Hundreds of people crowded along Heber City’s Main Street for a rally against the Trump administration on Saturday morning, one of 17 “No Kings” demonstrations in Utah and thousands held nationwide.

They held signs reading witticisms like “IKEA makes better cabinets” and chanted, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Donald Trump has got to go” as supportive honks from passing trucks nearly drowned out their voices.

A ski patrolman could be spotted in the crowd, despite it being a hot morning without a snowflake in sight. He stood near another protester who was wearing a ski jacket and helmet and holding a sign reading, “Skiers against ICE.” The ski patrolman hoisted a single ski pole in the air. Suspended from it like a flag was the Red Cross-emblazoned jacket of the Park City Professional Ski Patrol Association.

Protester and Midway resident Lauri Sibulkin has been a ski patrolman for the association for 25 years. 

“My nature is to help people. It’s not to go stomping around in big boots,” he said. “I want the world to know the people that serve, whether they’re in the military or in emergency services, or our brothers in (police) uniform … we give a damn. We pay attention. We know right from wrong.”

He said the Trump administration has “utterly lost touch” with the notion that those in positions to enact harm must do everything in their power to avoid doing so. 

He expressed frustration that the U.S. and Israel launched surprise airstrikes on Iran in late February in the middle of the U.S. and Iran’s nuclear negotiations, thereby beginning the 2026 Iran war. He added that it was Trump who first withdrew from the United States’ previous nuclear agreement with Iran in 2018.

“Now, I’ve never managed to read The Bible because it’s terribly written. But that doesn’t make me an unbeliever,” he said. “But I’m told, in it, somewhere, it says, ‘Turn the other cheek.’ That doesn’t mean, ‘Be a coward.’ That means if somebody flicks your shoulder, you don’t punch them in the mouth. You find out why they did that, and if there’s a way to meet in the middle, do so.”

Fellow Midway resident Ron Lee also attended the protest to speak out about the Iran war, particularly the fact that it was started without congressional approval.

Lee called Trump an “immoral” and “corrupt” person who has displayed a level of “criminality” unlike any other president. 

President Trump was found guilty of 34 felonies related to falsifying business records in 2024. 

Lee also referenced Trump’s longstanding relationship with child sex offender and trafficker Jeffrey Epstein while holding a sign that read, “GOP: Guardians of Pedophiles.”

The protester added that he considered the Watergate scandal President Richard Nixon was involved in to be “minor stuff compared to what’s going on today.”

“The Republicans in Congress today do nothing to curtail what Trump is doing,” Lee said. “He’s not following the Constitution. He swore to the Constitution, and all he does is lie every day.”

Lee, 83, was involved in his local Republican party when he previously lived in Illinois. He became a Democrat when he moved to Utah 26 years ago because he saw that Democrats were being “overrun by the Republicans” in Congress, which he didn’t consider representative of all constituents in the state. 

“It’s just a smaller microcosm of what’s going on nationally today,” he said, referring to the Republican party’s current control of the state’s Senate and House of Representatives.

Park City resident Kim Hennemen attended the Heber City protest to show support in a majority-red county. 

She wore a sky blue unicorn costume that made her look as if she was riding the animal. She held a sign with red balls taped to it reading, “Balls for congressional members who’ve lost theirs.”

Standing next to Hennemen was her close friend, Ellen Guthrie, who is also from Park City. Guthrie wore a frog costume and a crown, which she had also worn at the previous “No Kings” rally in Heber City in October. Her sign read “No kings, only frog queens.” She was inspired by protesters who had worn frog costumes at anti-ICE protests in Portland last year. 

The pair have been attending protests together since George W. Bush’s administration.

“Right now, I’d vote for Bush,” joked Guthrie, who is a Democrat.

Hennemen and Guthrie weren’t the only longtime protesters at the demonstration. 

Kate Harrod, 71, is the former Government Affairs Committee chair for the American College of Nurse Midwives. She’s done plenty of lobbying in D.C. During Saturday’s protest, she wore a sparkly hat with an American flag pattern on it, one of several in her wardrobe.

She also owns a red-white-and-blue cheesehead hat, which she would have worn in her hometown of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where she had planned on attending a “No Kings” protest — that plan changed when she and her other daughter, Mikaela, decided to make a trip to Heber City to visit her daughter, Megan. 

