A cannabis shop, motel and McDonald’s in a row on Heber City Main Street. Cows grazing in the North Fields. Mount Timpanogos obscured by the wildfire-induced haze and ash that swept through the Wasatch Back last Friday. 

These are but a few of the paintings that can be found in Midway Town Hall during the Midway Art Association’s 19th annual Plein Air Paradise festival, which continues through Saturday.

Plein air is a French art form that involves painting outdoors. 

The Midway Art Association’s festival included four plein air events over the past two weeks: the main competition, in which artists must paint Wasatch and Summit counties, competitions restricted to Heber City and Midway, and a nocturne or sunrise painting competition.

The festival also has several auctions, including an auction of work artists will paint around Midway’s town square on Saturday morning.

Plein air artists combine the skill sets of visionary Vincent van Gogh and survivalist Bear Grylls. There’s a lot of preparation involved, according to Midway Art Association copresident Marge Bowen.

“A lot of artists will have wagons, but then you have to be able to roll it to where you’re going. There are easels that you can use as backpacks, so some artists are pretty compact,” she said. “Plein air artists have to be prepped to be outside in anything.”

Still, excursions sometimes turn into disasters.

“Bugs can fly into the wet paint. … If the wind kicks up, I’m telling you, a whole easel can go down. … When you’re standing outside in the North Fields, you’ll have trucks go by, and there’s a lot of dust, so you’ve got to be ready for that,” she said. “There’s lots of fun things that can go on out there.”

The festival has attracted 135 brave artists to the Wasatch Back this year. They hope to earn awards as large as $2,200 and sell their artwork along the way. They hail from nine states, some coming from as far as Florida and Hawaii. 

But many of these artists are locals, such as Heber City resident M. Scott Woodruff, who has participated in the competition for about four years. 

Woodruff has been obsessed with art ever since he was a kid.

“Sitting on my dad’s lap at church, he would draw on the back of the sacrament program to keep me quiet, because I had a lot of energy. He was a graphics designer, so art was his natural language. I became transfixed on that,” he said.

When it came time to pick a career, Woodruff wanted to become an artist.

“My dad’s like, ‘I’ll break your fingers if you become an artist,’” he said. “I didn’t know that’s an in-joke among artists. I took it seriously.”

So he pursued architecture instead, which gave him opportunities to sketch buildings for clients.

Woodruff retired three years ago and discovered plein air painting at a competition in Ogden. He thought of himself as an amateur, but his painting of the Hill Aerospace Museum placed second in the professional category. He’s been hooked ever since.

He typically begins with a pencil sketch before outlining it with a fine tip pen and painting it with watercolors. 

In a competition full of paintings of natural landscapes and wildlife, Woodruff’s depictions of buildings around Heber City stand out. Every brick and wooden slat is intricately detailed, and the buildings have a sense of texture viewers can almost touch.

Woodruff is drawn to painting buildings related to the Heber Valley Railroad in no small part because he worked there as a conductor about two decades ago. His grandfather was also a conductor on the tourist railroad. 

Woodruff completed his nocturne painting, the train station under the light of the full moon, on Tuesday evening. Another of his plein air works, which he painted during last year’s competition, depicts the Heber Valley Railroad’s original depot, broken windows and all.

“It’s just sad watching it decay. But it gets a lot of interesting texture and detail, and there’s history here,” Woodruff said. 

The artist’s passion for historic buildings is evident from his attention to detail and relentless enthusiasm.

“This is the real heart and soul of the community, because you go south of the city park, and it could be Main Street, Anywhere U.S.A., because you’ve got all your chain stores,” he said. “But then, north of that, up to the city building, which was the old Wasatch Stake Tabernacle, that’s the real texture, that’s the real nature of Heber.”

For two of Woodruff’s plein air pieces this year, he scouted out historic homes and painted them from the comfort of his camping chair. He ended up talking to the owners of one of the homes, who happened to be in their yard when he was setting up.

“They’d been in the house for 20 years. They love it,” he said. “It’s got an original sandstone foundation. It’s this typical 1890s, 1900s form on it, especially with all the beautiful woodwork.”

Painting in public often leads to conversations and compliments, which Woodruff joked give him hope for the human race in a time that often feels chaotic and negative.

Plein air painting is an excellent way to gain a greater appreciation for one’s surroundings, he said.

“You can live in an area and not really see it until you have to slow down and paint it,” he said. “You can snap a pic … and it’s one of the hundreds or thousands of pictures on your phone that (makes you think), ‘Why did I take that pic?’ But when you sit down and do a painting, it’s an investment.”

Artwork from the Midway Art Association’s Plein Air Paradise festival will be available to browse and purchase at Midway Town Hall until 6 p.m. on Friday and from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday.

The quick draw will also take place Saturday morning for those interested in watching artists paint around Midway’s town square. At 11 a.m., that work will be auctioned off. Learn more at midwayartassociation.com.

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On the horizon, a small silhouette flew across the backdrop of the Wasatch Mountains. Without even pulling out his binoculars, birder Dan Roberts identified it as a red-tailed hawk. As he walked along a southern stretch of the Provo River, he explained that he could identify the bird by its markings.

“I can also tell by the way he’s flapping his dad gum wings,” Roberts added. “If you have a dog, your dog moves in a certain way. If you saw him 1,000 yards away (you’d say) ‘That’s my dog,’ because of the way he’s moving. … You can see certain things that your nervous system and your brain has tuned into.”

Roberts’ nervous system and brain are certainly tuned into the avian world.

