Over the decades I’ve lived in my house, I’ve driven literally hundreds of thousands of miles going back and forth between home and Park City. Live, drive, work, drive, play, and drive. It’s just how rural life works. 

In all of that mileage over all of those years, I had never hit a deer until last week. And boy howdy, did I hit it. 

I know the typical crossing spots. After a while you get to know the deer by name. Yes, they all look alike, but they are different, too. But they are sort of predictable, crossing at a little swale coming off the farm to the river to drink on a fairly regular schedule. 

There have been some close calls, but no contact. The same with the elk herd that is getting displaced by subdivisions in Francis. There have been some slam-on-the-brakes moments there, but avoidable. Paying attention is key.

But it’s all kind of a lottery no matter how careful you are. Apparently every 750,000 miles or so, your number is up. I was on S.R. 248 climbing the hill toward Kamas. There was a big vehicle in the left lane, so I couldn’t see anything to the side except the slab of SUV next to me. 

The deer decided to run across the highway at about noon. It somehow cleared the westbound lane. The SUV next to me braked just enough to notice, but not enough to give me a clear view. The SUV missed it and the deer stepped right in front of me, and that was that.

I wasn’t hurt, and no other vehicles were involved. It could have been worse. A kind woman in a car behind me stopped to make sure I was OK as I sat on the shoulder, also trying to make sure I was OK. 

I called dispatch, who said they don’t deal with deer unless there is something really messing with traffic. The deer died, which is way better than being critically injured, but alive on the shoulder of the busy road. 

The car was a mess, steam blasting out of the radiator, crumbs scattering about. The car is mostly made of Tupperware as best I can tell. All that plastic crumple zone stuff in fact safely crumpled, and while I was fine, the eviscerated Subaru was worse off than the deer. I drove it home, but it was done. 

The insurance company sent out a tow truck, and a local body shop came up with an estimate. When the running total broke $10,000, they quit working on it. Nobody bothered to pry the hood open to see how bad it was inside. It didn’t matter. It was DOA.

What followed was sort of amazing. The accident was at noon on a Thursday. I called my insurance agent mid-afternoon. The claims process came at me like a firehose, largely AI powered but a few helpful humans in there, too. 

All of three business days later, I had the cash in my account. They made an offer so generous on a 10-year-old car with a lot of miles and duct-taped interior that there was no back and forth. They waived the deductible because I had been a loyal customer for so long. Not at all what I was expecting.

While I’m on the hunt for a new car, I’m driving the farm truck. It’s a 20-year old pickup that cost me $135 to fill up on Monday. And again on Thursday. I don’t understand why anybody will drive one of those as their daily ride. Needless to say, I’m staying close to home for the most part. 

For its day, the truck was pretty tricked out. But it doesn’t Bluetooth to anything, the backup camera is a postage stamp, and the transmission is a relic compared to modern trucks. And did I mention 14 mpg? It feels pretty primitive, but it’s getting me where I need to go for now.

Deer collisions are a big deal. Insurance estimates runs up to about $10 billion in vehicle damage and medical costs each year from wildlife collisions. The average deer claim is north of $5,000. 

A Pew Charitable Trust study puts the combined “societal and repair cost” of a typical deer collision at $20,000, and up to $110,000 for a moose collision (which almost always involves medical costs). 

I don’t know how they are estimating the “societal cost.” It obviously is more than the cost of paying the guy with the worst job in the world to drive around a clean up the carcasses. 

There is the aesthetic loss of seeing the moose happy and healthy in the wild, but since we haven’t figured out how to monetize scenic beauty directly, I don’t know what that value is. 

Societal costs would also include things like the extensive fencing going in along local highways to try to reduce wildlife collisions, and even very expensive solutions like the overpass at Parleys Summit. But while I’m skeptical of the larger and more esoteric cost estimates, the actual cost of demolishing a perfectly functional car are very real and very measurable.

Anyway, take it easy out there.  

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.

The post More Dogs on Main: Not the lottery I wanted to win appeared first on Park Record.

The leaves are beginning to turn, and it’s cold enough at night that the windows aren’t wide open any more. Thoughts turn to winter and skiing. 

We are facing a Super El Nino winter of unprecedented strength. The weather professionals are all foaming at the mouth. It means that surely, somebody, somewhere, will experience something. 

That’s about as specific as it gets. Not exactly the kind of thing you run out and buy new snow tires over if there is any tread left on the ones you wore out on bare pavement all winter last year. But it’s coming and it will be, yeah, El Whatever.

With the coming of winter, businesses are beginning to ramp up recruitment and hiring. You don’t run major ski areas or hotels without a whole lot of people. Some of them will be repeaters. 

Deer Valley seems to hang on to employees year after year, suggesting that it is a pretty good place to work. Finding all those people isn’t easy. There isn’t housing for them. The commutes have become longer and less enjoyable as gas prices rise and traffic jams build. 

The new stop light on S.R. 248 at the Maverick store went live this week. Chaos was the call of the day as people came around the curve from Kamas to find traffic at a dead stop sooner than usual. A few collision repair shops are conveniently located nearby.

The employee issue came to mind this week when an official from MIDA was addressing Wasatch County. He pointed out that the East Village development will require 6,000 employees to operate when completed. 

