The Utah Open plays its hundredth at Riverside Country Club Friday through Sunday and admission costs nothing, Michigan visits UCCU Stadium in Orem on Thursday, and the truck show fills Electric Park in Lehi
Plus a peach shake in Santaquin while the fruit is still in, Deer Creek down to 56 percent with every kind of fire banned, and Provo breaking ground on 34 homes it is holding for the people who work for the city.
Good morning, Happy Valley.
Monday we asked whether Saturday belonged to Alpine or the canyon. Both of those are behind us now, the city celebrations are done for the year, and school starts a week from tomorrow. What is left is a stretch of quieter, more specific things: a golf tournament that has been running since 1926 opening a private course to anyone who walks up, a Big Ten team playing on a field in Orem that only opened last August, and the last of the peaches.
📍 30 seconds in the valley⏱️ 7 min read
- ⛳A hundred years of the Utah Open, free at the gate
- 🚚A hundred semis in Lehi for Kidney Kamp
- 🏠Provo's 34 homes for its own employees
⭐ The Big One
Pick of the week The Utah Open plays its hundredth at Riverside on Friday, and the gate is open to anybody
The Larry H. Miller Utah Open runs Friday through Sunday at Riverside Country Club on North University Avenue in Provo. The tournament was first played in 1926, which makes this the hundredth playing, and it brings the state's leading professionals and amateurs into one field with $25,000 going to whoever wins it.
Riverside is a private club every other week of the year. The course is a William F. Bell design that opened in 1960, par 72, a little over 7,100 yards from the back tees, sitting along the river at the north end of town. Three days in August are the only ones where you can walk it without knowing a member.
Admission is free and open to the public for all three rounds. Kihei Akina won last year as the youngest champion the tournament has had. The list of names on the trophy behind him runs through Mike Reid, Jay Don Blake and Zac Blair, which is a fair share of the golf this state has produced in a century.
Our take
A hundred years of anything is rare here, and this one costs nothing to stand next to. Golf on television is a bad advertisement for golf in person, where you hear the strike and see how far offline a good player can go. Park, walk in, pick a hole with some trouble on it and stay there for an hour.⚠️ Heads up: The Utah PGA posts each round's tee sheet the day before, so the group you want to follow is something you sort out the night before rather than the week before.
free sportsfreeProvo
📰 Around the Valley
Provo broke ground on 34 homes it is holding for the people who work for the city
Delta Vista is a 68-home neighborhood where half the houses are permanently affordable and reserved for qualifying Provo City employees, with first preference going to police officers and firefighters. The workforce homes and the market-rate homes sit mixed through the streets rather than split into separate sections. The affordability runs through a community land trust, which takes the cost of the land out of the purchase price and keeps the house within reach of the next qualified buyer instead of resetting to market on the first resale. The city says the model needs no ongoing subsidy, and the first homes could be finished as early as the summer of 2027.
Deer Creek is down to 56 percent, and every kind of fire is banned at the park
The state park's own conditions page, updated on Monday, puts the reservoir at 56 percent full with the water sitting around 72 degrees. Stage 2 fire restrictions apply across the park, which bans open fires of any kind, including fires inside an established fire pit, charcoal grills and pellet grills. Both the Island and Main boat ramps are open. Any boat coming from Lake Powell, Nevada, Colorado, Montana, California, New Mexico, Arizona, Mexico or Canada has to go through decontamination first, and that unit runs from 7:30 in the morning to 6:30 at night.
📅 This Week
Sports
Worth it ⚽ Michigan plays in Orem on Thursday night
Utah Valley's women host Michigan at UCCU Stadium at seven on Thursday. The stadium is the reason to go even if the soccer is not your thing: 3,000 seats, eight suites, a video board and locker rooms that cost $28.5 million by the time it was done, and it only opened last August when UVU hosted Utah in the first match ever played there. Thursday starts a run of four straight home dates, with Utah on the 17th, Utah State on the 24th and Kansas on the 27th.
Our take
A Big Ten program driving to Orem to play is a decent measure of what the building bought UVU in one year. College soccer at seven on an August evening is about as pleasant as a ticket gets, and you can hear the players talking to each other from most of the seats.⚠️ Heads up: Campus lots nearest the gate fill first on a match night, and the walk in from the far side of University Parkway is longer than it looks on the map.
