Players are talking about fast greens and windy afternoons as the return of the world’s oldest continuous golf tournament to Soldier Hollow brings in qualifying amateurs for daily competition this week. The 128th annual Utah Amateur Golf champion will be crowned after 36 holes of match play on Saturday.

“It’s never had an off year,” said Easton Folster, the Utah Golf Association’s executive director. “The reason we’re able to claim that is the British Open is older, the US Open is older, but they took breaks for the world wars, and frankly, the pandemic in 2020, while we’ve never had a break.”

Soldier Hollow’s 36 holes make the course well-suited for high-volume events such as this 288-competitor field.

Monday and Tuesday contained 18 holes of daily stroke play, with each golfer alternating between Soldier Hollow’s mountainous Gold and shallower Silver courses while switching between cooler morning and windy afternoon tee times. The initial field thinned to 64 for match play starting Wednesday. 

2025 champion Bowen Mauss is back defending his title, along with seven other returning champions. On Tuesday, Angus Klintworth from Red Ledges stood atop the leadership board with a total to par gross of -9, followed by Austin Shelley at -8 and Ben Wilson at -7.

On Friday morning, quarterfinalists step out of the carts for two rounds of walking all-day play before Saturday’s 36-hole two-player championship. The winner receives a sponsor’s exemption for the PGA tour stop at St. George in October.

Soldier Hollow is hosting the competition for the eighth time. Event champion Tony Finau’s son, Jraice Finau, was the youngest competitor at age 14. He lasted through Tuesday. Twenty years ago, his father won the 2006 Utah Amateur title at Soldier Hollow against fellow future PGA pro Daniel Summerhays.

Red Ledges local Brian Jennings was competing in the amateur championship for the second time in three years after moving to Utah from Texas. At 40, he is on the older end of the competitor spectrum. He took up golf in his 30s.

He had been practicing at Soldier Hollow in the weeks leading up to the event but found that a fresh contest trim made for a different putting experience. He practiced at the driving range Tuesday morning before a 1:30 tee time with partner Cody Kent after their third withdrew during a poor Monday performance. 

“I can still hit the ball pretty far, so I can keep up length-wise, and I just enjoy the competitive nature of really anything, but of golf especially, so it’s my competitive outlet in life,” Jennings said. “I like the process of improving and getting better. Golf is very challenging, so a lot of time it’s two steps forward, one step back with that process.”

Jennings shot +3 in stroke play and missed the match play cut.

Wendy Debry stood by the 10th tee, watching son Jake Debry practice his left-handed putting. The ascending sophomore at Westminster College has three fellow teammates competing through the week.

Wendy carried a small foldable chair but she said there wasn’t much time for sitting as a spectator who must keep up with the cart-traveling players on foot while helping chase down errant balls, which earned her 7.5 miles along the Gold course on Monday. Debry shot a +15 and missed the cut.

As the competition refines itself throughout the week, Folster has found that a common goal motivates golfers of all success levels and the Utah Golf Association at large.

“You’re trying to beat par at the end of the day,” Folster said. “It’s the challenge to find perfection that will never be found in golf.”

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Parkites will be seeing blue this weekend as the Boyack clan is visiting town 200 members strong, clad in matching azure tops to mark their grand finale family reunion. The tradition has spanned 40 fun-filled weekends over 80 years, through all of Merrilyn Hilton’s lifetime.

“There’s nothing like being together in person,” said Hilton, a Boyack by birth and Layton resident who will be attending with her husband, Roy, and daughter, Michaela Foster, and son-in-law, Bret Foster, to connect with cousins from New Hampshire, Minnesota, North Dakota, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Nevada and Utah for the long weekend.

Hilton’s maternal great-grandparents, Jane Bowen and George Boyack, married in 1897 and raised seven children: Wanda, George, Merrill, Hal, Ray, Cliff and Dean. In 1947 George and Jane celebrated their 50th anniversary with the company of their adult children and growing families.

All present enjoyed themselves so much that the seven siblings began to rotate the duties of hosting a reunion every other summer. As decades passed, their children took up the torch, while becoming parents and grandparents themselves.

“Just in my generation there are 70 people, and we’re down to the fifth generation from my great-grandparents, so it’s just gotten too big,” Hilton said of the decision to draw the tradition to a close after one more hurrah.

Fifty last names will be in attendance. Great-great-grandchildren number 356, and the fifth generation already counts 87 members. At 97, LaMyrl Sandholtz will be the oldest attendee. 

“I just think it’s a very unique event because I don’t hear about too many people getting together for three or four days for a family reunion,” Hilton said. Her husband’s Hiltons hosted their first reunion in four years this June, a one-day potluck gathering.

Boyack festivities commence Thursday evening with a welcoming dance at the weekend headquarters Sheraton Hotel. Multiple forefathers were square dance callers, so the evening will include traditional dancing along with songs spanning all eight decades. Heidi Darling will be leading the dancing.