“You notice how many grandparents are out here. I was the generation that came after the protesters because I was too young in the ’60s,” Kate said. “But we learned from them, and a lot of those people are out here because the grandparents have to protect the young.”

Her daughter Mikaela lives in Minneapolis. She shared some of her firsthand experiences during U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Operation Metro Surge, which occurred December through February and garnered nationwide attention for ICE agents’ shootings of civilian protesters Renée Good and Alex Pretti.

Mikaela called it a “nightmare” and “like living in a civil war.”

“The craziest thing were the cars that were just abandoned on the road everywhere because they would just rip people out of their cars, and they would be left there,” she said. “One of the cars had a baby in the back that they discovered later.”

Mikaela is a postpartum doula and works with a client whose husband was arrested by ICE at a hospital during a prenatal appointment. He was later deported to Ecuador. 

“She had to deliver all by herself. She doesn’t have anyone else in the country, so I’ve been helping her a bit, just to be able to afford groceries and do her laundry,” Mikaela said. “The baby is a month and two weeks (old) now and still hasn’t met his dad.”

Mikaela said that is just one example of the lasting effects of the operation even after the February withdrawal of most of the ICE agents who had been deployed to Minnesota.

“People are scared to leave their houses and everything, still,” she said.

The biggest thing that stuck out to Mikaela as she participated in protests and barricades during the operation was the sense of community solidarity. 

Giving that community solidarity to Wasatch County residents was the reason why Interlaken resident Terri Goodall organized the protest. It’s the sixth protest she’s organized in Utah since April.

“I still believe in hope. I think we can change things,” she said.

Her husband, Bill, is more pessimistic on that front. He held a sign that said, “Not usually a protester, but geez.”

“How do you enact change when your country is being overtaken by mobilization of armed forces with masks?” he said, referring to ICE agents. “I honestly believe that it’s too late, that Trump has already taken things so far that we may never have another election in the United States.”

He pointed to the recent deployment of ICE agents in airports amid an ongoing government shutdown and the federal agency’s purchasing of a warehouse in Salt Lake City to develop into a detention center as examples of recent news items that have enhanced that feeling of doom and gloom.

Despite his pessimism, Bill could see the positive effect the demonstration his wife had organized had on the protesters.

“Most of the people that are here, you see, they’re pretty peaceful, but they’re also smiling,” he said. “This is a way to relieve some pressure and some tension and to feel good about being around other people that share your sense of the situation. … By organizing something like this, you provide people an outlet.”

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The March for Science is planned on April 22. City Hall in a recent report previewing the special-events calendar for Park City included an entry showing the March for Science. The recent report said attendance could run from between 500 and 9,000 people.

The high-end number of 9,000 would put the March for Science in the range of the Women’s March on Main during the Sundance Film Festival in January. The January event, which involved a march on Main Street and a rally in the flagpole parking lot on lower Swede Alley, was, by a wide margin, the largest demonstration in Park City’s modern era.

The March for Science is planned as a “celebration of passion for science and a call to support and safeguard the scientific community,” the recent City Hall report says.

One of the figures involved in the March for Science organizing said details are still under consideration. Daniel Syroid, who lives in the Snyderville Basin neighborhood of Timberline and is a retired electrical engineer, said organizers plan to submit a revised application for the March for Science this week. The lead organizer, Josh Hobson, said the route is designed to start at the Brew Pub lot toward the southern end of Main Street, follow Main Street north to Heber Avenue, turn east on Heber Avenue to the flagpole lot on lower Swede Alley. It would be the same route as the Women’s March on Main.

“We need to respect science to direct our public policy,” Syroid said, noting issues like coral dying as a result of increased acid levels in the oceans as well as the melting of glaciers.

He said Scott Pruitt, the EPA administrator, and other Trump appointees are worrisome to the scientific community. Pruitt is “basically a climate denier,” Syroid said.

He also mentioned concern about global temperatures increasing and sea levels rising, two related issued that are rallying cries of the environmental movement. He said there is a danger there will be large numbers of refugees as the climate changes.

“Our world is going to be much less habitable for humanity,” Syroid said.

He said, though, the event is not planned as a protest and it is designed to be nonpartisan. Syroid said the marchers will support the idea that science should be the “basis of public policy.”

