feathers (the grounds double as a peafowl sanctuary), candles and crystal chalices adorn the space. Celestial murals cover the ceiling. And adjacent to the altar that serves as the room’s focal point, a golden sarcophagus gazes out with painted eyes.
The sarcophagus is not just for show. Within it are the mummified remains of the religion’s founder, Corky Ra. Menu knew Ra, first hearing him speak at a lecture at the University of Utah. The Summum philosophy didn’t hit home with her
right away. “I must be honest and say that it sounded pretty wild to me – you know, mummification, beings that he’d had an encounter with,” Menu said. It was the philosophy’s take on meditation that first hit home with her.
These days, the pyramid is primarily used as a meditation and group study space, though the building is technically zoned as a winery. Summum members have been producing “Nectar Publications,” alcoholic beverages thought to enhance the meditative state, inside the pyramid since its construction.
Contrary to popular belief, though, Summum’s modern mummification occurs elsewhere, inside a neighboring building on the property. As licensed funeral directors, Summum counselors are free to carry out Ra’s unique mummification methods, on both humans and animals, without interference.
In the Summum view, mummification moves a departed soul forward in their personal evolution. While a person is being mummified, Summum members read a spiritual will that the person wrote while alive.
“The will says what they would like to have in their next life, what they feel their direction should be,” Menu said. “You hope that your soul will be guided.”
Visit Utah
Noella
In his final years, Brigham Young spent winters at this home in St. George while overseeing the construction of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints temple in the city. Young also had a home office here, which had a telegraph to help him work remotely.
Visitors tour St. George winter home and office of pioneering snowbird Brigham Young
by RACHEL FIXSEN
Each winter, St. George’s population swells with the arrival of “snowbirds”: people from cold, northern climes who flock to southern Utah for its mild weather and plentiful sunshine. One of the city’s first snowbirds was none other than Brigham Young, whose winter home in St. George has been preserved and is open to the public.
As the first territorial governor of Utah and second president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Young had too much on his plate to ever take a true vacation. However, he suffered from arthritis in his later years and found the warmer winters in St. George relieved his symptoms.
Young was active in all aspects of community life and development in St. George. His biggest task was overseeing the construction of the St. George Temple, the first Latter-day Saint temple completed in Utah. He even had an office built adjacent to his winter house; much like many modern snowbirds, he continued to work remotely, though the cutting-edge technology of Young’s day was the telegraph rather than high-speed internet. Visitors can see the telegraph when they tour the restored historic Brigham Young Winter Home and Office in downtown St. George.
When the Latter-day Saints migrated to Utah in 1847, they hoped to create a self-sufficient society, growing and making themselves everything they would need – including warm-weather crops like
Joshua Hardin Joshua Hardin
cotton and fruit. In the 1850s and ’60s, Young sent groups of settlers to southwest Utah to experiment in agriculture and establish what became St. George.
“Life in St. George was tough,” said Emily Utt, curator for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Church History Department. The extreme heat and scarcity of water made everyday existence a challenge.
Young visited St. George at least once a year to boost settlers’ morale; in 1870, he bought a two-room adobe house there as a winter retreat. Over the next few years, Young had the house expanded and refined. One of the principal builders was Miles Romney, who also contributed to other significant St. George buildings and was an ancestor of Sen. Mitt Romney.
Today’s visitors can walk through the whole house and see artifacts and replicas of items used by Young and his family, guided by a volunteer equipped with facts and stories.
When Young spent winters in St. George, it wasn’t just for his own comfort, Utt said, but to help the community succeed. Toward that end, Young announced plans for the St. George Temple in 1871. His decision to establish a temple in St. George was a powerful demonstration of his faith in the community.
Young supervised the construction closely. “When the carpenter had a question about the floor plan, he would take it to Brigham,” Utt said. “When they needed to order more nails, they would take it to Brigham.”
The St. George Temple was finally completed and dedicated in 1877, just a few months before Young’s death. In 2019, the temple closed to receive its most extensive renovation since it was built. Church officials estimate the project will be completed in 2023, when the public will be invited to tour the temple before it is rededicated. And while people are in town to see the temple, they will also be able to visit the home and office where Young planned its construction.
While leading a tour of the Brigham Young Winter Home and Office, Elder Edwards shows visitors what the St. George Temple looked like in the 1870s.
Prehistoric voices echo through rock art in Tracing Time
by LISA TRUESDALE
Like many people, Craig Childs found he could barely remember the day of the week during the height of the pandemic. He was relieved to find, however, that he could continue practicing his favorite “sport” during quarantine, no mask or social distancing required.
“My sport is seeing,” Childs said. “I walk long distances through undulating terrain, snow and rock ledges, waterless expanses, for no other purpose than to see.”
His wandering took him throughout the Colorado Plateau, mostly in southeastern Utah, searching for petroglyphs and pictographs, just as he has done for years. Then he gathered his experiences into a new book, Tracing Time: Seasons of Rock Art on the Colorado Plateau, to be released in February by Salt Lake City publisher Torrey House Press.
At first, some readers might be disappointed to learn that this isn’t a traditional sort of guidebook. There are no maps or directions to specific locations. There aren’t even any photographs of what one might see if one went searching for peckings, scratchings and rubbings on rocks, or paintings created using natural pigments.
“I am not offering a guidebook to places, but a guidebook to context, meaning and ways of seeing,” he writes in Tracing Time. “Exact locations are not deemed important. Particular sites you may already know, or you’ll be a hundred canyons off. Some are glaringly obvious, right above the highway, and others take days on foot to reach, sometimes with the aid of a rope.”
Rather than being a handbook, Childs’ writings are more of a reflection, a journal of sorts, with his rock-art observations mingling quite naturally with his personal experiences and his keen ruminations about life. He is truly connected to these prehistoric art forms, believing that “the artists’ voices echo through deep time” to reach him.
“Though I seek solitude,” he writes, “I’ve never believed I was alone.”
Tracing Time: Seasons of Rock Art on the Colorado Plateau
By
Craig Childs
Torrey House Press 224 pp, Paperback, $19
Joshua Hardin
Utah Trivia
EXTREMES
Challenge your brain with our Utah quiz.
BRIAN WANGSGARD
1 Cheesy potatoes, hash brown casserole, cheesy hash browns, party potatoes – real Utahns know the dish by what name?
2 Which Wasatch Front canyon features a 72-year-old diner in an actual trolley car, still named for its founder, the colorful Ruth?
3 Which city on the way to Brian Head or Cedar Breaks claims to serve the “best cinnamon rolls in the state?”
4
“Salsa golf,” a sauce created in Argentina in the 1920s, is similar to what pink condiment found nearly everywhere in Utah?
No peeking, answers on page 60.
5 What BYUtv series featured families competing by cooking a meal while playing games to win $10,000?
Austen Diamond/Visit Salt Lake
6 Native Americans taught early pioneers that the bulb of what is now the Utah state flower is edible.
7 Those who crave curry pizza will have to stay on the Wasatch Front to find it.
8
There are more than 300 permitcarrying food trucks operating in Salt Lake County.
9 Utah residents can apply to the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources to receive meat from euthanized or poached wild game animals.
10
Utahns consume more Jell-O per capita than the residents of every other state but Minnesota.
11
From its location on the site of an abandoned airport, the Cliffside Restaurant provides panoramic views of which city?
a. Ogden
b. St. George
c. Moab
12 Salt Lake City’s Oromian Restaurant features native cuisine of which country?
a. Ethiopia
b. Indonesia
c. Lithuania
13
Maddox Ranch House, known for more than 70 years for chicken-in-the-basket and its own salad dressing recipe, is on U.S. Highway 89 in what small town?
a. Mount Pleasant
b. Hyde Park
c. Perry
14
Zagat-rated Hell’s Backbone Grill & Farm, serving “Four Corners Cuisine,” is nearest which national park?
a. Capitol Reef
b. Canyonlands
c. Arches
15
Which of these popular eating spots was founded by Jayson Edwards in 2004, when he was a broke college student?
a. Cafe Rio
b. J Dawgs
c. Moochie’s Meatballs & More
Fireworks erupt over Rice-Eccles Stadium during the opening ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. The flawlessly executed ceremony set the tone for the 17 days of competition to come.
Mike Blake/Reuters/Alamy
Show Stopping Games
The people behind the 2002 Winter Olympics’ success share stories of how they did it – and why they are excited about the Games’ possible return to Utah
by MATT MASICH
THE 2002 WINTER Olympics
in Salt Lake City were a case study in snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.
Though a cloud of scandal fell over the Salt Lake Games during the early planning stages, Utahns banded together to put on what many observors have called the best-run Olympic Games in living memory.
In 1995, after four unsuccessful previous bids, Salt Lake City won the right to host the 2002 Winter Games. However, it emerged that the Salt Lake Organizing Committee, or SLOC, had attempted to help along the city’s bid by bribing members of the International Olympic Committee.
Seeking a fresh start, SLOC cleaned house by bringing aboard new CEO Mitt Romney, a financier whose sole political experience at that point was an unsuccessful Senate run in Massachusetts. Romney and his expert team spent
three years righting the ship, but a new cloud appeared when the 9/11 attacks occurred just months before the Games opened.
Despite all the preceding drama, the Salt Lake Games’ opening ceremony on Feb. 8, 2002, went perfectly. The next 17 days seemed to follow the inverse of Murphy’s Law: Everything that could go right, did.
“The Games elevated Utah,” SLOC Chief Operating Officer Fraser Bullock said. “We showed the world that we are capable of big things. As a result, our reputation around the world took a big step forward.”
To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the 2002 Winter Olympics, Utah Life explores their legacy through interviews with five key players responsible for the Games’ success. We also talked to a Utah-born Olympian and 2014 silver medalist who attributes her later success to the spirit of ’02.