I’m assuming that’s the hotels, retail, independent food and beverage operations, and probably the additional employees Deer Valley needs to run the lifts and day lodges.  And snowmaking, which we learned last winter will be critical to keeping that area alive.  Six-thousand people. The guy pointed out, just for reference, that when the Mayflower project, as it used to be known, was first approved in the early 1980s (yes, 45 years ago), the entire population of Wasatch County was around 8,500 people.

So where will these 6,000 people come from? The unemployment rate along the Wasatch Back is already very low, and pretty much any business you go in is looking for help. 

So they aren’t coming from Heber, Midway or even Kamas Valley. They just aren’t there. Adding an hour to the commute, we could access the 1,800 or so people in Duchesne — probably half of them children and retired folks, and the rest already employed. 

I’m not sure the transition from oil rig worker to masseuse in a snooty hotel spa is an easy one. 

Roosevelt is another hour away, making a two-hour commute. Not going to happen.  UDOT’s going to need a bigger bypass around Heber’s downtown, and it isn’t even designed yet.  

Provo is a reasonable shot from East Village, a little over an hour. That might be tolerable. They might be able to tap into student labor from the universities there. But it’s still an area with a booming economy and low unemployment. 

I’m not sure people will be looking to bite off a challenging commute for sort of OK wages when there are jobs available closer. The old formula of working for a ski pass died with the cheap multi-resort pass. They might have to run buses.

I have a hunch that a lot of those 6,000 employees are already here, working in Park City. If you could cut your commute in half, and never have to drive on S.R. 248 again, and have the same job you have now in a new hotel/restaurant/shop with a potential for career advancement, why wouldn’t you jump on that? 

So businesses in Park City, with its parking and traffic problems, may find their employees defecting to East Village. They are building 600 units of workforce housing there. Live, work, play. And the other 5,400 commute.

If the employees are moving on, what about the customers? Locals know there is something special about Main Street. If you’re in Toledo, booking rooms online, you might see it differently. 

Here’s a choice of a 40-year old property that’s a two-transfer bus ride from anything, and over there is a brand new hotel on the slopes. It might be more expensive, but eliminates the need for a rental car, and comes larded up with amenities that nobody ever thought of back in the 1980s when so much of the in-town bed base was built. 

Whether it’s East Village or Canyons Village, that would seem to be where the action is to the fresh observer. 

Obviously it’s not there yet with East Village, where most of the hotels are still see-through construction sites.  But as they get completed, there will be a big effort to keep the guests and their wallets there, if not eating in the hotels, then in the commercial spaces around the plaza area. 

Will it be as cool as Main Street? No, but you can walk there from your hotel without dealing with shuttles and schedules. Or drive to Heber/Midway  for an authentic small town experience with some good restaurants. That might be cool enough.

A gondola from Snow Park’s parking lot to China Bridge isn’t going to fix this.

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.

The post More Dogs on Main: Help wanted, times 6,000 appeared first on Park Record.

Gov. Spencer Cox, whose 15 minutes of fame came when he promoted the idea that we need to “disagree better” in solving political differences, has now fully flipped to the dark side. 

Recently, Cox demanded that Summit and Wasatch counties get on board with the state’s unlimited growth policies and issued thuggish threats to back it up. He sent a guy named Steve Waldrip to a Heber City Council meeting to break some windows. 

“My message back from our good governor, who cares deeply about these issues is:  Your funding as a county is now at risk, meaning none. Anything in my power I will stop. … Any other funding to counties who openly declare war on the state over these growth issues without being thoughtful, without having discussions, and with just saying, ‘We couldn’t care less’ — that funding is now suspended.” 

The only thing missing was, “Thank you for your attention to the matter.”

Well, when you put it that way, bring it on. (As an aside, his beef is with the counties, not Heber City, so he was in the wrong meeting, but whatever.)

At the root of this Mafia-sounding threat is the Utah Preliminary Municipalities Act.  This bad policy gem enacted by the 2024 Legislature allows a real estate developer to write his own zoning. 

The owner (or up to three owners) of “undeveloped” land a quarter mile or more from an existing municipality can petition the lieutenant governor to form a “preliminary municipality.” They have to do a feasibility study that shows that the proposed new town will achieve a population of 100 people and generate sufficient tax revenue to fund the operation of the municipality within five years. If all the streets are privately owned and the costs pawned off to the homeowners association, the bar for feasibility is pretty low. 

If certified as feasible, the developer then has all the powers of a town without any of that election fuss. He gets to write his own zoning laws and approve subdivision plats that lock in the proposed density. 

While aimed at residential growth, it could be used for data centers, nuclear reactors, ski resorts, really anything the developer wants to write into his own zoning. The only powers the pretend municipality lacks are taxation and condemnation. Not even the state Legislature was comfortable handing developers the power of condemn their neighbors’ property. They have to designate 10% of the housing as “affordable.”

In the meantime, they rely on the county for services, and the county is responsible for road maintenance as long as the roads are built to county standards. 

The long and short of it is the developer simply carves out a patch of ground where he gets to write his own zoning, build stuff that the county wouldn’t approve, and at the end of five years, either convert to an actual town or dump the project off entirely on the county that thought it was unworkable and wouldn’t approve it in the first place. 