Friday morning begins with the Boyack softball game at Basin Recreation Center before further activities of the relay variety that constitute the Boyack Olympics. A lunchtime barbecue will go on into the afternoon, then come evening, the cousins will split up by generations to patronize a handful of local dining establishments before a Boyack sing-along back at the hotel finishes the night.

Saturday is a free day until the Boyack dinner banquet. If you’re going to be late, please bring the fish you caught. The Sheraton will be catering the meal, though someone will likely be opening their tartan-clad “Recipes from the Clan Pan” family cook book to make matriarch Jane’s shortbread squares for dessert. Meanwhile, young women from the Park City Latter-day Saints ward will treat the little ones to a catered meal across from the adults, in Doug and Pam’s suite, then games and activities in the Silver Mine Room.

Sunday brings one last George S. Boyack Sunday School meeting before hitting the road by noon after lots of Boyack hugs. 

Knowing the tradition is coming to an end is not easy, but that fact makes this gathering extra-special.

“I’m kind of sad about it,” Hilton said. “Everybody’s so busy with life that it’s hard to get together, and I’m very grateful that we’ve had this opportunity. When people say ‘my cousins,’ they’re pretty much referring to cousins from their grandparents. When I’m referring to my cousins, I’m referring to my first and second cousins because I know them, I’ve grown up with them, and they’re closer to me than most second cousins are. My daughter has really close relationships with some of her third cousins. The generations start blurring together and we’re all one big huge family.”

2024’s reunion was in Las Vegas, and earlier gatherings coincided with the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair and Ashland, Oregon’s Shakespeare Festival. Park City previously played host in 1988 and 2014. 

Hilton fondly remembered long-ago reunions when the Boyacks would rent collegiate dormitories.

“At UC Davis, the way that dorms were designed is that they surrounded the pool, so during our free time everyone would come out of their rooms and get in the water, play the chicken games, Marco Polo and just have a crazy old time,” she said.

While reunions are a visible manifestation of family ties, Hilton takes comfort knowing who she can call on at any time.

“I think the bonds that families have really helps strengthen me as an individual, to know that I have all these cousins that, push came to shove, I could call and say, ‘Hey, I need help, I need support,” Hilton said. “It doesn’t matter that you aren’t in contact with them every single day, but to know that they’re going to have your back when it really counts. If I were to go on a trip across country, I know I could call on any Boyak cousin and say, ‘Hey, I’m looking for a place to stay,’ and they’d put us up.”

The Boyacks consider their family bonds a tribute to the exponential power of two: Jane and George Boyack.

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In honor of the year’s longest day, the international sailing community has christened the summer solstice as Sailstice.

The Park City Sailing Association will celebrate the turn of the season and trimming of the sails Saturday on the Jordanelle Reservoir, its home port. The global event is dedicated to promoting sailing in all its forms. The non-profit’s day-long open house begins at 11 a.m. with boat rides, demonstrations, games and food for seasoned skippers and landlubbers fresh on the water alike.

Scott VerMerris has been involved with PC Sailing for over 15 years and is the group’s director of sailing and community engagement. He grew up sailing with his family on Lake Erie, came to Utah for skiing and work in wilderness therapy, then was thrilled to find conditions on the Jordanelle make Park City a unique ski town with a sailing culture, albeit a little less upscale than the ski resorts.

“We’re not a yacht club,” VerMerris said. “This is a community sailing center, so there is a difference there. Our goal is to make sailing accessible, affordable, inclusive and it’s not exclusive in that way. We don’t have a restaurant. We don’t have a bar. It’s not that kind of place. We do a lot of social events, but it’s truly a community sailing center.”

Summer activities at PC Sailing include children’s sailing school on weekday mornings, Monday evening adult group lessons, Laser boat racing on Tuesday nights, Women & Wind Wednesday night social and educational meetings, and keelboat races on Thursdays, along with private adult lessons, an unlimited boat-borrowing program for members, and spectator-friendly regatta events.

“There’s no wrong time to get into sailing,” VerMerris said. “It’s such a healthy, fun activity for all ages. It can bring people together, but it also fosters independence. For kids, it develops a sense of independence and accountability, as well as problem solving and confidence building through doing something new. There’s also a lot of STEM education. There’s physics and math, and there’s the connection with nature and figuring out how to make your boat move and navigate and figure out the wind as well as how to take care of your equipment.”

Their 100-craft fleet is situated on a mooring field near the Jordanelle campgrounds facing south toward the dam, over which thermal gusts blow to provide the wind in their sails.