Fraser Bullock
As chief operating officer of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee, Fraser Bullock worked sideby-side with Mitt Romney for three years to plan the 2002 Winter Olympics. Bullock is now president and CEO of the Salt Lake City-Utah Olympic Games Committee, which seeks to return the Games to Utah in 2030 or 2034.
THERE WAS A very negative aura around the Games when Mitt and I joined the Salt Lake Organizing Committee in 1999. There was a $400 million budget deficit, and there was zero interest from any new sponsors in having anything to do with our Olympics. Fortunately, we had Mitt Romney as a superb leader who set the tone of optimism, honesty, integrity and fiscal responsibility.
By the summer of 2001, I felt strongly that these Games were going to be successful. It looked like we were going to have a budget surplus, which was surprising given where we had come from. Operations were rock solid, we had a team and venues in place, and we were feeling confident that we could have a really good Games.
Then 9/11 happened. On that day, I remember talking with Mitt on the phone after he had driven past the Pentagon just after it was hit. We had people questioning whether we should host the Games given the terrorist threat.
There was no doubt in our minds that we were going to go forward with the Games. It was important to the world to have an opportunity for healing, but we had a lot of work to do. We reviewed our security plan in detail with all the federal agencies and local law enforcement. We had a strong security plan to begin with, but given the unique nature of the 9/11 attacks, we had to address some new elements.
Aviation security was one of the big concerns. During the opening and closing ceremonies, we shut down all commercial air traffic – there were no planes in the air. Throughout the Games, every private aircraft coming from outside Utah had to go through a gateway airport. If you were coming in from the Northwest, you would have to stop in Boise to have the plane inspected and the people checked out before being cleared to fly into Utah.
At the opening ceremony, athletes from
Salt Lake Mayor Rocky Anderson and IOC President Jacque Rogge pass the Olympic flag to Mayor Sergio Chiamparino of Turin, Italy.
Jim Bourg/Reuters/Alamy
Team USA carried in a flag from the twin towers. As that flag was being brought in, you could have heard a pin drop. You could feel the palpable emotions in the stadium for those who had lost their lives. I will always retain that moment in my mind’s eye.
The International Olympic Committee expected to hold a meeting each afternoon to review operations and decide what corrective actions need to be taken. These meetings typically go all 17 days of the Games. After three days of our Games, they canceled those meetings; everything was going so smoothly, there was nothing to talk about.
We knew we’d have some extra money left over at the end of the Olympics, so I told our creative guys to spend all they could on fireworks. I remember being on the roof of Rice-Eccles Stadium watching those fireworks with my wife, Jennifer, and thinking we’ve done it – we’ve pulled it off. In spite of starting in a deep hole, dealing with a scandal and 9/11, Team 2002 and the citizens of Utah pulled it off.
Rocky Anderson
The Democratic mayor of Salt Lake City from 2000 to 2008, Anderson played a lead role orchestrating the logistics of the 2002 Winter Games.
EVEN BEFORE THE 1999 mayoral election, Mitt invited all the candidates for mayor to SLOC headquarters to keep us updated on where things stood with the Olympics. I’ve got to say, he did such an extraordinary job. Although it takes a team to accomplish what was done, it also takes a really good leader that knows how to put that team together. On that regard, Mitt scores the highest grade he could get.
Even before 9/11, one of my greatest security fears were the anarchists up in the Northwest. I was in Seattle in 1999, when they had their riots during the World Trade Organization meeting there. I felt like things needed to be absolutely ready for a rapid response to shut anything like that down immediately. When 9/11 happened, this was the first major world event after that, so of course all of our concerns were ramped up many times over.
Members of Team USA carry an American flag recovered from the ruins of the World Trade Center into the opening ceremony. Performers at the ceremony present Native American images of bison.
Steve Wilson/Reuters/Alamy
David Gray/Reuters/Alamy
Well in advance of the Games, there were national and international news stories talking about what a dull place Salt Lake City is, and asking why anyone would want go there for the Olympics. I saw enough of those kinds of articles that I said, “OK, we need to take some preemptive measures.” I went to great lengths to change the view of a lot of the journalists who were coming to town. We did a night out on the town, going from restaurant to restaurant and bar to bar, introducing the journalists to all this great nightlife in Salt Lake City. Everybody had a great time, and I think it changed the tenor of their reporting.
Salt Lake City is unusual in having so many people who served missions and can speak other languages. This allowed us to get all these Olympic volunteers together who can speak almost any language on the face of the planet. Our volunteers were so welcoming to everyone. The Games really are all about getting people to know each other better to build more peaceful relationships between individuals and eventually, one hopes, between nations.
Leading up to the opening ceremony, we’d had days and days of horrible
inversions. It looked like the international television cameras were going to show Salt Lake City looking like London back when everybody burned coal. It was horrible. But the morning of the opening ceremony, at about 5 a.m., a huge wind came through and blew it all out of the valley. It seemed almost miraculous.
It ended the same way. On the night of the closing ceremony, which was going to feature precision-timed fireworks in the stadium and throughout the city, we’re sitting there biting our nails, because a huge storm was coming in. But the closing ceremony went off without a hitch – the storm held off until five minutes after the ceremony ended.
Shannon Bahrke
Team USA’s first medal of 2002 was won by Shannon Bahrke, who took silver in women’s moguls at Deer Valley Resort. She later won bronze in the event at the 2010 Winter Games. Bahrke still spends much of the winter at Deer Valley, where she participates in the resort’s “Ski with a Champion” program.
Derek Parra raises his arms in celebration after setting a new world record in men’s 1500-meter speed skating. His Team USA teammates Mark Grimmette and Brian Martin take silver in men’s doubles luge.
Moguls skier Shannon Bahrke sprays snow at the end of her silver medal-winning run at Park City’s Deer Valley Resort.
Mark Reis/Abaca Press/Alamy
Dan Chung/Reuters/Alamy
Jerry Lampen/Reuters/Alamy
WHEN I MOVED here in 1998 to attend the University of Utah, I went to my first football game dressed in red and white with facepaint. As I walked into the student section at Rice-Eccles Stadium, I froze in my tracks when it suddenly hit me: This is where the opening ceremonies were going to be in 2002, and I could be here – how crazy is that? I stopped cold, with people walking around me while I just stood there with tears streaming down my cheeks.
When we eventually did walk into the stadium for the opening ceremony in 2002, we walked in opposite of where the student section was, so I saw the doorway where I’d stood four years earlier. I was just so proud in that moment to be part of something I had dreamt about. For me, it seemed destined. I’ve never felt that way before or since the 2002 Olympics. It just felt like this is where my spirit was supposed to be.
The Olympic team was confirmed on Jan. 22, and our event was Feb. 9, which gave us time for a two-week camp. We got to train on Deer Valley’s Champion run, where the moguls events would be held during the Games.
When we were training the morning of the competition, I could see a steady stream of people trickling up to the stands. In moguls skiing, we usually have 50 people who are watching at the bottom: your family, your coaches and a couple of people who got lost on their way to apres. To have 20,000 people down there … we don’t get that, ever.
On the first run, I was so nervous. I stood there in the gate, looking down at my legs. They looked like my normal legs, but they felt like these huge lead weights. I’m not supposed to be here, I thought. This is meant for people who are amazing athletes. This is just me. How do I do it?
When we’re in the starting gate, they have a camera on a boom that swings over and stops in front of your face. So, not only are there 20,000 people at the bottom, there are 2 billion people on the other end of the camera. It was a way bigger moment than I ever could have imagined. I did well enough on my first run to reach the finals. My final run was crazy. It was like everything came into place. My soul was just destined to be in that mo-
The 2002 Winter Olympics cauldron burns brightly outside of Rice-Eccles Stadium on the final day of the Salt Lake Games. The cauldron had water running continuously over the glass so it wouldn’t blacken.
ment, and everything became crystal clear: This is me; this is who I am. It was a surreal moment, that second run. It just felt right.
I’ve been to really incredible sporting events, but there is nothing that can ever prepare you for the way the Olympic spirit brings the world together. You will see someone who maybe fell, who isn’t even close to winning but is digging deep with all their effort, and everybody rallies together to cheer for those people. There’s no way you can tell people how incredible that’s going to be until you experience it.
Tom Kelly
The 2002 Winter Games were one of 10 Olympics the now-retired Tom Kelly worked in his long career as spokesman for the Park City-based U.S. Ski and Snowboard Team.
When I think back to the Games, the first thing I think of are the fire barrels on Main Street in Park City. My friend Myles Rademan, who was the city’s director of information during the Olympics,
had the idea to use these propane-burning fire barrels up and down Main Street. You can only imagine how it went over with security when he proposed putting 50 propane tanks on Main Street, but he pushed it through.
The fire barrels became the iconic meeting place during the Games. Everybody was there. Whether you were gathered around a barrel or just basking in the glow of the fire, Main Street took on this aura. I’ve been to a lot of Olympics, and I’ve never seen anything that created such a great atmosphere for people from around the world to come together with locals.
During the Olympics, my job was to tell the story of the U.S. athletes in all ski and snowboard events. We won 10 medals in skiing and snowboarding, which at the time was a record for us.
One day, I was up in Snowbasin for the women’s downhill. When it got canceled, I made a beeline back to Park City for the men’s snowboarding halfpipe. I walked into the venue in the middle of the last run, and I looked up at the scoreboard
Tony Marshall/PA Images/Alamy
American snowboarder Tommy Czeschin goes airborne in Park City as he practices for the men’s halfpipe competition. Czeschin finished in sixth place; three of his U.S. teammates swept gold, silver and bronze.
to see three American names at the top. I had a hard time figuring out why there were three American names up there – it never occurred to me that we were dominating the competition that much. We ended up sweeping all the medals in the men’s halfpipe.