It sounds crazy because it is. The statute limits this to two applications a year across the state, suggesting that even the Legislature had its doubts. 

Trying to find out how many of these are active and where they are located isn’t easy.  There is one near Moab, downstream on the river along Kane Creek Road. Grand County denied that application because the proposed town is in the floodplain of the Colorado River. That one is in litigation contesting the constitutionality of the whole program. 

There is another up on the Jordanelle Ridge in Wasatch County called Wasatch Highlands. 

The West Hills incorporation proposal west of Kamas is under a former version of this act and will go to a vote in November. 

The Dakota-Pacific/Six Ridge project at Kimball Junction is somewhere in the mix, and so is the Lost Creek plan in Browns Canyon. The listing at the Lieutenant Governor’s Office seems deliberately opaque.

Wasatch and Summit counties have objected to the Preliminary Municipality Act because it eliminates local planning. 

Anybody driving around Jordanelle Reservoir and U.S. 40 into Heber would come to the conclusion that Wasatch County is the most pro-growth jurisdiction in the country.  No mountain is too steep to hack a road on, no terrain too hilly to be flattened for national home building chains to extrude identical townhomes by the hundreds.  Yet the governor doesn’t seem to think that is enough. Pave the last inch.

The pretend town plan is designed to result in stupid planning. Ivory Homes wants to stick 600 houses in Browns Canyon. Given the cost of developing all of the infrastructure from scratch, those will not be cheap houses. They can’t be in a price range that addresses the local job market.   

So who will live there? People commuting to Salt Lake? The home buyers won’t be moving there because of the robust Peoa job market. 

That doesn’t solve anybody’s housing problems, and worsens traffic and air quality issues. They probably end up as sort of third-tier vacation homes, which is exactly what we don’t need.

Utah housing is very expensive. There is an imbalance between the growing population and the available housing. Whether it is a housing shortage or a people surplus is open to interpretation. But shouldn’t we be building housing close to the jobs?

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.

The post More Dogs on Main: Pretend towns and real threats appeared first on Park Record.

I recently came across an interesting article by David Schultz in the Daily Yonder. For those unfamiliar with the Daily Yonder, which I’m assuming is more or less all of you, it’s a website with news and issues affecting rural areas.

Not just farm commodity prices, in fact they don’t cover that in detail, but things like healthcare delivery in sparsely populated areas, who will produce our food when the average farmer is about 60 now, education, and so on. 

They are pretty big on data centers. And rural culture. It’s a little different take on the world from, say, The New York Times. 

Anyway, this article was about the rural-urban divide — the big differences between rural and urban America. We obviously see it at the ballot box nationally and also right here in Summit County where the voting patterns on the east and west sides of the county are almost mirror images. 

Schultz used internet search data for a number of consumer products like food and clothing to see how just how different rural and urban areas really are. He compares the differences in consumer preferences to voting patterns and concludes that election results can be predicted from the grocery store. 

His results come up with two very different worlds. 

He said that differences in food preferences, as indicated by on line searches, were the most striking. The divide was greatest when comparing searches for pork rinds to searches for tofu. 

There was a huge difference in the relative number of searches for gravy and pesto as well. And Velveeta and brie.  

There’s nothing in that list that will ever make it on my grocery list. I don’t eat either pork rinds or tofu, Velveeta or brie, though I can imagine eating pork rinds with Velveeta more easily than eating tofu with gravy. 

I’m not sure why anybody is searching Google for the nearest pork rinds or tofu. In Birkenstock country, every market will carry tofu. And in the cowboy boot world, pork rinds are everywhere. So there may be a quirk in his methodology, though I think the result is accurate.

Other aspects of life split almost as cleanly. NASCAR fans were decidedly rural and NPR listeners on the urban side. That might partly be a reflection of where typically weak public radio signals can penetrate, KPCW excepted. Again, I’m not a big fan of either. 

NASCAR seems like watching traffic, and I get enough of the real thing on S.R. 248 without buying a ticket to the track. And there’s a whole lot of NPR coverage that sends me reaching for the button to switch over to music on my phone. “Splendid Table” is a great bit of self-parody, and would never considered serving suggestions for pork rinds, Spam or any recipe involving Velveeta.

Counties with a Whole Foods store overwhelmingly vote Democrat, and Shultz reported that only 2% of counties that voted for Trump had a Whole Foods in them at all. And we don’t even need to discuss voting patterns in counties with a Waffle House in them. 

Huge national retailers spend millions of dollars studying where to build and how their product line matches up with the community. They are investing a ton of money based on their demographic analysis and proprietary formulas. They don’t drive consumer choices, but try to locate in communities that likely align with their products. 

There are few ski shops on South Padre Island, or surf shops in Omaha. I don’t think we will be seeing a Cracker Barrel opening on Main Street any time soon. I am puzzled that the Culvers restaurant in Heber didn’t make it. That seemed like a pretty good fit. 

I’m eagerly waiting to see what the retail tenants in the new Ritz Francis hotel turn out to be. Francis, like much of the east side of Summit County, is growing explosively, and is on the front line of our local rural-urban divide, ground zero in the gentrification splatter zone. 

