The new traffic light on S.R. 248 went live this week. It’s at the intersection where Browns Canyon joins 248. For some reason, that junction has never had a proper name like other major intersections around here. We have Kimball, Silver Creek, Park and Quinn’s Junctions. That has always been “where you turn to go to Peoa.” When I was very young, the remains of the Union Pacific stockyard were there. That’s where local ranchers shipped their beef, lamb and mountains of wool to market. Later, there was a mineral processing and railroad siding there called Phoston, and the steep hill on what was then U.S. 40 (pre-Jordanelle when the road was at the bottom of the lake) was known as Phoston Hill. So maybe it’s Phoston Junction? When everybody is stuck trying to get up the hill in the snow when the light changes, it will need a name. The stop light is necessary. There is suddenly a lot of cross traffic there, and it will only get more dangerous.
The whole area is under construction. We’ve been carpet bombed with orange barrels. Starting at my driveway, where a couple of barrels have marked a damaged guardrail since March, all the way to Park City, there isn’t a spot on the road out of sight of orange barrels. There’s a place where Highway 35 was slipping into the wetland. So UDOT is digging out a layer of muck and rebuilding the road on new, imported dirt that will compact and support the weight of the semis that now come over Wolf Creek Pass to avoid being weighed on U.S. 40.
Next up is the Woodland water line reconstruction that has a couple of miles torn up, though mostly in the shoulder. Days pass without anybody working on that, though the road is suitably blocked for safety. And from Kamas to Park Junction (Park Avenue and Kearns Boulevard) it’s one construction site next to another. They appear to be installing orange barrels around new utility lines next to the utility lines they started installing a year ago. Nothing ever seems to get finished.
The fascinating thing is that there doesn’t appear to be much actual work happening. Nobody shows up. The only visible action is that somebody comes in at night to move the barrels around. They won’t stay in the same place. Somehow, they wander, and it takes a crew of barrel wranglers with a pack of border collies to round them up and herd the barrels into new locations.
Aside from relocating barrels, it doesn’t look like there is any actual work getting done. Apparently the excavators and dump truck drivers are all working from home these days, and phoning it in. Millions of dollars of machinery sits idle for weeks at a time. At this rate, none of us will live long enough to see measurable progress, let alone completion.
But they rearrange those barrels every night, just the same.
The growth around the Jordanelle is happening on a scale I find hard to grasp even as I see it happen. One day I counted 25 trackhoes, and that’s just the ones I could see while driving. There were probably that many more that I couldn’t see without running off the road. Nothing is being built on the existing grade. Somebody found a great plan for condos to be built on flat ground, and decided they would scrape the mountains away to make flat benches to pile condos on. It looks like the Kennecott mine. A project will come to a pause, and I think maybe it’s complete, and then the next week, another hillside has vanished to make way for Phase 23.
No matter how you feel about the Hideout annexation fracas, there are a ton of housing units there with not so much as a 7-Eleven within a 20-minute drive. The hotel project that has been under construction since the Bush administration is possibly nearing completion. They’re advertising that their bar and restaurant are open. With the new traffic light, area residents can actually get there. But if you are experiencing a chocolate chip cookie emergency and need a couple of eggs to complete the recipe, you are driving to Kamas or fighting your way into Park City on S.R. 248 (which, despite the current “improvements” still won’t carry the load). There’s nothing closer in a neighborhood of a thousand people or more.
The zoning was literally written by the major developer. It’s very odd that there isn’t any commercial space. A grocery store in the thick of all that, at the unnamed junction with the new light, would be a gold mine. But no, instead we have a lumber yard and a bunch of storage sheds, including some that have apartments in them so you can sleep with your Ferrari. I’m told they sell for close to a million dollars, but the covenants won’t let you put a convenience store in there.
They say half of any project is showing up. It’s really not enough to move the barrels around.
Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.