“We have a beautiful building and a boat yard, we have great facilities, but we do not have the protection of a marina,” VerMerris said. “We teach people how to manage sailing on a lee shore, meaning we have the prevailing weather from the south, so the wind will push you onto the beach and ramps. Making downwind landings on the ramp or landing certain boats with the kids on the beach requires some skill and it also requires that we have really good moorings. In terms of boats and facilities, we’re really diligent about how we structure things so we can manage this place.”

PC Sailing partners with the National Abilities Center, Park City Recreation and Adventure Camp, Deer Valley Resort and the Utah Olympic Park to provide engagement opportunities that may engender lifelong passions.

“There’s no gender bias in sailing,” VerMeer said. “It doesn’t necessarily require brute strength. It can be attractive to a lot of different types of people, even for people who haven’t gravitated to traditional sports. There’s different types of sailing that one can go towards, whether it’s racing or cruising, and then there’s big boats and small boats, wet boats and dry boats.”

PC Sailing provides life jackets, and all that newcomers need to wear is clothing appropriate for exposure to sun and water. 

“It’s really incredible to see kids who were drawn to video games and not organized sports gravitate toward sailing, and I see the same in adults. We treat a lot of veterans, so its a fantastic form of rec therapy because of the camaraderie that it offers, the ability to be outside, find peace on the water and learn a new skill.”

Also, Rosie Chapman, who has previously worked as the Olympic director for US Sailing, has joined the teaching staff as the center aims expand its training program.

While other lakes in Utah offer their own experiences, Park City Sailing’s space on the Jordanelle is the state’s most established collective, and last year it hosted the 2025 U.S. Adult Sailing Championship. The group will be hosting its inaugural Jordanelle Boat Regatta circumnavigation race on Aug. 1. 

“We are the center for sailing in Utah,” VerMeer said.

For more: SailPC.org.

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John Santy had planned for a quiet Thursday evening in his Snyderville Basin condo when, shortly after 5 p.m., he heard a loud bang followed by his roommate screaming in the kitchen.

“I quickly stood up and all of a sudden there’s this dude in my living room running back and forth through my kitchen opening doors, bleeding, and I’m like, ‘What the hell are you doing?’” Santy said. “He wouldn’t listen to me, so I grabbed my gun (that) I had hidden, and I cocked it and told him to get … on the ground or I would shoot him. He put his hands up, I got him proned out, then I told (my roommate) to call 911 and just said, ‘If you move, I will shoot you.’”

While his roommate was on the phone, Santy heard knocks on his front door. He didn’t know it at the time, but it was the Summit County Sheriff’s Office.

Deputies were dispatched to Canyon Creek Apartments following an earlier 911 call about a 35-year-old man behaving violently and threatening people with a pair of scissors, according to Sgt. Skyler Talbot. The suspect fled when deputies arrived and attempted to enter multiple apartments before jumping onto a balcony and accessing Santy’s unit through an unlocked door.

Santy said he wasn’t sure whether the man he held at gunpoint in his home was associated with the people pounding on his door. But he decided to trust that the voices on the other side of the door were from the authorities.

“So I said to him, ‘Don’t you move or you’ll get shot,’ and I slowly walked away toward the door, and they came in,” Santy recalled. “And because I had my gun in my hand, they were freaking out, and I was like, ‘No, no, no. I’m the homeowner.’ They’re like, ‘Drop it, drop it.’ I was like, ‘Okay,’ and I put it down, and they pushed me out of the room. I was like, ‘He’s in the kitchen,’ and they ran around, and then they arrested him.”

Talbot said deputies shot the man three times with beanbag rounds before he entered a third-floor apartment, then leapt from that balcony onto Santy’s below. 

“He monkey-jumped or swung,” Santy said. “It’s like 10 feet onto my balcony. He broke my outdoor table when he fell. We had our door cracked open to get some fresh air. When you’re on the second floor, you think you don’t have to worry, but he busted through the screen and came in, and that’s when I heard (my roommate) screaming.”

After the sheriff’s deputies arrested the man, Santy sanitized his place while his roommate called out of work for the evening to allow herself to recover emotionally.

“I had to clean up the blood off the floor,” Santy said. “I was an EMT, so it’s normal to me, but still, when it’s in your place with somebody else’s. I put gloves on and (cleaned) it, and it went away.”

Santy is a 41-year-old lifetime Park City resident who has lived in his Canyon Creek condo for the past two years. He has certifications and a concealed weapons permit for his firearms but had never found himself in a position that prompted him to pull a gun until Thursday.

“I didn’t want to shoot him, but I was ready to,” Santy said. “I’ve had lots of training. My dad taught me when I was 12 years old. I train all the time with my firearms and definitely always keep it safe, which is very important.”

Santy’s father, Jim Santy Jr., was a Park City fire captain.

After the incident, neighbors spoke about the noises that brought them out to investigate as they pieced together the situation.