In a town that has struggled to support even a convenience store for years, the new hotel project includes a whole lot of nice-looking retail space. They will need a restaurant to serve hotel guests (Waffle House or Ruth’s Chris?), but what of the other spaces? 

Will they be selling center pivot irrigation system parts and horse liniment? Probably not. With the big money flooding into places like Victory Ranch and Tuhay, maybe they will be rented to New York style delis and Breitling watch stores. High-end fly fishing gear? I hope we don’t get a Starbucks. 

Where the tenant mix tilts on that pork rind-tofu balance, and how successful the stores are will be a real indication of the cultural shift happening. Would a shop there stock Wranglers or Levis? Ariat seems to be the current brand trend on the rodeo circuit. 

Is Kamas Valley ready for a Lulu Lemon store? Or a place to buy your $3,000 cowboy hat? We already have a sizeable culture of influencer types milking their cows in white Ralph Lauren dresses. 

Is it time to pack up and move to Tabiona? There’s no tofu there.

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.

The post More Dogs on Main: The pork rind-tofu scale appeared first on Park Record.

My heart goes out to the people in Henefer and other areas affected by the Rocky Canyon fire. 

A little over two years ago, the Yellow Lake fire was threatening my neighborhood, before the wind shifted and pushed the danger across the pass to Hanna. The anxiety level of being ready to evacuate, or for Henefer, actually out of your home, is hard to describe until you’ve felt the ashes falling on your porch. You are completely powerless. 

I remember being awake night after night trying to engineer a string of lawn sprinklers that might, maybe, protect some of the buildings even with our lame water pressure. 

Once it’s burning, all you can do is watch, worry and appreciate the courage of the firefighters who are doing all they can. Stay safe, everybody.

In what seems like a classic failure of process, UDOT has once again delayed the decision on the route of the Heber bypass road until the spring of 2027 (want to bet?).  The road has been in the planning stages since Noah got off the ark. 

They scrapped the prior design because they had been dithering so long that the traffic increases had made it obsolete years before the first shovel of dirt was moved. 

There were local concerns about the most recent design and so it’s back for revisions and the decision — not the construction — had been pushed off again. 

Meanwhile traffic gets heavier by the day. It’s a difficult problem. The traffic on Heber’s Main Street is both terribly congested and unpleasantly noisy. What used to be a really charming downtown is now a noisy, smelly, hostile snarl of traffic. But the alternative is a desecration of the North Fields, the green expanse that has more or less defined Heber forever. No good answer, just the least worst solution. 

At the intersection of River Road and U.S. 40, there is what appears to be a strip mine operation. It’s actually a luxury hotel and spa development called The Slope that will be operated as an Andaz Hotel, part of the Hyatt family that is apparently so far beyond my price range that I’ve never heard of it. 

It will join a long list of high-end hotel/spas attending to the important exfoliation needs of the ultra-wealthy. Maybe not the most socially necessary land use, but it’s close to the airport. 

The Eastern Summit County Planning Commission sent a unanimous negative recommendation on the Lost Creek Village re-zone request. That would have built a town of 3,000 units — about 10,000 people — in Browns Canyon. 

It now goes to the Summit County Council for their consideration. Given the infrastructure costs for a development of that size — there are no existing water or sewer systems to expand on, schools or fire stations — there is no way that a home there will be within the price range of the people working at the exfoliation hotels, fire departments, schools or the Gucci store in Francis. 

What’s the point if a development doesn’t solve the imbalance between the exfoliators and the exfoliated, and instead brings in more of the people who need assistance exfoliating? We just keep building the wrong stuff around here.

The County Council will be looking at it and considering both their own pipe dream of building 1,500 affordable housing units and the realities of what a new population center bigger than Kamas, Francis and Oakley combined has on existing services. 

Of course, lurking in the background is the constant threat that the thuggish state Legislature will approve something worse over local objections. I suppose to be polite, they have to hold a hearing before saying “no” to the proposal, but that’s the only answer to it. 

The County Council is looking at streamlining their zone change process. It takes years now. It begins with the zone change proposal, then an amendment of the general plan, then under the current process, a development agreement that ties the zone change to a specific site plan and project design. 

So something isn’t just re-zoned to be “commercial.” It gets rezoned to be an exact pre-approved project. That loads enormous cost on the applicant without knowing what the outcome of the process is, and if the applicant is successful, it also makes future modifications more difficult, like the factory outlet mall changes. 

It’s a broken process. It needs to be streamlined so we can say “no” a lot more quickly than that. Given the tsunami of already approved development hitting us from all sides, the most junior planner covering the front counter ought to be able to say “no” and adjourn for lunch. Maybe when everything already approved is built, if there’s anything left, we could look at what happens next. We surely don’t need more.

Park City’s 5-acre parcel on Bonanza Drive continues to grind through the process.  After decades of planning, that seems farther from a community consensus than it was several years ago. At this point, why don’t we put a nice bronze plaque on one of the concrete ruins of the former businesses, and declare it a “landmark historic industrial brownfield” preserved for posterity. 

Meanwhile, the school district is wrapping up construction on the baseball facility. It should be done in time to host the World Series, and appears up to the task. 

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.

The post More Dogs on Main: The exfoliation balance appeared first on Park Record.

The potguts have hibernated at my house. While that’s probably not the most important news of the week, it somehow seems significant. 