In the mid- to late-’80s, the U.S. Ski Association wanted to make sure that, wherever the Olympics came in the United States, the host site didn’t just focus on the 17 days of the Games. Our message to the U.S. Olympic Committee was to pick a bid city that was going to build the venues and commit to ongoing athletic programs. We weren’t trying to get the Olympics to Salt Lake City – it’s just that Salt Lake embraced that vision better than anyone else.
Our Olympic venues are four times busier today than they were right after the 2002 Games. Every single venue is still
in continuous use today and could easily be used if the Games return. The fact that zero venues need to be built here is pretty unheard of. If you look at other past Olympic sites, I don’t know if any of them can say that they could hold an Olympics tomorrow without needing to build new venues. It’s all part of the legacy that was created in 2002.
Colin Hilton
During the 2002 Winter Games, Colin Hilton was director of Olympic venue operations in the Park City area. For the past 15 years, he has served as CEO of the Utah Olympic Legacy Foundation, which operates the 2002 Olympic facilities.
I was one of the experienced folks brought in in 1999 to help run the Salt Lake Games. I had worked previously on the Summer
Tony Marshall/PA Images/Alamy
Eric Gaillard/Reuters/Alamy
Games in Atlanta and FIFA World Cup in Boston. Having had past major-event experience, I was the calming voice that explained to folks how an Olympics comes into a community, how we mitigate its impacts and how we all have fun while we do it.
We had two major events happening in Park City almost every day: one at a ski resort and one at Utah Olympic Park. We had 21,000 spectators come to watch ski jumping at Utah Olympic Park, but the geography was a bit challenging. We had a temporary parking lot about a mile below the competition venues, which left us scratching our heads – how do we get everybody parked and in their seats without it being too much of a burden?
We created an elaborate system of 20 transit buses that would go up and down the mountain to move people up. But we also knew that couldn’t be the only solution. We ended up creating a 10-footwide walking path all the way up the side of the road. We dressed it up, put in rest stops and even created an onsite radio station where people could make requests as they started their trek uphill. And if you made it to the top of the hill, you got a free pin.
Wouldn’t you know, we had a lot of empty buses, because all of our visitors wanted the pin and that fun experience walking up the road. We literally had 85 percent of the crowd to the mile walk up and back. By the time they got to the top, they were just the happiest campers.
Today, the Utah Olympic Legacy Foundation is a living legacy of people and programs. It’s not just about having the doors open to these Olympic facilities, but making sure they are open to more than just elite athlete training.
The venues allow youth athletes to get involved in winter sport. If you’re not an athlete, we’ve got museums, public bobsled rides, alpine slides, tubing hills and public skates – program offerings that engage our citizens and visitors from out of state.
We have an expression down at the Olympic Oval in Kearns: high performance by day, recreation by night. The speed skating national team trains there starting at 5 a.m. and continuing through the day, while people are working and kids are in school. When 3 p.m. comes around, school kids
Rick Wilking/Reuters/Alamy
Dinosaur skulls appear over the crowd during the closing ceremony. Speaking with voices provided by Donny and Marie Osmond, the ersatz dino bones narrated the festivities at the end of the Games.
Tristan Gale of the United States celebrates with fans after finishing her second run in the women’s skeleton competition. Gale won the gold medal in the event, which was reintroduced as an Olympic sport in 2002.
come to learn to play hockey, speed skate and figure skate. From 9 p.m. to midnight is men’s and women’s league hockey. Then we get up and do it all over again.
Noelle Pikus-Pace
Though Provo native Noelle Pikus-Pace did not compete in the Salt Lake Olympics, the 2002 Winter Games gave her the inspiration and training facilities she needed to launch her Olympic career. Pikus-Pace went on to compete in the women’s skeleton event in 2010 and 2014, winning a silver medal at the latter.
Going into the 2002 Games, I was primarily a collegiate track athlete. I had been doing skeleton for about a year and a half, just to see where it would go. I was on the U.S. skeleton team, but I was on a lower-ranking team that wasn’t competing in the Olympics. During the winter of 2002, you couldn’t turn a corner in Utah without meeting
somebody who was volunteering for the Olympic Games. Seeing the camaraderie and unity that the Games were bringing to Utah made me want to be a part of it in a bigger way.
Skeleton was close to the end of the Olympics. Team USA won gold in men’s skeleton and silver and gold in women’s skeleton. It just lit a fire within me to see our team representing America on this track that is so close to home; I grew up about an hour away from the Olympic venues in Park City.
When I saw the U.S. athletes going to the medal ceremonies and having those medals draped around their neck, that was the moment when I said, “That’s going to be me. I’m going to be there.” It took many years past that, but I eventually got there.
I trained on the track from the 2002 Games; it is my home track. There’s no way I would have been an Olympian if we
didn’t have the venues here in Utah. I’m so grateful to live where I live. It would have been a completely different life for me had the 2002 Games never taken place here.
The constant upkeep of the facilities is unparalleled. I’ve been to tracks around the world that have literally been torn down as soon as we’re done competing. It’s not like that here – it’s meant to continue moving forward and leaving a legacy. They’re constantly looking for ways to grow programs and recruit new young athletes into the sports facilities.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a community come together like we did in Utah to bring the world together for the Olympic Games. Even 20 years later, I still see people walking around with those blue Olympic volunteer jackets from 2002, and they wear them with pride. It’s neat to see that people are still passionate about the Olympic Games – and they’re excited to hopefully get those Games back in Utah one day.
Dan Chung/Reuters/Alamy
Courtesy Tim Martin
The Arch Flying COWBOY
Pilot Tim Martin threads the needle of southeast Utah’s stone arches
by RACHEL FIXSEN
TIM MARTIN DOESN’T come off as a daredevil. At 81 years old, with a light step and a spare build, he’s reserved, polite and forthright but not boastful about the experiences that earned him the nicknames “Arch Enemy #1” and “The Arch Flying Cowboy.”
Martin is a native of southeast Utah and has flown an airplane through 14 of the region’s iconic geologic features: stone arches. He’s flown through some of them hundreds of times, he says, as recently as a few months ago.
Some of those arches left little room for error. He estimates that the smallest one he’s flown is Jeep Arch, at about 50 feet across, in an ultralight plane with a 30-foot wingspan. Martin says he knows some pilots have flown through arches a few times, but no one has made as many arch passages as he has – though he has never, he noted, flown through any arches within Arches National Park.
Courtesy Tim Martin
Tim Martin dips the wing of his plane as he sails through Corona Arch, west of Moab.
MARTIN’S FAMILY SETTLED IN southeast Utah generations ago. His grandfather had a farm and ranch in Castle Valley; Martin and his siblings grew up on a ranch in Brown’s Hole, south of Moab. Martin started working at 18 years old, driving a D2 skid steer for a logging company, hauling trees out of the forest. He joined the Army for two years and served in the Army Reserves for a year after that. He tried mining here and there, for uranium in the Grand County area and for gold in areas of Nevada.
What he did for most of his life was drive trucks. For years he hauled butane and propane from Lisbon Valley to Seven Mile, close to where he lives today in La Sal. Then he went into business with his brothers for a few years working sheet metal.
“That was the dumbest thing I ever did,” Martin said. “The three of them were all really good sheet metal workers. Me, I wasn’t good for anything –except driving a truck. I was a good driver.”
That’s characteristic of Martin’s humility. If you lined up 10 different kinds of pilots in a room, he says, from one with a private license for small planes to a pilot for a commercial airline, each one of those pilots would have something they do better than any of the others.
“I got good at one thing, but that doesn’t mean I’m the best pilot,” Martin said.
Video footage and photographs evidence how good Martin is at that one thing. He’s especially proud of a photograph his wife, Darla, captured of him flying through Corona Arch. Before he had a video camera and only had still shots to prove his arch-flying feats, some skeptics suspected him of staging the photos by flying in front of the arches, tricking the viewer into thinking he was flying through them. In the Corona Arch photo, the shadow of the arch falls across the tail of the plane, proving that he’s actually beneath it.
Courtesy Tim Martin
A thin cloud layer can’t obscure the rugged landscape of Castle Valley, where Martin’s grandfather had a farm and ranch.
Tim Martin’s home in La Sal features photos and other memorabilia related to his flying exploits. Martin, now 81, didn’t learn to fly until he was in his mid-30s; within four years, he had flown through his first arch.
In the 1990s, a pair of aspiring filmmakers asked Martin if they could look through some of his old photos and footage from his flights through arches and over the rugged canyon country.
“Thirty minutes later they said, ‘Tim, let us make a video,’ ” Martin said.
Dana Morris and Jim Page produced a half-hour movie called Arch Enemy #1: Exploits of the Arch Flying Cowboy of Canyonlands, which plays audio clips from an interview with Martin over footage taken from his airplane. While the camera soars among the Fisher Towers or over the deep gorges of Canyonlands National Park, the interviewer asks Martin how his first solo flight changed his life.
“Up to that point, I had never had a lot of confidence in myself doing things, and I think for some reason it gave me a little confidence that I could do things that I had never realized,” Martin replies. “That if I worked hard enough at it and studied at it, I really had a chance to do some things that I had never dreamed of.”
MARTIN HAD BEEN a passenger in small planes as a kid and knew pilots that he looked up to, but he didn’t start to learn to fly himself until he was in his mid-30s, in 1977, when his nephew convinced him to take lessons. He earned his private pilot license that year, built up several hundred hours of flight time, and went on to earn his commercial and instrument licenses over the next couple of years. He flew through his first arch, Rainbow Bridge, in 1981.
Soon after gaining his commercial license, he bought a scenic and charter flight company called Mustang Aviation, based out of the Canyonlands Field Airport. When he tried out pilots to fly for the company, he found some loved the challenge of flying low over the rugged terrain of southeast Utah, while others couldn’t get comfortable with the remote and difficult country.
“If they don’t have adventure in their souls, it’s not for them,” he said.
Martin and Darla ran the company for
four or five years before selling it to Redtail Aviation, which still operates out of Canyonlands Airport.