“All my neighbors are calling me the hero of the neighborhood,” Santy said. “I’m just glad I was able to stop him because I don’t put up with stuff like that. It’s ridiculous. I’ll protect my community at all costs, and I’ll protect my house.”

Santy was able to review his actions thanks to a home security video system.

“The only reason I have it is to keep an eye on the pets when I’m gone,” Santy said. “I’m glad it kicked in during this situation because I never planned on anything like this.”

The suspect was taken to a hospital and treated for injuries related to the incident, then booked in the Summit County Jail, where he is being held without bail. No formal charges have been filed against the suspect as of Monday.

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As a theoretical physicist, Alec Hewitt reaches for a laptop rather than a lab coat when he does his research.

Hewitt, a 2015 Park City High School graduate, earned his Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of California, Irvine, this month for his work studying theoretical and elementary particle physics. The five-year Ph.D. program culminated in his dissertation based on two articles he published characterizing and simulating neutral leptons.

“Basically, everything that you know of is made of protons, neutrons and electrons, but those aren’t the smallest particles,” Hewitt said. “There’s actually a periodic table with more fundamental elements. Given that, you can write down essentially almost an equation of everything. From that, in principle, it would be possible to construct everything that we know of, like nuclear theory and chemistry. Who knows, we could go further, but it’s nice to know that there’s a set of laws that’s the bottom as far as we know of.”

The theoretical nature of his practice means that he spends much of his time developing ways for others to test his hypotheses.

“I usually play around on a supercomputer making simulations of the experiments so we can essentially tell experimentalists what to look for, and we try to match their signal,” Hewitt said. “Currently there’s an experiment that will be looking for the particle that I simulated.” 

Hewitt is a native Utahn who spent his early childhood in Lehi and Draper before moving to Park City in ninth grade when his father, Paul, became Park City’s fire chief. 

“It was awesome,” Hewitt said of the relocation. “Honestly, I think that really changed my perspective. I was struggling with Crohn’s disease, arthritis and really bad anxiety at the time. I feel like the friend group that I hung out with taught me to not be so focused on technology and made me to really appreciate nature.”

Hewitt’s 3.3 high school GPA was less stellar than near-perfect grades he would attain in college. He credited Park City High School teachers Debra Alcox, Mary Purzycki and Gaylynn Mooney for fostering his interest in science and mathematics.

After high school, Hewitt attended the University of Utah, where he spent a year exploring options before physics captured his imagination with its dedication to rigor.

“I thought I would prefer philosophy, but I found philosophy a little bit hand-wavy,” Hewitt said. “I think particle physics is amazing because you can answer these philosophical questions with data.”

Hewitt graduated in 2020 with bachelor’s degree and a double major in physics and mathematics. When he asked a research colleague about the best place to conduct graduate studies in baryogenesis and sterile neutrinos, UC Irvine became his destination. Hewitt described the school as “a powerhouse for neutrinos.” Frederick Reines, the physicist who co-discovered neutrinos, was a founding dean.

Before embarking on his graduate studies, Hewitt experienced the death of his father after an off-road-vehicle accident while on a family vacation in 2021. Paul Hewitt was in his 10th year as Park City’s fire chief.

“It’s been extremely difficult, but it didn’t destroy me,” Hewitt said. “That was his dream job. He was extremely stoked to get that job, and he loved it, and I think he was a very good fire chief.”

Hewitt aimed to continue post-doctorate studies after UC Irvine but found the anti-academic agenda of the Trump administration created fewer opportunities for people like himself.

“Right now is a brutal time for physics. It’s getting basically gutted in America,” Hewitt said. “I applied to 90 places all over the world, but really the funding has been completely crippled by the current administration, so no one actually in my school got accepted to post-docs in my field of theoretical physics and particle theory.”

Friends and family draw Hewitt back to Utah a few times a year, but he sees his future in a financial center like New York City or San Francisco. He is currently teaching a basic physics class and is enrolled in a summer school course learning how to become a quantitative researcher for the stock market, which demands skills similar to a physicist’s.

“They both use mathematics, and they both rely on coding, simulations, data and statistics,” Hewitt said. “In particle physics, I’m basically looking at signals and simulated data, and in the stock market, you’re looking for signals to buy and sell. It’s going to take several months to feel like I’m sharp enough on the statistics and probability to land anything, but it’s a pretty natural path for physicists and one of the most common industry paths to go down.”

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Heads up! Area disc golfers are meeting to crown the bosses of tosses.

The sporting public is invited to participate in the fourth annual Wunderment disc golf tournament at the Wasatch Wunder course at Wasatch Mountain State Park in Midway at 9 a.m. this weekend.

Intermediate and advanced players will throw through 21 holes, with different courses on Saturday and Sunday, and cumulative weekend scoring. Beginners and age-protected competitors will play 18 daily holes. The tournament costs $65 to enter, and all participants receive commemorative competition discs along with trophies for placements.