They normally are around until mid-August. In fact Aug. 15 is so predictable that you could safely bet on that year after year. 

This year they vanished on Aug. 1. They have been off schedule all year, coming out of hibernation on March 20 — and why not, since winter was over long before then? But that was nearly a month early. 

The hibernation doesn’t seem gradual. It’s like they had some kind of potgut convention where they took a vote and decided that Saturday was it.

f their typical cycle is to be out and about gorging themselves for about 120 days, I guess this year they hit the mark in late July. It seems right on plan, to the dismay of some hungry coyotes. Once they get fat enough to high center, there’s nothing left to do but sleep it off.

I have no idea what the typical range of a potgut is. I suspect they don’t travel far, and that each group of potguts is seriously inbred, with a schedule distinct within each colony. 

Friends in Silver Creek, another potgut stronghold, said theirs also hibernated on about the same schedule. I have not heard a report from the Tiger Woods golf course, which is a potgut paradise. 

The marmots, technically the yellow-bellied marmots, have their own schedule. It’s similar to the potguts, but they are still around, packing on the pounds. 

The deer have set up camp in the back yard. That usually happens in mid-September when the food and water run out up higher. I guess it’s pretty slim pickings on the upper ranges already.

It’s probably the drought, but the aspen leaves around my place have dried out and become sort of crunchy even if they are still green. There’s no getting around it, though, the season is turning. 

I don’t know if an early potgut hibernation portends a strong winter. I hope it does.  The scientists who make up the weather forecasts are all foaming at the mouth because we have a “super El Nino” condition in the Pacific Ocean. When pressed for what that means for the winter locally, as in whether skiing will be better than last season (a low bar), the answer is always a definitive shrug. Charts and graphs and a century of data, and the best they can come up with is “we don’t know.” For this they are paid significant money. 

You want to know what the weather will be like in the next week? Call somebody in Reno and ask them to look out the window. If you want to know what the weather will look like in January, consult a Ouija board.

I still believe in the hornet nest theory, but it’s too early for the hornets to be building their big nests yet. So for now, all we have to go on is an early potgut hibernation and scientific shrugs.

The drought drags on despite Park City having the wettest July on record. The storms were very localized. Park City got poured on, but 15 miles away it was blue sky. Some days Francis had water running down the streets and Kamas was dry. 

Mostly my place was just dry. Oklahoma in the 1930s dry. The flow in the Provo River, according to a gauge just down the road from my house, is about 44 cubic feet per second. The 60-year median is about 100 cubic feet. That’s bad enough, but of that 44 cfs, about half of it is releases from the Uinta lakes. Without those small reservoirs, the flow would be measurable in a shot glass. 

Maybe we will rescue the Great Salt Lake next year, but it’s not happening now. The golf courses are still emerald green, and the only thing slowing the construction of new homes is mortgage rates. Three thousand houses in Browns Canyon? No problem. I’ve never been good at math, but something seems wrong with this formula.

A big winter would do a lot of good, and a series of big winters, even “normal” winters, might put things a little closer to getting back on track. The drought cycle is about 20 years old now, and it will take more than a couple of good years to reverse it, with no guarantees that it won’t continue for another 20 years. 

Another winter like last will cause some lasting damage environmentally and economically. But there’s nothing we can do about it but try to adapt.

All those private bowling alleys in the catacombs of the mansions suddenly don’t look so ridiculous if there’s no snow to ski on. They won’t support the local economy. We might have to rely on pickleball for that.   

The intrepid leadership at Vail Resorts isn’t taking this laying down. They have just named Bill Hornbuckle to their board of directors. He’s been the CEO of the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, and also the T-Mobile stadium.  hat seems like a perfect solution to improving the disappointing on-mountain experience. 

Making ski resorts more like Las Vegas should fix it. Maybe we can get Wayne Newton to entertain at the Red Pine Lodge.

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.

The post More Dogs on Main: The potguts have hibernated appeared first on Park Record.

It’s summer and there isn’t a whole lot of news happening. Small things tend to pop to the top when the rest of the news is basically reruns of the same stories that seem to go on forever without resolution. The 5-acre parcel, toxic mine waste, disagreements on how to manage Summit County’s 910 Ranch conservation area, weirdness in Hideout, and on and on. 

And then a real gem floats to the surface. 

According to Townlift, on Monday evening the Sheriff’s Office got lots of calls about somebody racing through the Trailside neighborhood, speeding up and down residential streets. It sounds like the car was fairly distinct, though the Sheriff’s Office was unable to locate it. They posted pictures residents took of the offending vehicle online, asking for help identifying the driver. 

By Tuesday, the offending driver realized he was more or less busted by the internet, and contacted the Sheriff’s Office. The situation was resolved with a stern talking to, but no citation. The statement from the Sheriff’s Office said that the speeds were higher than they should have been, but not something that warranted “heavy-handed enforcement.” 

So it all worked out in a kind of “Andy of Mayberry” way, and apparently all is right with the world. 

Except …

I hate to go all “you kids get off my lawn” on this one, but apparently part of getting off with a wag of the uniformed finger instead of talking to a judge was that the driver said he was “the CEO of a company using the vehicle to film content for social media.” 