As a wildlife biologist for the state of Utah between 1997 and 2012, Roberts monitored non-game birds. Now, he spends his retirement birding for pleasure. He was one of about 25 who participated in the Audubon Christmas Bird Count at Wasatch Mountain State Park on Saturday. 

The Christmas Bird Count occurs annually from Dec. 14 to Monday across the western hemisphere. The citizen science project started by ornithologist Frank M. Chapman has been running since 1900. 

Each count takes place in a defined circle 15 miles in diameter. Last year’s bird counts garnered over 83,000 participants around the globe.

The Heber Valley bird count was one of more than 25 held in Utah this year, taking place everywhere from Antelope Island to Park City. Wasatch Mountain State Park has been participating in the bird count since about 2000.

The goal of the census is to provide long-term data for conservationists. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency used data from the Christmas Bird Count in its 2012 report on climate change indicators in the United States.

The comprehensiveness of the bird counts doesn’t quite compare to the studies Roberts performed in his career. He and his co-workers would walk exactly on defined lines using GPS. And each participant was tested rigorously to recognize bird songs before being allowed to count birds.

While the birders who participate in the Christmas Bird Count are generally on the more experienced side, there’s no barrier to entry.

Roberts said the data for the Christmas Bird Count is far less precise but still valuable. 

“If laws need to be enacted, what’s going to make that happen? You have to have data,” Roberts said. “We could find all kinds of faults with the data, but if you have lots of data, even if it’s not the best-quality data, it still has a lot of power in it over a long period of time. And not just a long period of time, but a lot of places.”

The bird count data also includes factors like hours counting, distance covered and weather and water variables, such as cloud cover and snow depth. 

In the case someone sees a bird atypical for the area and time of year, the birder is expected to take a photo and fill out a rare bird form. 

For example, Roberts could have sworn he’d heard the twittering of a sage thrasher, though the bird should be in Mexico at this time of year. But because he couldn’t get a visual on the bird, he couldn’t verify it. 

“It’s better to omit the truth than to make up a lie,” Roberts said.

There was, however, a group that identified a long-tailed duck with its signature cowlick on its tail feathers. Just what the arctic bird was doing in Utah could have come down to any number of factors.

“The bird can’t tell you why,” Roberts said. “He’s got a different gene. A photon hit his brain at the wrong way. You know, with quantum mechanics, all this stuff, who knows? In fact, we can’t even prove we have free will.”

As Roberts continued talking about predetermination, Cary Hobbs chuckled at his friend’s lecture. He’d followed Roberts down the Provo River, dutifully penciling down data as the pair identified migrating flocks of Canada geese, round chickadees singing their “chicka-dee-dee-dee,” and a bald eagle sitting on a telephone pole.

The Watson to Roberts’ Holmes, Hobbs provided levity to the experience, pointing out a couple of ravens dancing in the sky on a “date” and asking, “What do you think that one is?” as a helicopter passed by.

Hobbs’ birding claim to fame was identifying a great gray owl in 2017. It was the first the state had seen since 1989. 

“I put a picture of him on Facebook. This was on a Sunday afternoon, and on Monday morning … the place was full of cars out there, people that had taken off work to go find and see a great gray owl,” he recalled.

The Midway resident has been participating in the Wasatch Mountain State Park bird count for 20 years. He said this was his first year participating that he’d seen green grass and not a flake of snow on the ground. That led to a lot of other firsts: only two flocks of geese, zero ducks and not a single robin.

“Normally, I’d come up with maybe 300, 450 birds. Today was 162,” he said. “Normally this time of year, it’s cold. For example, the eagles don’t really come down until it gets really cold enough to drive them down. Usually, I have a lot more eagles than we saw today.”

Roberts said the lack of birds has been something he’s observed this winter, too.

“Everybody says, ‘I haven’t been seeing the juncos around my house,’” he said. “The snow brings all the juncos to around your bushes and around your house. … They can still eat all these wild seeds. And when it gets covered up with snow, they come to your bird feeder.”

Kathy Donnell, a park ranger who has run the bird count since 2012, confirmed that the bird count was low across the groups that spread out over Wasatch Mountain State Park’s 23,000 acres. Last year’s bird count at Wasatch Mountain State Park counted 54 species and 4,416 birds. This year’s numbers will be finalized and sent to Audubon and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology by the end of February.

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The Swaner Preserve & EcoCenter hosted a Wetland Pond Walk Thursday evening, August 17, 2017. Attendees of the event learned about the importance of wetland ecosystems as native wildlife habitat, as well as the Columbia Spotted Frog (which is a Utah-listed Sensitive Species). (Tanzi Propst/Park Record)

Link to full gallery here: https://parkrecordphoto.smugmug.com/PHOTOS-Wetland-Pond-Walk/https://parkrecordphoto.smugmug.com/PHOTOS-Wetland-Pond-Walk/

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The Swaner Preserve and EcoCenter opened up their nature walks for the summer Saturday morning, April 15, 2017. The walks are weekly on Saturday mornings beginning at 8:30 a.m. (Tanzi Propst/Park Record)

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Local artist Bridgette Meinhold uses black house paint to create a mural of snow-covered evergreens on the wall at Riverhorse on Main early this week. The piece is Meinhold’s first mural and is completely her own — from sketch to masterpiece. (Tanzi PropstPark Record)

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Toddlers gathered at the Swaner EcoCenter with their parents and/or guardians to take part in the Little Naturalist Story Time Monday morning, Oct. 10, 2016. A story was read to the kids before they began a craft and nature walk. (Tanzi Propst/Park Record)

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