The Professional Disc Golf Association is hosting this XC-tier event, which allows non-member play and guarantees that 25% of the purses benefits Elevate UT Disc Golf, the nonprofit dedicated to building municipal-quality facilities.

“The spring tournament is really special because we’ve got six holes that run along the creek that play dramatically differently when there’s water in there,” said Scott Belchak, who founded Elevate UT and designed the Wasatch Wunder in 2022. “Of course, you might lose your disc.” 

Ben Marolf owns Another Round Disc Golf in Murray and will be competing in the Wunderment’s Mixed Pro Open division.

“There’s a lot of very memorable holes up there because of the way the course was designed into the forest,” Marolf said. “It lends itself to some tricky, thin, really hard-to-hit gaps. It’s not the world’s longest course, but it’s a satisfying one to play well, and it’s beautiful. When I’m going to play up there, I don’t care a ton about how I place. The event is so fun. It’s just nice to be up there with a bunch of people tossing frisbees.”

The course takes 2.5 hours to complete, with concrete pads, beginner accommodations and shaded seating at each tee. Hole 1’s elevation is 6,000 feet, and the course ends at 5,400 feet.

“You go through several different biomes as you’re there, so it’s kind of a journey when you play,” Belchak said. “There’s hops growing down on hole 12. The view from hole 10 across all of Midway and the whole Heber Valley is just fantastic. There’s no place like it.”

A native Utahn, Belchak discovered disc golf while living in Minnesota and brought his passion back with him when he returned in 2020. He met an enthusiastic community of players whose homemade course plans had often succeeded past their carrying capacities and began advocating for professional constructions to last for generations.

“I built Elevate UT Disc Golf to help municipalities understand their lack of infrastructure surrounding these public spaces where there’s hundreds of thousands of hours poured in by the public by using them every year and millions of footsteps that happen on these grounds every year, and when millions of footsteps happen, they need to be prepared for that,” Belchak said. 

He pitched his course plan to Wasatch State Park manager Jonathan Hunt, who suggested the location around the campgrounds.

“I got to work designing nine holes and realized we’ve got enough space down here we could put 18 in, so Jonathan purchased nine more baskets, then we got started,” Belchak said. “That first couple years, we put about 2,000 volunteer hours into the course between 60 people. We built that thing with just blood, sweat, tears and basically no cash at all.”

Last year Elevate UT received $120,000 in a combination of grants from Wasatch County TAP and the Utah Office of Outdoor Recreation that funded course upgrades and standardization.

“This tournament is our celebration of completing the grant process and being fiscal stewards of county and state money,” Belchak said. “It’s built to instill a love of the game to people because, if you can capture the imagination of people with these public spaces, then they’re going to become stewards of the land, and it creates this recursive, repeating cycle of volunteerism and stewardship.”

As the state park ecosystem includes nearby campgrounds, a golf course and pioneer orchard, the disc golfers’ hard work proved immediately beneficial during the runoff after 2023’s record-breaking snowfall.

“We had to hike that creek before runoff started because there was so much detritus from years and years of that creek never being cleaned up,” Behchak said. “The creek area, from the holes we had built, was pretty much clear already because we had volunteers go in there and beautify and clear the creeks. I’m pretty sure that if the disc golf course wouldn’t have been installed, the creeks wouldn’t have been able to contain the water that was going to barrel down that mountain, so in the end, I think disc golf saved the park from that monumental year.”

Preregistration is available at online at discgolfscene.com.

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Like well-behaved bulls in a china shop, the grace and delicate touches of heavy-duty machinery operators will be tested at Southfield Park on Monday.

Heber City Public Works is hosting its fifth annual Backhoe Rodeo at the Wasatch County Events Complex Indoor Arena from 4-7 p.m. The event is free for spectators and will feature 80 competitors, including seven women, from local public works divisions competing in backhoe, trackhoe and side-load garbage truck challenges as the kickoff to American Public Works Association Week programming.

The concession stand will be open, plus attendees can play a plinko board and purchase raffle tickets for camping chairs, fishing poles and coolers, with proceeds benefitting Paws for Life and the Children’s Justice Center.

Backhoes denote wheeled machines with rear-situated excavating arms, while trackhoe is a colloquial term for a front-scooping crawling excavator.

Chris Pedersen is Heber City Public Works’ program compliance administrator and designated safety officer who has his trophy from a previous backhoe rodeo displayed on his work desk. He’s been with the department for 16 years and participated in backhoe rodeos in St. George and Layton early in his career, but knows of nowhere else that currently hosts such an event.

Pedersen is unable to participate in this year’s backhoe and trackhoe events, both because too many championships prompted his forced retirement from competition and he is recovering from a four-wheeler accident over the winter that broke his wrist in two spots and fractured eight vertebrae.