“We were not good business people, I realized when we finally sold,” Martin said. Whenever a member of his large
Martin holds a DVD of Arch Enemy #1, a 30-minute video chronicling some of his most daring aerial exploits in southeast Utah.
Murice Miller Murice Miller
family or one of his many friends wanted a flight, he would take them for free. He and his wife also started to notice that they were coming up short on fuel. At first they thought the fuel company was cheating them, but after they sold the company to Redtail, it was discovered that the airport’s underground fuel lines had been leaking. They were fixed after Redtail identified the problem.
Martin went back to driving trucks for a living but kept flying for Redtail for the next 19 years. He also flew for the San Juan County Sheriff’s department and sometimes for movies or commercials. He remembers missions searching for lost hikers or boaters, transporting convicts for the sheriff and taking passengers on scenic tours.
In one close call, he had to emergency-land a Cessna Turbo 207 at the Needles Outpost when the head broke on the No. 1 cylinder while he was taking a family on a scenic flight. Martin’s confidence in his risk assessment means he’s not usually scared of flying through arches, under bridges or down narrow canyons – but he says the cylinder failure was a scary experience, though, fortunately, no one was hurt.
In another close call, Martin was aiming to fly his ultralight plane through Pritchett Arch. On approach, he realized he had too much power and decided to go over the arch instead and try again on another pass. But his wheel clipped the top of the arch, sending him into a spiral and eventually a “faceplant into the slickrock.”
He fractured both his legs. Fortunately, his son and a friend were there to help him load pieces of the broken plane into the back of a pickup truck they’d brought to the site. Martin remembers ferrying airplane parts for three hours until he finally couldn’t walk anymore.
His companions drove him back to town. On the way, they passed Darla and their youngest daughter driving the other way. Darla saw the shattered plane parts in the back of the truck; she also saw that Tim was sitting upright in the cab and that they weren’t headed for the hospital, so she decided to wait until she got home to find out what happened.
The margin for error is minimal as Martin maneuvers his aircraft through _______ Arch, above, and ________ Arch, below. He has had a few close calls while flying, including a crash at Pritchett Arch.
Courtesy Tim Martin
Courtesy Tim Martin
Martin flies through Wilson Arch, just a short flight away from his home in
Courtesy Tim Martin
La Sal.
Martin and his wife, Darla, live in La Sal, where their home has a wall full of pictures of their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Darla has often photographed her husband’s arch flights.
MARTIN STILL FLIES occasionally, though he’s retired from Redtail and from trucking. He keeps busy hobby-farming hay and corn on the property where he grew up, and maintaining a healthy store of firewood to heat their La Sal home through the winter. He’s even active in his leisure activities: Last summer, Martin hiked Mount Peale, the tallest peak in the La Sals at 12,726 feet.
Martin also stays busy keeping in touch with his family. He has four children, 19 grandchildren and a dozen or so great-grandchildren – he and Darla said it’s hard to keep up. An entire wall of their home is devoted to framed photos of grandkids and relatives. Art made by their children and grandchildren decorate other walls, including a painting in brilliant colors of a plane threading a red rock arch against a blue sky.
Many of Martin’s family members have enjoyed flights with him. Some of his nieces recently asked him to get “Arch Enemy #1” T-shirts made for them. Martin’s son, Travis, dabbled in flying, but none of Martin’s children became pilots.
As he thumbs through photo albums of generations that came both before and after him, it’s clear that Martin’s attachment to his home turf is fed not only by his thrilling experiences exploring it by air, but by the deep family roots that tie him to the area.
“Flying has made me very happy,” Martin says in Arch Enemy #1. “Some people would probably say flying is the most important thing in my life, but that isn’t the truth. Flying is very important to me, but my family is the most important thing in my life.”
Explore Utah with the new 2022 Utah Life wall calendar! It has the gorgeous photography you love in the magazine, ready to hang in your home or office. Order before they’re gone!
Slow-cooked meals
WARMING UP THE WINTER
recipes and photographs by DANELLE McCOLLUM
COMING HOME TO the aroma of dinner simmering in the slow cooker, hot and ready to eat, is one of life’s simple pleasures – especially when the winter weather gets seriously cold. These rib-sticking recipes bring warmth and spice to help defrost on chilly days.
Tex-Mex Cheesy Chicken and Rice
Chicken is cooked with beans, corn and southwest seasonings, then combined with cheese, rice and taco toppings. A topping of Fritos adds the perfect salty crunch.
Spray slow cooker with cooking spray. In small bowl, mix taco seasoning, cumin, salt and pepper. Sprinkle both sides of chicken with seasoning mixture and add to slow cooker. Pour Rotel tomatoes, beans and corn over chicken in slow cooker. Cover and cook on low for 4 hours, or until chicken is cooked through. Remove chicken from slow cooker and shred with two forks.
Turn slow cooker to high. Add Velveeta and cheddar cheese to sauce in slow cooker and cook for 15 minutes. Beat with whisk until cheeses are melted and smooth. Add rice to slow cooker, along with shredded chicken; stir to combine. Cover and cook 10-15 minutes more. Stir in green onions and cilantro just before serving. Can be topped with Fritos or other desired topping.
4-5 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
1 package taco seasoning
1/2 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
1 10-oz can Rotel tomatoes
1 15-oz can black beans, rinsed and drained
1 cup frozen corn
4 oz Velveeta cheese, cubed
2 cups shredded cheddar cheese
4 cups cooked rice
2-3 green onions, chopped
1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro Fritos for topping, plus any additional desired toppings
Slow Cooker Red Beans and Rice
This hearty take on classic red beans and rice has twice as much andouille sausage as traditional recipes. Don’t forget to boil the beans before putting them in the slow cooker –otherwise, they will take forever to cook.
Rinse and drain beans. Place in medium saucepan and cover with water by 2 inches. Bring beans to boil on stove. Remove from heat. Cover and let stand one hour. Place remaining ingredients, except rice and green onions, in slow cooker. Cover and turn to high.
When the beans have soaked one hour, drain and add to slow cooker. Continue cooking on high for 7-8 hours, or until beans are tender. Serve over rice. Garnish with green onions.
1 lb dried red beans
1 ½-2 lbs andouille sausage, sliced
6 cups chicken broth
1 medium onion, diced
1 small jalapeño, seeded and diced (optional)
3-4 cloves garlic, minced
1 6-oz can tomato paste
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
1 tsp dried thyme
1 tsp dried oregano
Hot cooked rice, for serving Green onions, for garnish
Slow Cooker Thai Peanut Pork
A sweet and spicy Thai peanut sauce brings rich flavor to slow-cooked pork and vegetables. Though the dish isn’t excessively spicy, those worried about the heat may choose to halve the chili sauce. The chopped peanuts and lime wedges, however, are essential.
Lightly grease slow cooker with non-stick cooking spray. Place pork loin in slow cooker. In medium bowl, stir together teriyaki sauce, rice vinegar, chili sauce, ginger and garlic. Pour teriyaki mixture over pork loin. Cover and cook on low for 4-5 hours.
Remove pork from slow cooker and shred with two forks. Whisk peanut butter into juices in slow cooker. Return pork to slow cooker, along with sliced peppers and snow peas; cook for 30-60 minutes more, until vegetables are tender but still crisp. Serve over rice or noodles with green onions, peanuts and lime wedges to garnish.
2 lbs pork loin
1 cup low-sodium teriyaki sauce
4 Tbsp rice vinegar
2 tsp chili sauce
1/2 tsp ground ginger
3-4 cloves garlic, minced
1 red bell pepper, seeded and sliced
1 yellow bell pepper, seeded and sliced
2 cups snow peas
2/3 cup creamy peanut butter
1 cup chopped green onions
1/2 cup chopped roasted peanuts
2-3 limes, cut into wedges
Cooked rice or rice noodles
What’s in Your Recipe Box?
The editors are interested in featuring your favorite family recipes. Send your recipes (and memories inspired by your recipes) to editor@utahlifemag.com.
UTAH THROUGH OUR POETS
Poetry
Utah’s forests abound with life, yet few places are more still and silent during the long, cold months of winter. Our poets take us on a journey through the winter forest, from the magic of falling snowflakes to the strange majesty of the natural world at rest.
Ode to Winter Forests
Ed Richardson,
Heber City
Deciduous trees stand bare limbed and stoic as if to say, “Bring it on, we’re ready”
The sun doesn’t peek over the Uintas at 6 a.m. anymore, it’s more like 8
The mountains are donning winter wear a layer at a time
Cold nights, blue sky days and air so fresh you could bottle it and sell it
Walks in the forest snow watching the dogs tearing around – joy in motion!
Soups and stews dominate the menu. Cozy nights by the fireplace.
Holiday-season get-togethers with friends and family – the sparkle of Christmastime.
The robins and geese can head on south. As for me, I choose to stay – “Bring it on!”
Mountain Loneliness
Ellen Liebelt, South Jordan
The day stands cold and gray
One can see tall gray forms, As shadows in the past.
A gray mist rises, while The stream drops like silverGray coins in a child’s gray tin.
The air smells gray and musty
From flumes of gray smokey fires, Made from barren gray branches, That once held singing, gray sparrows.
Noah Wetzel
Winter Silence
David Rosier, Spring City
The high, high forests fall to silence week on week while winter grips the mountain peaks where snow has shrouded pines and aspen. Weak subsiding light casts shortened, silent, bleak and barren days. Such winter silence speaks with eagles’ piercing treble shrieks reverberating peak to rocky peak –then silence until spring revives the creeks.
Prints
Garrold Leigh Glidden, St. George
Ah, to be the first to make the prints upon the snow.
Like the stuff of swirling globes, an opening flurry of white floats from the heavens to the earth of my proximity.
Star-like flakes, once individual, have lost singularity and combined in the clouds.
They fall en masse into protruding and welcoming limbs of the trees and shrubs.