That’s from Townlift. I guess that’s the new way to talk yourself out of a ticket.  “Officer, it’s OK for me to irresponsibly race through neighborhood streets filled with kids and dogs at twilight because I’m an important social media influencer.” There you go. Social media influencer immunity. It’s a well-known legal defense. 

You see it all the time. It’s OK to climb over the railings at the Grand Canyon viewpoints, endangering yourself and potentially people who have to rescue your stupid influential butt, if you are a social media influencer. 

Harass the wildlife at Yellowstone? No problem if it’s for your TikTok stream. And now street racing through neighborhoods. And since he was the CEO of the (one person?) company, well, OK.

Sorry, but I think filming anything for social media content is an aggravating circumstance, like using a gun or threatening somebody while holding a head of iceberg lettuce.  If the penalty for speeding is a $150 ticket, speeding to make social media content ought to double that, not explain the offense away.

I don’t know the particulars of the case, the speeds involved, or how serious a risk it posed to the neighborhood. Fortunately nobody got run over, no parked vehicles damaged, and it’s entirely possible that categorizing it as just stupid jerk behavior and letting it go with the finger wag is appropriate. The driver turning himself in shows a glimmer of responsibility that mitigates it somewhat. 

But I still think being a social media influencer is all by itself pretty close to a hanging offense. How many data centers do we need to preserve that critically important video of street racing through Trailside in perpetuity? How much global warming will be caused by maintaining the electronic file of the photos of all the salads photographed for social media posts? 

Anyway, it was wonderful to finally get some rain. It wasn’t enough to save a hay crop, but it has to lower the fire danger. If nothing else, it washed the dust off everything, and dropped the temperatures into a tolerable range.  The next couple of weeks are typically the hottest of the summer, so breaking the heat wave for even a few days is a nice change.

Drought makes bad news coverage. Fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods produce dramatic pictures that capture the cataclysm. Drought isn’t instant. It just kind of grinds. Depleted reservoirs, withered leaves on trees, dead aspen groves, crops that are stunted or didn’t get planted at all — it’s just not well suited to our typical news coverage, and certainly makes crappy social media posts.  “Now here’s 30 seconds of looking at the Palmer Drought Severity Index.”

But it matters. Whole civilizations in the West packed up and left because of droughts.  Wildlife behaves differently. I normally get deer in my yard in mid-September. There is enough food and water up higher that they steer clear of houses until then. Not this year. The normal ranges are bone dry, and they are in the front yard looking for food and water.

The variety of birds I’ve seen lately is unusual. I’m not a birder, but even the most casual observer would notice the difference this year. I guess the food that’s usually available in a broader area isn’t there, and they are pulled into the river bottom, too. 

The other morning I was out checking on the farm and counted about a dozen different birds in a mile-long drive on the ATV.  Sandhill cranes, a few varieties of hawks, crows, redwing blackbirds and a lot I don’t know the names of. Western tanagers, colorful as parrots, have become almost thick in the yard. 

It’s interesting to see them, but I hope that the weather pattern reverts to whatever normal looks like soon.

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. 

The post More Dogs on Main: Influencer privilege appeared first on Park Record.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner. If you picked “less than a week” in the pool for when the new traffic island on 248 would claim its first victim, you won. UDOT just finished installing, or reinstalling, a random traffic island in the middle of S.R. 248 a week or so ago. 

It’s a nicely done chunk of concrete in the middle of the road that must serve some purpose but it’s not clear what. On either end of the concrete obstacle, they put up a warning sign. The signs are the bumblebee striped rectangles, mounted at a height that is only visible if you are driving a cement truck. If you are in anything that sits closer to the ground, the sign is way above the roof of your car. When you are close enough to see it, the sign is only visible through the sun roof.

Anyway, in less than a week, somebody smacked into it. From the looks of it, they hit it pretty hard. The sign on the westbound lane is broken off, and there are shards of somebody’s grill, bumper and lights scattered all about. 

I hope nobody got hurt, as it was obviously a solid impact to break off the signpost and smash up the car. On the other hand, there aren’t many times of day when traffic is moving fast enough on 248 to do major damage. So let’s hope all is well, other than dealing with the insurance company. A little bump can do several thousand dollars damage to a car. 

The warning sign has been down for a couple of days, leaving the concrete curb in the middle of the road unmarked. Safety first, eventually. So there may be more victims to come. It’s not in the traffic lane, and drivers paying attention ought to be able to avoid it. But nobody really expects to find a concrete curb dropped in the middle of the road for no apparent reason, and swerving to miss a deer or an over-width excavator on the road puts it right in play. Who said commuting is boring?

Driving around here is becoming quite a challenge. The other day it occurred to me that we are marking construction zones all wrong. The default position really should be that the road is torn up and unpredictable, with open trenches and utility stuff sticking up on the shoulder. The abnormal condition that we should be warned about is those rare spots where the highway is unmolested and the normal traffic lanes are open and functional (with conflicting lane marking stripes going off in all directions).  Maybe we could save a lot of money on orange barrels if we marked the places that aren’t under construction instead. 

In the rest of Utah, this is the big “Days of ’47” celebration. Donald Trump, the 47^th president, probably thinks it must be about him. It’s not. It marks the anniversary of Brigham Young’s arrival in the Salt Lake Valley, which was part of Mexico at the time.  “Bienvenido a nuestra casa, senior Brigham.” 