“It’s fun to participate in, but it’s just fun to come and watch and see the skill level that some people have,” Pederson said. “It’s kind of an art I guess you can say, running equipment. It takes a lot of time and practice.”

Jordanelle and Wasatch County Special Service Districts, Wasatch County Public Works, Midway Public Works, Heber Light and Power, and Heber City Public Works will all have representatives competing.

Kody Giles of Heber City Parks and Cemetery won the trackhoe and backhoe rodeo trophies in 2025 and will be returning to defend his titles. This year, backhoe and trackhoe champions will receive a gun along with their trophies.

The first hour showcases a set of backhoe precision challenges, and Pederson described the multifaceted nature of one test.

“You pick a basketball off a cone with a digging bucket, then you take it over into a trench box and there’s a garbage can in a trench box and you have to put the basketball into the garbage can,” Pederson said. “If you knock it over, if you miss the garbage can or drop the basketball you lose points, and there’s tennis balls that sit on the corners of the trench box and if you bump the trench box and knock tennis balls off you get deducted points.”

The trackhoe competition demands stacking tires with speed. Last year, Pederson couldn’t resist jumping out of retirement onto a trackhoe after the competition ended and stacking 16 tires in under three minutes to show that official champion Giles still has room for improvement.

This year’s event will last three hours rather than the two hours of previous years, thanks to the introduction of the garbage truck obstacle course competition, with vehicles provided by Wasatch County Special Services.

Pederson anticipated excitement with drivers taking the wheel of a new vehicle, himself included, in the discipline’s debut.

“I haven’t been in one,” Pederson said. “That’s what my brother does every day. I was teasing him the other day and said, ‘I’ve never even ran one and I’m going to whoop you.’”

Pederson cited benefits and the camaraderie that develops among workers as the reasons he chose this career in public works, and sees Wasatch County offering a model of worker appreciation that drew attention at a recent public works conference.

“We had a roundtable event and talked to a lot of people from around the state from different public works agencies, and everyone was pretty surprised we put on as big of events as we do,” Pederson said. “We had a lot of people say this year that they wanted to come from different places, public works directors and employees, just to come see what we do because they want to start doing the same thing.”

As further Public Works Week programming, the public is invited to attend a free dinner Party in the Park at Southfield Park on May 20 from 5-8:30 p.m., courtesy of the Public Works Department, The Hub and Mountainland Auto Sales. Last year’s picnic drew 2,000 people to the meal, bounce house, mechanical bull, face painting, balloon tying, lawn games and booths.

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Bring a handkerchief and an appetite. The Ideal Playhouse in Heber City is staging nine performances of “The Spitfire Grill” musical at 7 p.m. from April 24 to May 9.

Tickets for the two-hour, two-act show cost $22-32 and also entitle audiences to a 20% pre-show or next-day meal discount at production partner Chick’s Cafe down Main Street.

“The Spitfire Grill” began as a movie that won Sundance Film Festival’s Audience Award in 1996. James Valq and Fred Alley adapted the story into an off-Broadway musical in 2001 with a folk and country soundtrack. Karyn and Steve Anderson, the owners of the Ideal Playhouse, serve as the show’s co-directors. 

This is the sixth production the Andersons have directed since the Ideal’s 2024 opening, including “Big River” last fall. Steve heard players and critics recommending “The Spitfire Grill” as a natural pairing for the historic venue and saw their points when he read the script.

“It’s got some grit to it,” Anderson said. “There might be some teary moments. For me, it’s a story of love and forgiveness and moving on and enjoying the things you already have around you. From the ambience of the theater and the small-town kind of feel, it seems like a place that should do this story.”

Ashley Bates stars as Perchance “Percy” Talbot, a young woman free on parole who comes to fictional Gilead, Wisconsin, inspired by a photo she saw in a magazine. Sam Bennett plays sheriff Joe, who convinces Hannah, the Spitfire Grill’s widowed owner, played by Beth Knight, to offer Percy a job.

“I’m hoping that Heber will see this as a story they can relate to,” Anderson said. “I’ve had some family members go through similar experiences to characters in this story, so it’s kind of a personal journey for me as well. I wanted to see and feel what their experience was like restarting and moving to a small town to try to get away from all the distractions in the world.”

Yet small towns can have their own preoccupations. Percy’s presence causes a stir, and Effy, the busybody postmistress played by Robyn Laine, is a prime instigator. When Hannah falls and breaks a leg, she chooses inexperienced Percy to run the place over the protests of her nephew, Caleb, a laid-off quarry worker turned unsuccessful realtor played by Tyson Augustus. 

“A lot of people in this story are kind of downtrodden, looking for some hope, some rebirth if you will,” Anderson said. “The go-to would be, let’s put this in the spring because that’s when everything restarts.”