All is decorated in serenity and whiteness. Birds have gone to their shelters, and all is pure and still.
I will not disturb this scene with scrapes of shovel, nor alter the newness of this blanket of icy crystals by my trudgings.
I await the sun’s intensity to clear paths and to change surroundings.
Coming are the days for shorts, T-shirts and flip flops. Ah, to be the first to make the prints upon the sand.
A skier squeezes between trees at Alta Ski Area. Early morning light sets aspen trees aglow in the Wasatch/Cache National Forest near Park City.
A Chill Day
Barbara Comnes, Ivins
It was a chill January day.
I layered up in winter wear
Knit Irish scarf, snug Peruvian hat, boiled wool Canadian mittens
Double socks and high fur-topped Arctic boots
Trudging through deep snow
Over a frozen mountain lake.
My snowshoes loudly crunched the icy crust
Breaking the lonely winter stillness all around
When the piercing call of a raven high in a pine tree
Silenced my tracks.
I watched his sleek black silhouette fly up into a bone white sky
I heard the rhythmic pounding of a drum –
My own heart beating.
I felt glad
And filled with warm gratitude
On that chill day
WE INVITE YOU to submit poems inspired by Utah for future issues of Utah Life. The May/June 2022 issue’s theme is “Lakes,” with a deadline of March 1. The July/August 2022 issue’s theme is “Pioneers,” with a deadline of May 1. Visit utahlifemag. com/poetry-submission to submit your poems, or email to poetry@utahlifemag.com.
Tom Till
The Utahn who invented television
At age 14, Beaver native son Philo T. Farnsworth had an idea that changed the world
by MATT MASICH
THE CLASSROOM WAS empty when high school freshman Philo Taylor Farnsworth arrived to meet his chemistry teacher one day in early 1922. The lanky 15-year-old was taking advanced, one-on-one science classes after school, as he had already taught himself physics before starting high school.
As Farnsworth waited for teacher Justin Tolman, he picked up a piece of chalk and began filling the blackboard with intricate diagrams and equations. He was just finishing up when his teacher arrived.
“What does this have to do with the chemistry assignment?” the bemused Tolman asked.
“Nothing,” Farnsworth replied. “It’s just my idea for television.”
Many inventors in the 1920s had ideas for television.
The difference was that the idea the Utahborn Farnsworth sketched on the blackboard 100 years ago was the first that actually worked.
By age 22, Farnsworth had built, patented and publicly demonstrated the world’s first electronic television system.
“You have to credit Philo T. Farnsworth as one of the crucial figures in the development of all-electronic television,” said Ron Simon, senior curator at New York City’s Paley Center
for Media, formerly known as the Museum of Television and Radio. “It was an idea many people around the world were working on, but Farnsworth was the one who, as a sort of boy genius, put all the pieces together.”
Television’s impact on modern society was on par with the light bulb and telephone, yet Farnsworth received only a fraction of the recognition lauded upon Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. While those inventors of a previous generation were able to commercialize their inventions, Farnsworth found himself battling corporate giant RCA when it came to bringing television into the American home.
PHILO FARNSWORTH WAS born in a log cabin near Beaver in 1906. He was named after his grandfather, an early Latter-day Saint pioneer in Utah whom Brigham Young sent to settle Beaver as the town’s first bishop.
Philo didn’t live in a home with electricity until he was 11, when his family moved to his uncle’s farm in southern Idaho. The farm had a generator, which fascinated Farnsworth. A natural tinkerer, he soon was able to fix the generator whenever it broke down.
The previous owner of his family’s farmhouse had left behind stacks of scientific journals, which the voraciously curious Farnsworth read whenever he had a free moment between schoolwork and farm chores. He subscribed to science magazines to keep up on the latest inventions in the rapidly emerging field of radio.
Radio was still very new in the early 1920s, but inventors were already working on the logical next step: using radio waves to transmit pictures as well
Philo T FarnsworthArchives
Philo T. Farnsworth was a teenager when he got his idea for television. A bronze statue of Farnsworth stands in the Utah State Capitol.
Chris Amundson
This log cabin north of Beaver is where Philo Farnsworth is believed to have been born. The cabin was built by his namesake grandfather, a pioneer who was sent by Brigham Young to settle the area in the 1850s.
as sound. People referred to this stilltheoretical technology as “television.”
Nearly all attempts to create television had involved mechanical devices with moving parts. These early mechanical television systems used a rapidly spinning disk to capture an image, which was sent through a wire to another spinning disk, which displayed the image. However, the transmitted pictures were, at best, mere silhouettes.
Farnsworth became fixated on the idea of inventing television. His intuition told him that mechanical television was a dead end. Instead, he envisioned a purely electronic television that relied on Albert Einstein’s then brand-new theory of the photoelectric effect, which explained the complex relationship between light and electricity.
The 14-year-old Farnsworth spent nearly every waking moment trying to think up a practical way to transmit images electronically. He even daydreamed about television while he was doing farm
work. He was plowing his family’s beet field when he had his eureka moment.
As Farnsworth looked back on the rows upon rows of furrows he had just plowed, he had a sudden burst of inspiration: Just as he had plowed the field in rows of parallel lines, a television camera could scan an image in a series of parallel lines, then transmit it to a television set which would reassemble the image line by line.
He rushed home and excitedly explained his revelation to his father. The elder Farnsworth didn’t understand the technical details, but he knew his son was brilliant enough that the idea might have merit. Still, he advised the boy to keep quiet about his invention. The father didn’t want anyone to steal the idea, but more than that, he didn’t want neighbors to think the shy and bookish Philo was even odder than they already thought he was.
Farnsworth started waking up at 2 a.m. each day to give himself more time to work on his ideas for television. While he was in high school, the only person
besides his father he told about his work was his science teacher, Justin Tolman. When Farnsworth finished his impromptu blackboard presentation for his teacher, Tolman thought for a moment before issuing a brief, prophetic assessment: “It just might work.”
Farnsworth displays his image dissector and television set at his San Francisco laboratory in 1929.
Philo T. Farnsworth Archives
WHILE FARNSWORTH overflowed with ideas, he lacked the money necessary to turn those ideas into reality.
During his final year of high school, he and his family moved back to Utah, settling in Provo. Just a few months before Farnsworth graduated, his father died. Desperate to gain scientific knowledge, Farnsworth attended Brigham Young University for a year, but without his father to pay his way, he had to drop out for lack of tuition money.
Farnsworth, who had started going by “Phil” rather than Philo because he was tired of people calling him “Fido,” sought work with a job placement agency. He was sent to Salt Lake City to do temp work at a charitable organization called the Community Chest, where he soon befriended two of the charity’s directors, George Everson and Leslie Gorrell. While chatting one evening after work, he revealed to them his big idea for television.
Everson and Gorrell had enough engineering knowledge to know Farnsworth’s television might have legs. They agreed
to form a partnership that would supply Farnsworth $6,000 toward creating a working television system.
The first person Farnsworth called to tell about his new business venture was his girlfriend, Elma “Pem” Gardner. On the same phone call, he also asked her to marry him in three days and immediately move with him to California, where he wanted to set up his television laboratory near the movie studios. Though shocked at the suddenness, Pem said, “Yes.”
The Farnsworths were married on May 27, 1926. The next day, they caught a train from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles, where they spent the summer working side by side in their new laboratory. They hauled in so much strange equipment – lamps, prisms, wires, generators – that the police paid them a visit to make sure they weren’t constructing an illegal moonshine still.
Though Farnsworth made progress building his first television equipment, he burned through his initial funding in a few months, and much work remained to be
done. Everson and Gorrell still believed in Farnsworth and were able to find a bigger investor group to provide another $25,000, as well as laboratory space in San Francisco. In return, Farnsworth promised to create a working television system within one year.
After filing a patent for a television system on Jan. 7, 1927, Phil and Pem Farnsworth spent most of the year working to meet their promised deadline. Pem’s brother, Cliff Gardner, who came out from Utah to help, formed the entirety of their lab crew.
Since Farnsworth’s television was based on technology he had just invented, they had to build nearly every single component from scratch, including the complex glass tubes that formed the basis of his new “image dissector,” as Farnsworth called his television camera. As Pem later described it, blowing their own glass tubes for the image dissector was “a little like having to make your own tires before inventing the car.”
Gorrell would often stop by the lab to check on Farnsworth’s progress. “Hi Phil!” he would say. “Got the damned thing working yet?” Farnsworth had to reply, “Not yet.” Though Gorrell’s tone was ostensibly lighthearted, Farnsworth knew his investors’ patience was running thin; he would have to show them some results before long. He hired a small staff of talented recent college graduates to help him on his final push.
By Sept. 7, 1927, Farnsworth was ready to test his television system. Gardner pointed the camera at a slide with an image of a straight line. The rest of the crew gathered in front of the receiving tube, as they called their primitive television set. Soon, “a line appeared across the small, bluish square of light on the end of the tube,” Pem wrote. “It was pretty fuzzy, but Phil adjusted the focusing coil, and the line became well-defined.”
Farnsworth shouted for Gardner to turn the slide. The line on the receiving tube turned, too.
“That’s it, folks!” Farnsworth shouted. “We’ve done it! There you have electronic television.”
He sent a telegram to Gorrell, who was in Los Angeles. The message consisted of just four words: “The damned thing works.”
Farnsworth still had to make many refinements before he unveiled his
In his laboratory, Farnsworth holds one of the many glass tubes he and his staff created to send and receive television signals. His brother-in-law, Cliff Gardner, became an expert glass blower to help him.
Science History Images/Alamy
invention to the public. After another year of work on his television system, he called his first press conference on Sept. 1, 1928.
Just a few reporters showed up to the lab. Farnsworth set up the camera in front of a modified movie projector showing a clip from the film The Taming of the Shrew. The reporters were amazed when they saw the clip appear on the television set.