The City Hall report says the March for Science will require approval by the Park City Council. It also says it will be a challenge for staffers to craft plans to lessen the impact of the March for Science in the little more than a month before the event is scheduled.

The March for Science would follow three months after the Women’s March on Main and, although not designed to be partisan, it could continue the local resistance to the Trump administration. The Women’s March on Main was also not planned as a partisan demonstration, but the crowd was heavily weighted toward Trump critics as many at the event mocked the Republican president-elect on the day before he took the oath of office.

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In this week’s collection of portraits from For The Record, we asked people at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church how they think the community should respond to the Trump administration’s immigration policies. (Tanzi Propst/Park Record)

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The uncertainty surrounding the national and global economy after the presidential election is concerning, and roadblocks may lie ahead, but for now Park City is chugging along as smoothly as ever.

That was the crux of the message Park City Chamber/Bureau officials delivered Wednesday at the organization’s annual Economic Forecast Luncheon, held at the Park City Marriott. Chris Eggleton, chairman of the Chamber/Bureau’s board of directors, and president and CEO Bill Malone took to the stage and lauded the business community for helping make it another successful ski season.

In an interview with The Park Record following the luncheon, Malone expounded on that message, saying visitation has been up over last year for much of the ski season so far. And the number of reservations on the books through mid-March — the farthest statistical outlook available to the Chamber/Bureau — indicates things are unlikely to slow down over the next month and a half.

“From our point now through mid-March, we’re golden,” he said. “We’re in great shape.”

The early signs are also pointing to a strong summer, Malone said. The Chamber/Bureau has generated “a ton” of leads for business convention travel — the primary demographic of summer visitors — for this year, as well as the summers of 2018 and 2019.

“Those are trending very positive,” he said. “That gives us a lot of optimism. We can say we’re strong on the leisure (travel) in the short-term, and we’re strong on the corporate and incentive business on the long-term.”

But things are less certain between mid-March and the summer. Malone said businesses can lose a lot of the gains they made in the winter during the early spring, a timeframe in which Park City’s often experiences a significant lull.

This year, the Chamber/Bureau is hoping to reverse the status quo.

For the first time, the organization is deploying a national marketing campaign aimed at luring more visitors during the spring. The television and digital ad effort, dubbed Spring It On, will be featured in several of the largest markets in the country and aims to showcase the unique things Park City offers during the spring.

“We need to focus some energy on that timeframe,” Malone said. “We held back on some of our marketing. We started earlier, took a break in the holiday period, then went for a couple weeks after the holidays and took another break. Now, we’re hitting a new message, and it’s all about sunshine, activities, skiing and concerts in the spring.”

As much effort as the Chamber/Bureau is spending, the business community’s support of the campaign is what could ultimately make the difference, Malone said. Businesses throughout the area are banding together to offer specials during that period in an effort to drum up more interest. It’s a similar strategy to one that has yielded increased visitation during the Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend in recent years.

“We can go out there and talk about it, but if they can put the muscle behind it that says, ‘Hey, here’s what you get extra, here’s the added value,’ that’s the type of thing that makes people pull out their credit card,” he said. “That’s what we’re seeing on the spring campaign. We’re seeing lodging, restaurants, activities, retail coming together and putting things out there that hopefully are motivating to people.”

Another factor playing in Park City’s favor is this winter’s plentiful snowfall. It’s likely there will be enough snow to keep conditions at Deer Valley Resort and Park City Mountain Resort good well into the spring, an element Eggleton highlighted as he described the marketing campaign to those attending the luncheon.

“That can be some of the best time to ski Park City,” he.

Amid the optimism, officials also described the challenges the Park City economy faces. Chief among them, Malone said, is that employers are finding it increasingly difficult to hire enough employees, and they often rely on people who commute from the Wasatch County or the Salt Lake Valley.

The Park City and Summit County governments have identified affordable housing and transportation as key issues, and solving them would provide a larger local workforce Malone said he’s confident they can find solutions, but he worries it may take longer than employers would like. And in the meantime, it could put a throttle on the local economy at a time when it’s flourishing.

“Unfortunately, these things don’t happen fast,” he said. “It takes years to build and make the progress. But I think we’re light-years ahead of a lot of places because we’re addressing the issues.”

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