In the 179 years since those first pioneers arrived, there have been a lot of changes.  They learned how to build cities in the desert, make it complicated to buy a drink, blocked all the roads with endless construction, all to lay the groundwork to make a $32 million condo at the Four Seasons possible. 

The event is largely ignored in Park City. Kamas puts on a very nice celebration, a week-long affair on a fun, small-town scale. There’s a car show, parade, rodeos, the famous demolition derby, and best of all, lawn mower racing. 

Of all the options Park City has considered for the 5-acre Bonanza Drive property, over more than a decade, I don’t think they have given lawn mower racing proper consideration. There is plenty of room for an interesting track (and plenty of orange cones to mark it with). With the loss of Sundance, the city needs another event. 

But while Park City dithers, Kamas will emerge as the lawn mower racing capital of the Wasatch Back. Snooze you lose. 

Aside for being a good excuse for a barbecue, Pioneer Day is important. It’s really good to spend a little time reflecting on what went before us. Somebody cut a road down Parley’s Canyon with an ax and shovel long before there was a freeway to facilitate our commuter society. 

Everything has something that went before it, and something before that. Utah has a uniquely weird history, with the pioneers arriving here because they were invited to leave the United States at gunpoint. They came here, fled to here, seeking separation and isolation. They built towns all over in the most unlikely places, and for a generation, ran their own show.

The United States took the West from Mexico by force, and the pioneers found themselves back in the U.S. whether they wanted to be or not. Then came the railroad and mining, and finally, after 50 years, statehood. 

The state was built by immigration. My little town of  Woodland was amazingly cosmopolitan. There were literally families from pole to pole, with South Africans and Norwegians living next door, and a chowder of different languages.

Pioneer Day is deserving of celebration.

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.

The post More Dogs on Main: Demolition derby, UDOT style appeared first on Park Record.

It’s back. The random traffic island in S.R. 248 between the lights at Round Valley and Richardson Flat Road has reemerged. The thing is like a mushroom. You think it’s gone, and then it erupts again. 

As best I remember, this is the fourth iteration of this traffic island since the 1990s when S.R. 248 and U.S. 40 were reconfigured to go around Jordanelle Reservoir. 

The function appears to be preventing people from making left turns from 248 into the Film Studio property, or from the Film Studio on to 248. The weird thing is that the road where this island it blocking turns hasn’t actually been there for a very long time.  People were not making life-threatening left turns at an intersection that didn’t exist.

But that didn’t stop UDOT from installing the blockade, then removing it, then redesigning it, reconstructing it, removing it again and so on. 

Somewhere deep in the vast cubicle farm at UDOT headquarters, some engineer must have made this traffic island his life’s work, with new design features and flourishes with each version.  

My guess is it gets installed, and then a snowplow driver smacks into it at 40 mph when it is buried in snow. That’s hard on the snowplow, and really hard on the driver who slams his teeth into the steering wheel. So it gets taken out. Then the engineer discovers that the maintenance department had removed this critical safety feature, and it goes back in. 

This time around, though, it looks like there is actually going to be a real intersection there as a back entrance to the Studio Crossing development. So maybe now it will be a permanent impediment to people who want to turn left, forcing them down to the light. Actually, they can’t turn left because the traffic is backed up at a dead stop for miles in both directions. Sooner or later, the island will be replaced with a traffic light.

There is a traffic light being installed at the new Maverick station, making three lights to get through when driving through Quinn’s Junction, really four if you count the nearby light at Round Valley. So that will keep things moving smoothly. 

An additional light is under construction at the entrance to Tuhaye, with more planned through Hideout. Thank goodness we have carefully managed and controlled growth around here. Otherwise, we could have a sprawling mess with snarled traffic everywhere from Summit Park to Daniel. But nothing a traffic island can’t fix.

There is exciting ski industry news. Deer Valley is opening the new Hail Peak lift next winter, with a summit elevation at a lung-burning 7,400 feet, or about 200 feet higher than the Snow Park ticket office. So there’s that to look forward to. 

A penthouse condo at the Four Seasons at East Village has been listed for slightly over $5,000 per square foot, or around $32 million. That’s just jaw dropping expensive and it doesn’t even have a private bowling alley.

For comparison purposes, you can buy the just-listed Cherry Peak ski resort, lock, stock, and barrel, for $22.5 million. I’m not sure which is the better deal, a penthouse at East Village or a whole ski resort near Logan that is about a thousand feet too low to hold snow. Cherry Peak would leave you with $10 million left over to spend on something else, like a bowling alley. Decisions, decisions.

Vail Resorts has announced a new initiative they are calling Epic Experience. The press release said it will be defined “by delivering the best and most differentiated guest experience in skiing and riding.”  

They will focus on gear rentals, lessons, food, the My Epic App, and staff interactions.  Well, that should solve it. Oddly missing from the list is anything about actual skiing.

I learned to ski at Park City Mountain the year it opened. I had a pass of some kind there for better than 50 years. My frustrations with the place reached the breaking point, and I haven’t skied there in several years now. 

It had nothing to do with the My Epic app. I’ve never used the app, and don’t want it.  There is no part of skiing that should require an app at all. Getting outside and away from electronic crap is part of the reason to go. 