Two days later, a headline appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle: “S.F. Man’s Invention to Revolutionize Television.”
The accompanying article extolled the simplicity of his all-electronic system, which, unlike previous attempts at television, required no spinning disks. “It is a queer looking little image,” the article wrote of his television display, “but the basic principle is achieved, and perfection is now a matter of engineering.”
ARTICLES ABOUT Farnsworth’s invention started appearing in newspapers across the nation. One of the people reading those stories was David Sarnoff, a top executive at the Radio Corporation of America, or RCA. What he read about the upstart inventor deeply worried him.
Under Sarnoff’s leadership, RCA had acquired a complete monopoly on all patents for radio; any company that wanted to manufacture radios had to first pay RCA a hefty licensing fee. Sarnoff was also responsible for creating NBC, the first national radio network. He recognized it was only a matter of time before television became even bigger than radio – and he wanted RCA to control the nascent television industry as completely as it controlled radio.
While Sarnoff had the vision for television’s future, his company lacked the technology. But rather than seeking to license Farnsworth’s patents, Sarnoff decided to fund a rival television research program at RCA headed by inventor Vladimir Zworykin. Unbeknownst to Farnsworth, the Russian-born Zworykin had also been developing ideas for electronic television. Though Zworykin’s camera technology was far behind Farnsworth’s, the display on his television set was better.
In 1930, Zworykin paid a visit to Farnsworth’s lab in San Francisco. Farnsworth, who knew Zworykin by reputation, spent
Corbis Bettman
A Westinghouse factory churns out television sets in the late 1940s, when television became a part of daily life. Cameras televise RCA President David Sarnoff speaking at the 1939 World’s Fair’s opening.
Everett Collection/Alamy
three days showing him how his television system worked. He didn’t worry that his visitor might steal his innovations – after all, Farnsworth had already filed his television patents. Rather, he did everything he could to impress Zworykin, hopeful that a favorable report from him might persuade his corporate bosses to license Farnsworth’s inventions.
Zworykin was, indeed, impressed as he watched Farnsworth’s crew build an image dissector tube from scratch. “This is a beautiful instrument,” Zworykin said, holding the just-built image dissector. “I wish I had invented it myself.”
When Zworykin returned home, he immediately built a Farnsworth-style image dissector of his own. However, more than a year passed with no word from RCA. When the company finally did make an offer, it wasn’t to license Farnsworth’s patents but to buy them outright – and for less money than he had already spent on research.
Farnsworth refused RCA’s offer and instead licensed his technology to Philco, a Philadelphia-based radio manufacturer that wanted to start making televisions; though it was a short-lived partnership, the Farnsworths – now with two children in tow – relocated to Philadelphia.
Meanwhile, RCA poured money into Zworykin’s research, hoping to develop a television system that didn’t use Farnsworth’s patents. Sarnoff informally referred to one of Zworykin’s engineering teams as the “Get-Around-Farnsworth Department.”
Frustrated by what he saw as RCA’s infringement on his patent, Farnsworth
Utah Remembers Philo
THOUGH PHILO FARNSWORTH had been all but written out of the history books by the time he died in Salt Lake City on March 11, 1971, his reputation as the father of television has steadily grown over the past half century.
In the 1980s, students from Ridgecrest Elementary School in Cottonwood Heights waged a successful campaign to put a statue of Farnsworth in the U.S. Capitol. The 7-foot-6 bronze statue by sculptor James R. Avati made its debut in the U.S. Capitol in 1990, where it joined a statue of Brigham Young. Two copies of the Farnsworth statue were placed in Utah: one at the State Capitol, and one in his hometown of Beaver.
The statue in Beaver stands near the cabin in which Farnsworth was born, which was moved downtown from its original location north of town. The people of Beaver never forgot about Farnsworth, said Dean Hollingshead, who helped orchestrate the cabin’s move.
“He was just a downhome boy,” he said. “Everybody either
RCA’s David Sarnoff competed with Farnsworth. Early 20th century magazines touted television.
filed a case with the U.S. Patent Office seeking to finally settle the question: Who invented electronic television?
LAWYERS FOR FARNSWORTH and RCA presented their arguments at the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C., in early 1934. Farnsworth’s legal team contended the facts in his favor were simple:
knew him or his extended Farnsworth family, who were well-established here.”
Hollingshead remembers seeing Farnsworth when he returned to town as guest of honor at Beaver’s centennial celebration in 1956; during his trip, the inventor stayed with the town’s mayor, who happened to be his first cousin Samuel Taylor Farnsworth.
While Farnsworth’s popularity has enjoyed a posthumous resurgence, his statue is currently slated to be replaced in the U.S. Capitol by one of Martha Hughes Cannon, the Utah woman who was the first female state senator elected in the United States. The Farnsworth statue is to be relocated to Utah Valley University in Orem.
Yousuf Karsh
Justin Tolman reunites with Farnsworth, who was his student for a semester in high school. Tolman saved the diagram the young Farnsworth sketched of his television, which helped the inventor later on.
The patent for his television system was issued in 1930, before any of Zworykin’s television-related patents were issued.
But RCA argued that Zworykin had actually filed a patent for a television system in 1923. Even though that patent was never issued, RCA claimed it proved Zworykin had the idea first.
Farnsworth’s lawyers searched for some way to prove he’d had his television revelation even earlier than Zworykin. They asked Farnworth if there was anyone he told about his idea when he first had it as a teenager – perhaps that person could testify on his behalf.
And so it was that Farnsworth’s lead attorney made a trip west to track down Farnsworth’s old science teacher Justin Tolman, who had retired and settled in Salt Lake City. The lawyer arrived at Tol-
A 1983 U.S. postage stamp commemorates Farnsworth’s invention of the first television camera.
kin has no right” to claim he was first to invent television. “Priority of invention is awarded to Philo T. Farnsworth,” the ruling concluded.
Farnsworth was ecstatic. However, the Patent Office’s decision in his favor would turn out to be only a moral victory.
FOR THE NEXT four years, RCA’s strategy was to file appeal after appeal with the Patent Office while continuing to develop television just as it had before the ruling. While the appeals were ongoing, RCA’s technology pulled ahead of Farnsworth’s. It was little wonder: RCA devoted millions of dollars to fund a 20-person engineering team; Farnsworth was constantly short of funding and could only afford to hire a few assistants, whom he would periodically lay off when money ran out.
man’s home and found him working in his rose garden. He asked the teacher whether he remembered a student by the name of Philo T. Farnsworth.
“I surely do,” he replied. “Brightest student I ever had.”
Tolman also vividly remembered the day Farnsworth sketched out his electronic television. He gladly volunteered to give testimony about it at the Patent Office. At the trial, he was asked if he had any written proof that Farnsworth had told him about his idea in 1922. Tolman reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a sketch Farnsworth had made of his television system and given to him all those years ago.
It took a year for the Patent Office to reach its decision, but it was worth the wait for Farnsworth. In July 1935, in a 48page ruling, the office found that “Zwory-
It became clear that RCA, not Farnsworth, would be the one to bring television to the masses. When the 1939 World’s Fair opened in New York City, RCA had an entire pavilion displaying its marvelous new television sets and cameras. RCA even televised the opening ceremony, which featured a speech by President Franklin D. Roosevelt – with an introduction at the podium by RCA President David Sarnoff.
Shortly thereafter, RCA and Farnsworth sat down to finally resolve their differences. The reached a settlement that had RCA pay him $1 million for previous use of his patents, plus ongoing royalties for every television set manufactured.
“It was a battle between the independent genius and the corporation,” the Paley Center’s Simon said. “In many ways, Farnsworth won, because RCA had to buy the patent rights for television. But after-
Philo T. Farnsworth Archives
ward, Farnsworth was sort of erased from the history of television.”
Getting RCA to license his patents was what Farnsworth had wanted all along, but the settlement came about a decade too late to be of much use to him.
Farnsworth’s key television patents were only good for 17 years. By the time the legal wrangling with RCA was over, 10 critical years had been wasted. Then World War II broke out, delaying major development of television until the fighting ended in 1945. Farnsworth’s patents expired in 1947, just months before television’s popularity started to explode.
The fight with RCA took a toll on Farnsworth’s physical and mental health. He began to drink heavily. Not long after the settlement, he was hospitalized for three months after suffering what was described as a nervous breakdown.
As television became a fixture of American life, Farnsworth sank into obscurity. In 1957, he appeared as a guest on the game show I’ve Got a Secret, in which panelists tried to guess what major
accomplishment he had achieved. None of the panelists recognized him, and none were able to guess he was the man who invented electronic television.
He eventually stopped working on television, redirecting his focus to his unsuccessful attempt to harness atomic fusion to supply the nation’s energy needs. He was all but broke when he and Pem retired to Salt Lake City.
Farnsworth grew bitter about television and contemptuous of the networks’ vapid programming. He sometimes regretted inventing television in the first place. It wasn’t until the first moon landing in 1969, just two years before he died, that he came to fully appreciate the magnitude of his contribution to the world.
He and Pem watched as a miniature version of his image dissector beamed footage of Neil Armstrong to a worldwide television audience of 650 million people. Farnsworth turned to Pem with tears in his eyes.
“This,” he said, “has made it all worthwhile.”
Farnsworth retired to Salt Lake City, where in 1969 he watched as the Moon landing beamed images to Earth using his image dissector.
Alamy
Lake Powell Side Canyons of
Photographer Jeff Foott and his 18-foot motorboat explore Glen Canyon’s quiet offshoots
story by MATT MASICH photographs by JEFF FOOTT
As viewed from the overlook at Alstrom Point, the very first rays of morning peep over the edge of Glen Canyon at
Lake Powell’s Padre Bay.
SOME OF THE world’s most beautiful sunsets can be found at Lake Powell.
Though many Utahns have said something to that effect, few have truly seen enough of the world to make that statement with much certainty. That’s not the case with Castle Valley photographer Jeff Foott.
