If you looked up Chris Peterson online, you might not expect him to be painting a wall next to Heber City’s bustling Main Street.
With one master’s degree in public administration and another in environmental humanities, his website explains his career has taken him from rural development humanitarian work to Colorado River restoration efforts to charter school co-founding.
But he also holds a bachelor’s degree in painting, and he fell in love with art in high school. In 2017, after working for various organizations for 15 years, he missed the creative discipline. So he decided to make a change.
“I realized that I was not making enough money for the personal sacrifice that was happening. … I was burned out on working in organizations, and I had chronic headaches,” he remembered. “I had some mural gigs fall in my lap as one organization ended, and it made sense at that time for my own mental health to focus on making art.”
Over the past few weeks, that focus brought him to the north exterior wall of Mountainview Laundromat in Heber City, where he turned the bland surface into a couple of mature brown trout that look like they’re about to leave the building and flounder into Main Street’s traffic.
Peterson said the mural is part of his latest project, Utah Wildlife Walls. He was contacted by Heber City officials after hosting the Celebrate Utah Wildlife contest earlier in the year.
“Its mission is to install at least one wildlife mural in each of Utah’s 29 counties,” he said. “It’s based on this idea that wildlife are an integral part of our culture and our community, and nowhere is that more true than in rural Utah.”
He partnered with the Utah Wildlife Federation and has since painted the recently-completed mural in Heber City, a 120-foot Bonneville cutthroat trout in Salt Lake City’s Sugar House neighborhood, a golden eagle and rattlesnake in Midvale, and a Colorado River cutthroat trout in Vernal.
That’s four murals but only in three counties, he said. That leaves plenty still to do.
“We’re looking at doing a razorback sucker in Moab in the spring, and looking at trying to get on Antelope Island,” he said. “This was a project not born with a budget. It was an idea with a big vision.”
He said that in urban suburban landscapes where murals have become increasingly popular, it’s not hard to sell wildlife-loving folks on murals of animals.
“It costs basically the same as a stucco job, but it can have measurable impacts on real estate value and on visitation to local businesses,” he said. “It’s a proven tool to create places to get rid of blight and to beautify little corners of towns which needed a little love, and this is one of those corners.”
Heber City residents have already shown appreciation for that bit of love his work gives to the community.
“Have you seen the amazing new mural at MountainView dry cleaners?” Aaron Cheatwood asked Nov. 14 on a popular community social media page. “Awesome!”
“Such a wonderful addition to the area,” Sandi Brower said.
Multiple people agreed, including Pru Klein.
“Quite an improvement!” he commented.
Adam Heiden said the work “seems a little fishy,” and Bradley Rounds said he’d noticed people with fly rods getting uncomfortably close to the painting, but no one on the often-critical page had a negative thing to say.
A lifelong resident of Utah, Peterson said he recognized the importance of the state’s relationship with wildlife through the lens of his own.
After high school, he became a river guide on the Provo River. In his 20s, he explored the wild landscapes of the state while traveling in his truck, always hungry for what canyons or peaks awaited him around the bend. During grad school, he worked as a fly-fishing guide and came to find the experience thrilling and contagious. He has hunted elk with bow and arrow in northern Wasatch, been charged by a bear in Jones Hole, and encountered cougars.
He knows what it’s like to become prey, and he considers those memories almost healing. Almost.
“There’s something very soothing, like some ancient connection that we have to these other creatures,” he said. “Those experiences where you are not in your thinking brain, you’re in your body and your instincts are in full effect — that is a therapeutic way of being.”