If Vail really wants to improve the guest experience, how about predictably opening Jupiter Bowl? Consistent grooming? Addressing the overcrowding on the mountain?

Between paid parking and the morning goat rodeo at the base, the guest experience is pretty well soured before you are on the snow. An app won’t fix that. 

The plan to upgrade the Eagle chair, and the new gondola at the Canyons side should help, though the real issue is just too many people on the mountain at busy times. 

Gourmet chicken fingers with elevated presentation of mac-and-cheese might be nice. Curing the sewer gas stink at the Summit House might be a more important element of the guest experience to start with. 

But even then, no matter how seamless the My Epic App becomes, it’s really about the snow — the lifts, the skier density on the runs, the condition of the snow. 

If Vail Resorts really wants to elevate the guest experience, start with the mountain. Great skiing will trump bad chili every time.

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.

The post More Dogs on Main: S.R. 248’s mystery island appeared first on Park Record.

When I built my house, now 42 years ago, I bought a beater pickup truck with a snow plow on it to keep the road open. Both were well-used if not abused, but fully functional. 

A few days after getting it home, I bumped into a neighbor who complimented my “fancy new outfit.” I was confused. My outfit has been a T-shirt and jeans for my whole life. I couldn’t figure out what she was talking about. Her husband somehow clarified the situation by making it clear she was talking about the plow truck. That was the “outfit.”

The truck by itself, despite its age, was somewhat tricked out with extra lights for plowing and cartoonishly oversized tires installed by the prior owner. That was enough to elevate it from a truck to a “rig.” When the snowplow was attached, with yet more extra lights, the combination promoted it into an “outfit.” 

I’ve sort of studied that distinction ever since. The line between a rig and an outfit is not easily defined, but you know it when you see it.  Forty years ago, trucks were basic and utilitarian, built for work. Now they are so larded up with luxury fittings and shrinking cargo capacity as to be useless for work. 

The demarcation separating the rigs and the outfits had also moved upscale. And, of course, an antique pickup that wasn’t even a rig when new can achieve outfit status through patina alone. 

Only trucks and ATVs fit on this scale. Your Porsche is not an outfit no matter how much you spent.

Anyway, over the holiday weekend, the traffic past my place was constant. I watched it for a bit, and there were lots of fancy outfits rolling by. Half-million-dollar motor homes towing a hundred thousand in ATVs, half-million-dollar sports cars, followed up by hundred-thousand-dollar pickups laden with a ton of chrome and all manner of additional toys. 

There was a wide variety of vehicles and accessories, but I would guess the average price was about $150,000 each. That’s allowing for some old Toyota Tacomas with Walmart kayaks tied in the bed. 

So 10 of them would be $1.5 million. A hundred vehicles strung out, making the left turn out of my lane impossible, would ring up $15 million. Over the course of the day, there were probably 500 high-end outfits rolling by, or maybe $75 million in toys. Every day, for three days. And that doesn’t attempt to put a price tag on the horses in the deluxe horse trailers in the mix. There is really no upper limit on the price of a horse.

All of that gets stored someplace when not in use, which explains the proliferation of storage places around the county. Those can run from covered parking to $2 million condo garages with a living room and kitchen so you can watch football with your motor home or Ferrari, with a studio apartment upstairs for the mechanic or mistress to live in. 

The amount of cash splashing around is stunning. Condos that are only conceptual cubes of air high above the ground are selling “reservations” pending the actual construction. There is apparently a brisk resale market on this real estate that is, at least for now, not real. 

So much for generational holdings. They are in it for the flip — $1,800 a square foot with a freeway view is advertised as a screaming hot deal. There must be a limit to the number of people who can shell out millions for a vacation home they use twice a year. We haven’t found the end yet, though I suspect one day we will with unpleasant results for some.

I always look through the real estate porn magazine that comes with the paper once a month. It’s interesting to see what the upper end of the market looks like, knowing that the advertisement is as close as I’ll ever get to these places, not that I would want any of them. 

Something strange has happened. For months, if not years, every listing described the property as being in a “coveted” neighborhood, and sometimes in a “highly coveted enclave,” which I suppose is even better. It didn’t much matter where it was.  Everything was coveted, from the top of the Colony or lots next to the sewer plant. 

In the most recent edition of the real estate ads, I couldn’t find anything in a coveted neighborhood. Lots of exclusive neighborhoods, and the ridiculous situation of a gated community within another gated community is still a draw among the wealthier students of the French Revolution. 

The neighborhoods are exactly the same as three months ago, yet no longer coveted.   There may have been an uptick in Bible study among realtors, discovering that the 10th Commandment is pretty clear: “Thou shalt not covet they neighbor’s house.”  I always thought this development binge was sinful. 

Does that mean the bloom is off the rose, and what used to be coveted is now so over-developed with cookie-cutter mansions that look like Audi dealerships that they are no longer coveted? It’s like admitting your “outfit” has depreciated to mere “rig” status.  How embarrassing.

It’s probably optimistic to believe that the market fever is breaking, but life around here is lot more pleasant during the downturns. 

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.

The post More Dogs on Main: Coveting thy neighbor’s rig appeared first on Park Record.