Thankfully, Caleb’s wife, Shelby, a capable cook played by Jessica Theriault, joins Percy behind the grill, where the two women develop a friendship and hatch a plan to help Hannah finally sell the restaurant. Meanwhile, they are trying to discern the identity of another mysterious visitor, played by Brian Bevacqua, whom they see taking the loaf of bread Hannah requests they leave on a stump each night.

The immersive theater experience provides practical and projectional stage settings that should help audiences feel like they’re watching the restaurant action from a nearby booth.

“You’re going to feel like you came inside Chick’s Cafe,” Anderson said. “The stage setting is the diner, the grill, then all around you is this wooded forest field. It’s enchanting but simple. We talked last night that we don’t know if we’re going to do an actual blackout ever because we just want the audience to stay engrossed in the experience. There are some really poignant effects that will move audiences later in the show.”

Early songs include “Coffee Cups and Gossip” and “Into the Frying Pan” then segue into more poignant numbers like “The Colors of Paradise” and “Forgotten Lullaby.”

“It’s so powerful to me when we can weave music in with an elongated story,” Anderson said. “One thing that I’ve noticed, the music seems a bit discombobulated during the first third of the show. As this Percy character gets the chance to win over the town and listen and give people some hope, I found the music score becomes more cohesive and melodic. I don’t think that was an accident. Once things get better, the song in your head gets a little clearer and the melody in your head isn’t so abstract.”

The discounted meal at Chick’s, where Anderson’s favorite order is bacon, eggs and hotcakes, brings the story full circle. 

“It will make it all four-dimensional for them, complete the experience,” Anderson said.

Tickets are available online at hebervalleyentertainment.com/events/spitfire-grill-24.

The post ‘The Spitfire Grill’ is natural pairing for historic Ideal Playhouse appeared first on Park Record.

Mountain Wine Storage’s suite houses tens of thousands of bottles in climate-controlled coolness on Airport Road in Heber City, and the new wine cellar David Spon created for the foyer space is impossible to miss upon entry.

Nineteen shelves of rift white oak cover a 10-foot wall facing the door and wrapping around the corner, storing and displaying horizontal bottles secured in beveled scoops with flush lighting strips underneath. On the right wall, double-deep racks fill the top half above rows of silent release drawers designed for maintaining bottles in their original wood casings. Beside the door, a single-deep section shows the breadth of storage styles.

Spon first visited Mountain Wine Storage soon after its 2024 opening on a personal consultation trip with co-owner, Rob Taylor, for whom he is creating a cellar at his Deer Valley home. Spon immediately saw potential in the entrance space. 

“I wanted to give Mountain Wine Storage a soul and set the tone for when people walk in,” Spon said. “It’s a very industrial, functional space.”

Taylor said it’s important to combine aesthetics with a utilitarian nature.

“A lot of the homes aren’t necessarily designed to have cellars, so when people come out here, they’re looking for storage facilities. We’re the first ones in Utah that have humidity and temperature controls in a lock-safe facility with generator backup, so we’ve seen tremendous growth of people coming in,” he said. “With wine lovers, they want to possibly build their own cellar.”

That’s where Spon enters the picture. He began his career in Washington, D.C., in 1989. Now, he finds himself with a design office in Water Mill, New York, three ferry rides away from his Connecticut cabinet shop. 

“When I start to work in one area, I start getting more work in that area,” Spon said. “I’m always thinking long-term.”

A seated section of Mountain Wine Storage has a display board featuring Spon’s blueprints, and magazines such as Architectural Digest and the Washingtonian that feature his work.

Homes from 5th Avenue to the Hamptons store collections in his creations, and Spon developed cellars for Charlie Trotter’s restaurants in Chicago, the city where his eventual connection to Utah began.

Taylor was living in Illinois in 2009 when he hired Spon to reimagine his home cellar. After Taylor relocated to Deer Valley in 2020, he enlisted Spon to create a cellar to house his 9,000-bottle collection currently at Mountain Wine Storage.

Spon drove out to Park City for his first visit with his two dogs, fell in love with Utah and met more clients in the area, returning for months at a time. He already purchased a ski pass for next winter and is preparing a cabinet to auction in the National Ability Center’s 2027 Red, White & Snow charity gala. 

Spon’s cellars range from the grandiose to the intimate, and projects of all scopes offer him a chance to create storage that accentuates a space. The horizontal scooped shelves are custom cut to hold 750 milliliter bottles up to double magnums. Spon uses maple ply backing on a foam fill, since surrounding bottles with heavy wood does not allow for optimal air-flow. His hand joinery is done in the mortise and tenon technique with Belgian finishes. He sourced the lunar sphere lighting fixture that shines above his Mountain Wine Storage cabinets from Wasatch Lighting in Park City.