Foott has seen sunsets on every continent, including Antarctica. In his more than 50-year career, he has shot still photos and films for National Geographic, PBS, the Discovery Channel and more. So when he says he witnessed one of the best
sunsets he’s ever seen at Lake Powell, the assertion carries some weight.
Together with his wife, Judith Zimmerman, who is also a professional photographer, Foott has led numerous photo workshops on Lake Powell. They travel in a houseboat, then launch smaller boats to explore the main lake and its offshoots.
One evening, as he and some workshop students were approaching their houseboat after a trip up a long side canyon, he noticed the sky’s color start to change.
“We just hung out and watched one of the most beautiful sunsets I can ever remember seeing,” Foott said. “It was the
reflections in the water, the cliff background – but sometimes it’s not just what’s visual. I had a couple of very nice city people on the boat, and they were just going crazy, because they hardly ever saw good sunsets.”
Many of Foott’s photography stories involve boats. More often than not, the boat in question is his beloved 1968 Boston Whaler, an 18-foot-long, double-hulled motorboat that was nearly new when he bought it.
Foott began shooting nature films in the early 1970s for the United Kingdom’s Anglia Television. The head of the com-
Sandstone along the shoreline near Padres Butte has ripples indicating it was formed at the bottom of an ancient ocean. Both sides of the shore in Last Chance Canyon feature red-and-white polka dot sandstone.
pany, Lord Aubrey Buxton, gave him an unlimited expense account for his first assignment, filming sea otters in California. Foott took the opportunity to purchase the high-end Boston Whaler.
In the decades since, Foott has crisscrossed the continent – Alaska, Florida, Mexico – hauling the boat behind his truck camper. Though he has had to leave his Boston Whaler behind while filming killer whales in Patagonia or great white sharks in Australia, it otherwise goes where he goes. When Foott photographs Lake Powell, he takes most shots from aboard his boat.
“If you’re a photographer, you’ve got a bunch of gear,” he said. “With a boat, you’re not backpacking 25 pounds of gear around – you’ve got it all right there.”
Since Lake Powell was created by the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam
in the 1960s, Foott has seen the once quiet canyon become a major recreational destination. There are now two different sets of people who come to Lake Powell, he said: those who stay in the middle of the lake to boat, water ski and jet ski, and those who come to explore the side canyons. Foott is firmly in the latter set.
“My favorite experience is finding a nice little place on shore,” he said, “putting up a tent and having dinner watching the sun go down.”
With Lake Powell’s water levels dropping recently, Foott has found it more difficult to venture down secluded canyons. In some areas, a lack of water means his journeys now end a mile or two short of where he once was able to travel. And even when there is water, it can conceal hidden danger.
When Glen Canyon was flooded, thou-
Sunset paints the sky above Face Canyon in colors reminiscent of its sandstone. A tourist boat plies the waters of Forbidding Canyon, which connects Lake Powell to Rainbow Bridge; the “bathtub ring” of mineral deposits on the canyon walls shows the lake’s declining water level.
In the prelude to sunset, the late afternoon sun lights up Padres Butte, at the far left, and other promontories along the edge of the canyon.
sands of trees were submerged beneath the lake. Many trees have remained upright and well-preserved for more than a half-century underwater – something Foott discovered firsthand a few years ago while exploring in his Boston Whaler.
“We were going up a side canyon, and it was so muddy you couldn’t see what was under the water,” he said. “I was going slowly, but I hit a tree that was sticking up, and ka-thunk: It poked a hole in the outer hull.”
It was the first time his Boston Whaler had taken such serious damage. The inner hull remained intact, so the boat didn’t sink, but the incident ended his trip.
Foott’s boat has been repaired, but he hasn’t had much opportunity to return to Lake Powell lately, as the continually dropping water has forced marinas to close. He is concerned about what the future holds for Glen Canyon, but his affection for it has not waned. “It is a place I have loved –and still love,” he said.
Defiance House Ruin in Forgotten Canyon dates to the 13th century. The canyon glows at sunrise as seen from Alstrom Point. The water is still and mirrorlike in Clear Creek Canyon, one of many side canyons branching off the lake’s Escalante arm.
Explore Utah
CULTURE. ADVENTURE. HISTORY.
by RACHEL FIXSEN
CULTURE
SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL
JAN. 20-30 • PARK CITY
The Sundance Film Festival welcomes the return of in-person events at this annual celebration of American independent cinema. Last year, much of the festival shifted to a virtual platform and to “satellite screens” around the country that hosted smaller gatherings. Online participation was such a success that this year the festival’s 80 films will again be screened online, as well as in-person at festival locations and select satellite screens.
“We have a real variety this year – lots of focus on diverse storytelling across genres,” Sundance Institute Publicist Sylvy Fernández said.
New this year, a program called Local Lens offers screenings in Salt Lake City and Park City, as well as free online screenings to Utah residents during the festival.
The festival also has a special program for Utah high school students to watch three feature films and discuss the works with the artists who created them. Utah locals can also get discounts on festival packages. Visit festival.sundance.org for details.
All in-person attendees must be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 and wear masks while inside Sundance venues.
The long-running festival marks the return of inperson film screenings in Park City and Salt Lake.
WHERE TO STAY
HOTEL PARK CITY
At the foot of the ski slopes and neighboring a golf course, Hotel Park City offers upscale lodging with amenities like a spa, fitness center and sauna. The hotel concierge can help book adventures like sleigh riding or cross-country ski tours. On-site dining options include Ruth’s Chris Steak House and Bandanas Grill. 2001 Park Ave. (435) 940-5001.
WHERE TO EAT
ATTICUS COFFEE & TEAHOUSE
This teahouse, coffee shop and used bookstore was named for the wise and courageous character Atticus Finch from Harper Lee’s classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird. The menu includes an extensive collection of teas as well as espresso drinks, breakfast sandwiches and burritos. A portion of all sales is donated to local nonprofits. 738 Main St. (435) 214-7241.
Sandra Salvas/Utah Office of TourismFilm Festival
OUTDOORS
BRYCE CANYON WINTER FESTIVAL
FEB. 19-21 • BRYCE CANYON CITY
The deep amphitheaters and bristling hoodoos of Bryce Canyon National Park are a wonderland year-round. The winter months usually bring snow to Bryce’s landscape, which varies from 8,000 to 9,000 feet in elevation, but that’s no reason to stay away – in fact, the red hues and intricate forms of the rocks are set off by the contrasting snow. The historic Ruby’s Inn hosts a winter festival each year to celebrate the chillier, quieter time of year with outdoor activities like cross-country ski or snowshoe tours, fat-tire bike rides and a ski-archery competition.
“Winter in Bryce Canyon is just like a cake – and cake is always better when there’s a little frosting on top,” Ruby’s Inn Manager Lance Syrett said.
Even in a year with no snow, attendees can still get active with kayaking demos in the hotel’s pool, morning yoga sessions or dance classes. People can also get creative with watercolors and photography, or get cozy with crafts and cookie decorating. The National Park Service hosts kids’ programs and geology talks that are open to the public during the festival. (866) 866-6616.
WHERE TO STAY RUBY’S INN
Those attending the festival may want to stay on-site – and Ruby’s Inn is a unique place that is worth staying at. It is the closest lodging to Bryce Canyon National Park. The inn is named for Rueben Syrett, a rancher who settled in Utah in 1916 and established what he called a “tourist lodge.” The Syrett family still runs the hotel, which also offers gear rentals and tours. 26 S. Main St., Bryce Canyon City. (866) 866-6616.
WHAT TO DO
DARK RANGER TELESCOPE
TOURS Nights come early in the winter, and in a dark-sky place like Bryce, that means more time for stargazing. Visitors can get an even closer look with Dark Ranger Telescope Tours, a family-run business with a collection of large telescopes and a wealth of astronomy knowledge. Those taking the tour should dress warmly – it’s very cold after dark. 1 mile south, East Fork Road 087, Bryce. (435) 590-9498.
White snow adds a new hue to Bryce Canyon’s already impressive palette of colors.
Farmington Snowman Scavenger Hunt
Jan. 1- 15 • Farmington
At Station Park – a mixed-use “lifestyle center” with retail, hotels, restaurants and children’s play area – kids can pick up a scavenger hunt sheet and find 15 snowmen and one Santa Claus hiding nearby. A completed sheet earns a treat, courtesy of Rhodes Physical Therapy, a Farmington-based practice. (801) 923-9111.
Webb Space Telescope Launch Celebration
Jan. 7 • Lehi
NASA was slated to launch the James Webb Space Telescope in December. The new instrument, which features mirrors made from Utah-mined beryllium, will be able to see farther into deep space than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope. The Hutchings Museum Institute is celebrating the new telescope at the Megaplex Theaters at Thanksgiving Point, where people can watch the launch and listen to experts talk about the project. (801) 768-7361.
Winter 4x4 Jamboree
Jan. 12-15 • Hurricane
Drivers in full-size 4x4 vehicles can join guided trail rides on a range of technical terrain in the beautiful landscape of southwest Utah in an event managed by the nonprofit Desert Roads and Trails Society. After-ride activities include a bonfire, vendor show and live music. (435) 619-6119.
Clay Con West
Jan. 14-16 • St. George
Clay enthusiasts converge for this conference at the Dixie Convention Center, where potters and sculptors get inspired and build friendships. Demonstrating artists on the main stage present their techniques and share their knowledge. Experts host workshops, and vendors are on hand to share their artistic creations. Amateurs and professionals are welcome. (435) 231-3734.
Matt Hage/Utah Office of Tourism
SPORTS ARCHES ULTRA RACE & MOAB’S RED HOT RACE
JAN. 29, FEB 19. • MOAB
Moab’s mild winters make the season perfect for hosting races through the scenic surrounding areas.