“I’ve never done anything other than wine cellars,” Spon said. “I didn’t segue into this from the construction side. I came into it from the wine side and was self-taught on everything. I was not influenced by studying what other people did. It was more about what made sense, being a wine taster, drinker and partier, and then spending time to see how people use cellars.”

Spon is awaiting a delivery of stainless steel strakes for drawers before he makes his next visit out west this summer. Though not quite his new home, he wants to stay busy helping Utahns refine theirs.

“I really resonate with Deer Valley, Park City and the Rockies in general,” Spon said. “I love the Hamptons, too, but as much time as there are projects out there, I am going to be in the Rockies.”

The post David Spon brings his craft to Mountain Wine Storage’s new cellar appeared first on Park Record.

Forsooth, Wasatch Back thespians have an opportunity to brush up on the Bard with help from a seasoned player.

From April 16-18 at the Utah Valley University-Wasatch campus in Heber City, David Anthony Lewis will teach a four-session adult workshop on Shakespeare acting in conjunction with Heber’s Charitable Acts Theater. Cost is $100, and scholarships are available. Thursday and Friday classes meet from 5-8 p.m., and then Saturday brings a morning rehearsal before the afternoon’s performance showcase. 

Lewis is an Equity union actor affiliated with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival who has taught acting for the past quarter-century while appearing in productions of 26 of Shakespeare’s 36 plays. This will be his premiere presentation of a curriculum he has developed, and a childhood friendship is the reason he is bringing his method to the Heber Valley.

Lewis grew up in Twin Falls, Idaho, with Carrie Zabaldo, the director of Heber’s Charitable Acts Theater, who asked him to develop this programming for aspiring local actors.

With Shakespeare’s canon providing perennially popular production fodder, Lewis’ workshop aims to give actors guidance on how to make a successful transition from auditions to the stage. Participants are welcome to arrive with a particular part in mind, while Lewis is equally willing to help the undecided and curious sharpen their interest and delivery.

“The intent of the first day of this workshop is to assist the participants in selecting and feeling comfortable with a Shakespeare monologue that would be appropriate for them to use in an audition situation,” Lewis said. “Or, if the participants are not interested in being actors but they just want to impress their friends by firing off a prologue to ‘Henry V’ — ‘Oh, for a muse of fire’ — that’s terrific, too.”

Friday evening’s class will simulate an audition callback and focus on performing a short scene in the company of two or three other actors. 

“How can you very quickly read that scene, assess what you need to know and dive into acting it? My method is based off of Shakespeare’s monologue from ‘Hamlet,’” Lewis said. “It’s generally considered to be Shakespeare the playwright’s plea to the actor who is doing his stuff, ‘Please do it like this and please don’t do it like this,’ so I’m going to use Shakespeare’s own words to walk us through how he’d like us to behave with his writing,” Lewis said.

Saturday’s morning session will continue honing the group scene in preparation for the afternoon performance. 

“I don’t expect anyone to be fully memorized with their material, but if you want to stand up and read the monologue you’ve been looking at all weekend, or if three of you would like to get up and do that scene from ‘Othello,’ outstanding,” Lewis said. “Let’s do it and use the lunch break to run home and grab that cool headscarf you want to wear to signify you’re the queen. It will be a really low-key performance opportunity. You can train all day as an actor, but if you don’t actually perform, none of it means anything.”

Centuries removed from the source, Lewis noted that themes of love, hate, jealousy, greed and avarice are relevant contemporary concerns. A certain coarseness also abounds, and recognizing shades of sexual meaning allows for richer interpretations. 

“We’re not going to shy away from the dirty materials,” Lewis said. “Not that I intend to use filthy language, but I will definitely highlight when Shakespeare is being dirty. A double entendre is sometimes even a triple entendre.”

Participants are encouraged to bring along any copies of Shakespeare, which will give them a leg up on actors of Shakespeare’s time, when high printing costs meant that not all actors had written texts to assist their memorizations. Lewis likened iambic pentameter to the “ba-bum” of a heartbeat providing a relatable lifeline in the process.

“The key to memorization is doing it over and over and over again,” Lewis said. “Shakespeare uses that very human natural rhythm, and little tricks in the poetry like a rhyme scheme, or all the words begin with the same letter, or the repetition of certain phrases, ‘to be or not to be.’ All those things serve to make that text sit inside your brain.”

Lewis noted that recording himself reading a monologue and listening to his own voice on playback is another helpful auditory memory technique. Audition monologues are typically one minute long, and maximizing the effect of a short presentation is the best way to open doors for new opportunities.

“Certainly if you are an actor or think you maybe want to audition for a Shakespeare play, this workshop is going to help you have a monologue in your pocket that you’ll be able to do at auditions,” Lewis said.

Registration information is available at HeberCAT.org/events/shakespeare-workshop.

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