Moab’s desert sees some snow in the winter, but mild temperatures and strong sunshine make it a welcome respite from the deeper winter of the northern part of the state. Mad Moose Events, a family-owned company that puts on foot races in Utah and Colorado, provides motivation to get outside year-round with January and February courses through sun-soaked redrock terrain in Moab.
The Arches Ultra loops through trails west of Arches National Park, with views of the park’s unique sandstone features as well as the La Sal Mountains, which are capped with snow in the winter months.
Participants can register for the full 50mile race, or scale down and choose a 50 kilometer, 13.1-mile half marathon or 9 kilometer option.
Moab temperatures usually warm up in February, which is when Mad Moose holds Moab’s Red Hot race. There are 55- and 33- kilometer options covering terrain in the Gemini Bridges area above Moab. Views of Canyonlands National Park and the La Sal Mountains give a gorgeous backdrop to the desert course. Non-runners can get involved volunteering at aid stations, or cheering on friends and family at the finish line.
Kurt Hoy/Mad Moose EventsEvents
WHERE TO STAY DESERT HILLS BED AND BREAKFAST
This cozy, family-owned lodging offers homemade breakfasts, a game room, back patio and hot tub. The owners love travel, adventure and hosting guests from around the world. Co-owner Vic, an avid runner and frequent participant in Mad Moose events, is glad to offer tips to those in town for a race. 1989 Desert Hills Drive. (435) 259-3568.
WHERE TO EAT DEWEY’S RESTAURANT AND BAR
New owners took over the long-running Eddie McStiff’s restaurant in 2020, updated the interior and menu, and gave it a new name: Dewey’s, after a beloved historic bridge over the Colorado River that was destroyed in a 2008 fire. The menu offers burgers, salads, sandwiches, pasta and more, while the Bridge Bar has 11 craft beers on tap, including selections from local craft breweries. 57 Main St. (435) 257-2337.
At the Bluff International Balloon Festival, the skies above the red sandstone buttes of southeast Utah fill with even more colors.
Bluff International Balloon Festival Jan. 14-17 • Bluff
Colorful hot air balloons festoon the skies over the impressive landscape around Bluff in this winter festival. Past events have included live music, an art market and chili supper, as well as a “glow-in” after dark, where balloons are grounded but inflated and lit up like colorful light bulbs. bluffutah.org.
David Allen
Balloons and Tunes Roundup
Feb. 18-20 • Kanab
More than three dozen brightly decorated hot air balloons launch in the mornings at this festival. The “tunes” portion of the event comes later, when a lineup of talented live bands performs in the evenings. Rounding out the days are a vendor fair and the beautiful Lantern Festival launch, in which floating lanterns are released into the sky. (435) 644-5033.
Bigfoot Snowshoe Festival
Jan. 29 • Midway
Billed as the only ultra snowshoe race in the United States, this event has options from a 5-kilometer to a 50-kilometer course, all at elevations around 6,000 feet. Snowshoes must be used for the entire race for entrants to be eligible to win awards given out after the race. (801) 808-4222.
National Geographic Live: A View from Space
Feb. 11 • Park City
Astronaut Terry Virts makes a special appearance at the Eccles Center to talk about his adventures in outer space. As commander of the International Space Station, Virts helped install an observatory module that he used to take stunning photographs of the Earth, many of which were published in the National Geographic book View from Above. (435) 655-3114.
Banff Mountain Film Festival
Feb. 14-25 • Multiple cities
This renowned international film competition brings audiences some of the most insightful and thrilling films about mountain culture, sports, adventure and the environment. The festival shows feature presentations in Logan, Moab, Ogden, Orem and Salt Lake City. (403) 762-6100.
TRIVIA ANSWERS
Questions on p 14-15
1 Funeral potatoes
2 Emigration Canyon
3 Parowan
4 Fry sauce
5 Dinner Takes All
6 True. Sego lily.
7 False. Go to Curry Pizza in Bicknell, pop. 350.
8 True
9 True
10 False. Utah is tops.
11 b. St. George
12 a. Ethiopia
13 c. Perry
14 a. Capitol Reef.
15 b. J Dawgs
Trivia Photographs
Page 14 A Salt Lake City food truck serves scones. French fries are served with fry sauce.
Page 15 A sego lily blooms near Moab. Hell’s Backbone Grill is in Boulder.
last laugh
story by KERRY SOPER
illustration by JOSH TALBOT
Artfully Missing Out on Utah’s Economic Boom (or My Worst Job Ever)
I’M A LITTLE tired of business magazines continually praising Utah’s prolonged economic boom: soaring real estate prices, a surplus of high-paying tech jobs and a responsible, well-educated workforce. What about the artsy goof-offs like me who are left out of the equation? Bad at math, naïve about all things financial and ill-equipped to hold down a traditional 9-to-5 job, I’m still living in the “starter” home we bought back in 1999.
Thanks to academia, I’ve found a safe haven for my brand of competent mediocrity, but for much of my early adult life, I floundered to find a decent job and lucrative career path in this thriving state. I quietly failed at a number of lame jobs: trench digger for a sprinkler company; midnight custodian at greasy chain restaurants; and fry cook at Stevenette’s malt shop in Provo, where I once got chewed out for serving cold french fries to Jimmy Osmond.
Ironically, my most spectacular failure was at a job I concocted myself; let’s call it “freelance, desperate artist.” After beginning art school at Utah State University, I made the foolish decision to take on only work that related to my imagined future as a well-respected, self-employed artist.
The surreal, often humiliating experiences I endured include painting a giant mural of Canyonlands for less than 50 cents an hour; drawing caricatures of tipsy tourists at Snowbird’s Oktoberfest; creating a cartoon map of every mom-and-pop store in Orem; and executing portraits of people’s pets at the grand opening of a big box store in Davis County – and then getting fired that same day after completing just two drawings: a parrot that wouldn’t sit still, and a grouping of three Shar Pei puppies – just a mass of interconnecting wrinkles, like a disturbing M.C. Escher maze.
My worst gig, however – the one that still haunts me on cold winter nights – was painting personalized messages on men’s boxer shorts for Valentine’s Day at a now defunct downtown Salt Lake department store (that rhymes with “K.P. Denney”).
With no experience painting on cloth, I should have just said no to this ill-conceived idea. But the store was willing to pay me $50 an hour, and for a struggling, young father, it was an offer I couldn’t refuse.
Unfortunately, I forgot about this job until the actual day. When I noticed it on the calendar, I flew into a panic, heading out the door with a single tube of red acrylic paint and some random brushes. I was
sweaty and agitated when I finally arrived at the store; I became further distressed by the scene that greeted me: a giant sign advertising my services – like I was some kind of underwear-painting professional – and a line of 10 women, already tearing open packages of boxer shorts.
Before I could sit down, the first customer approached and laid out some blindingly white boxer shorts. She instructed,
“Write ‘Love, Chrystal’ in a flowing script across the front.” With my hands shaking, I squeezed out a blob of red paint. Looking at my brushes, I was horrified to see I’d grabbed ones that were stiff and worn out.
Everyone now watching, I experimentally dabbed some paint onto to the rough texture of the boxers. Oh no – it simply bled into the fabric. Next, I tentatively tried to paint in cursive; this did not go well, either. With nothing to hold the shorts in place, the brush skipped, dragged and blobbed. When I finished the first jagged letter, it was barely legible.
As I forged ahead, gradually constructing the message, I began to hear murmurs from the line. Then people started to leave, clearly appalled by what they were witnessing. Eventually, it was just me and Chrystal.
When I finished, the boxers looked like the craft project of a sloppy second grader who was just learning to write. I gingerly pushed the mess toward my lone customer. She shoved them back. When I tried to apologize, she cut me off: “You misspelled
my name – you left out the ‘s’!”
I couldn’t believe it. The message read: “LOVE CHRYTAL.” In numb confusion, I stood up and backed away, rolling the shorts into a ball, as if trying to hide evidence of what I’d done. “I’ll fix this, I’ll fix this,” I stammered. Without a clear plan in mind, I ran to the men’s restroom.
Once inside, I put the shorts under the blasting faucet, but this merely splattered red paint everywhere, like a crime scene. Now the shorts were soaking wet and bright pink. A random guy opened the bathroom door at this awkward moment and froze in his tracks. I smiled and waved at him weakly, but he just backed out slowly, holding up his hand as if to say, “It’s OK, buddy – I didn’t see anything.”
Defeated, I shoved the wet boxers in my pocket. Then, I purchased another package of shorts with my own money, repainted the dumb message (spelled accurately this time but still painted poorly) and left the sad results on the table. As I snuck out of the store, I assured the confused security
More Than A Flag is a statewide initiative that invites Utahns to describe who and what we are. The aim is to create a 21st-century flag for a 21st-century state.
TOGETHER, WE ARE UTAH.
We are listening to the voices of Utahns across the state to hear the values, symbols and colors that resonate and represent who we are. Visit Flag.Utah.gov to follow the new flag design process and give us your opinion. Flag.Utah.gov
Supported by the Governor’s Office and the Utah Legislature.
guard I didn’t want any money. By the time I got home, I was late for class and didn’t have time to tell my wife about my disastrous day. As I headed out, I shoved the damp shorts into a corner of the front closet. It was my bad luck that she found them while I was gone. Needless to say, she was disturbed and confused. She recalls thinking, “Is it my Valentine’s gift?! And who the heck is Chrytal?”
She was still inspecting the weird boxers when I returned. My defeated explanation sent her into a weeping laughing fit. For weeks after that, she showed the shorts to friends, neighbors – even delivery people.
Worried that rumors of these infamous boxers might eventually make it into the evening news, I performed a ritual burning of the underwear on our charcoal grill. Vowing to get a real job someday, I whispered “Die Chrytal” (about the shorts, not the person) as smoky shards of pink fabric lofted into the night sky. If only I could destroy as easily the random flashbacks that I still experience to this day.