$ sportsfamiliesOrem
Festival
Worth it 🚚 A hundred semis park at Electric Park Friday and Saturday, and it pays for a kids' camp
The Great Salt Lake Truck Show runs its 37th year at Electric Park on the Thanksgiving Point grounds in Lehi, from ten in the morning to ten at night both days. More than a hundred show trucks come in from around the country, along with a truck pull and a silent auction. The money goes to the National Kidney Foundation of Utah and Idaho, which uses it to run Kidney Kamp, sending more than 200 kids who are on dialysis or waiting on a transplant to a week in the Utah mountains.
Our take
If you have a kid who turns their head every time a semi passes on I-15, this is a whole field of them at a standstill with the owners standing next to them happy to talk. Bring earplugs for the truck pull, and take the auction seriously, since that is where the camp money comes from.⚠️ Heads up: Ten in the morning to ten at night is a twelve-hour day and there is very little shade on that lot, so an afternoon visit means bringing your own.
free familiesfreeLehi
Theater
Book now 🎭 The Scarlet Pimpernel has ten days left in Pleasant Grove
The Ruth and Nathan Hale Theater has been running The Scarlet Pimpernel since the sixth of July, and it closes on the 22nd. It is the swashbuckling one, a French Revolution rescue story with a big score, staged in the round on the Grand stage at 401 South Pleasant Grove Boulevard. The box office is open Monday through Saturday from noon to 6:30 and closed Sundays.
Our take
Seven weeks is a long run and it has quietly reached the end of it. Theater in the round means nobody is far from the stage, which suits a show built on sword fights and disguises more than a proscenium would.⚠️ Heads up: The box office keeps shorter hours than the theater does, so anything you want to sort out in person has to happen before 6:30.
$$ date nightartsPleasant Grove
Music
Worth it 🎨 Springville puts a busker on Festival Street every Friday, and this week it is puppets
Art City Sidewalk Sessions runs Friday evenings from 6:30 to 8 on Festival Street at 50 East 200 South, from the middle of June through the second of October. Each week is a different performer, with McMazing Puppetry on the 14th and the Buskers Brawl on the 21st. Springville built the street for exactly this, closed to cars and open to whoever wanders down it.
Our take
This is the sort of thing that works because it repeats. You do not plan around it, you end up on Main and remember it is Friday. Take the kids, stay half an hour, get ice cream after.⚠️ Heads up: Buskers work for tips and there is no ticket, so carry a few singles if you plan to stand there the whole set.
free familiesfreeSpringville
Arts
Worth it 🖼️ Ghiberti's gilded doors are sitting in a campus atrium, and looking at them costs nothing
Gilded Paradise installed full-scale gilded plaster casts of Lorenzo Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise in the atrium of the BYU Museum of Art, with Florence projected onto the walls around them. The panels are the Old Testament scenes Ghiberti spent 27 years on for the Baptistery in Florence. The museum added 3D-printed copies of a few of the panels that visitors are meant to put their hands on, and there is a telescope on the mezzanine for studying the gilding up close. The exhibition runs into October, admission is free, and the museum stays late on Fridays.
Our take
Free and air conditioned counts for a lot in a summer where the smoke keeps drifting in. Send the kids to the 3D-printed panels first, because being allowed to touch something in a museum resets what they think a museum is.⚠️ Heads up: Parking enforcement on campus does not relax in August, so read the sign on the lot before you walk away from the car.
free artsfreeindoors
🏟️ The Scoreboard
The unbeaten run ended in Denver, and Bay FC comes to Sandy on Friday
Denver Summit beat the Royals 2-1 on Saturday in a match that got pushed six hours down the day because of the heat, and that ended a long run without a loss. They are still third in the league on 33 points, and Bay FC comes to America First Field on Friday night.
Oklahoma City took five of six at home, and the last road trip of the year started Tuesday
The Comets came into Daybreak and won five games out of six, including 10-6, 12-2 and 11-5. Salt Lake's one win was the 14-13 slugfest on Saturday that ended an eleven-game losing streak, then Sunday went ten innings and got away 6-5. That is three series lost in a row.
🍴 Eat & Drink
Worth it Rowley's Red Barn, Santaquin
The farm store and ice cream counter at 901 South 300 West in Santaquin, five minutes off I-15 at the south end of the county. They make the ice cream on site and run a hand-dipping cabinet of about 32 flavors, alongside farm produce, peach pies and the apple cider slush that they sell year round.
What you go for in August is the peach shake, which is a seasonal item and has actual chunks of peach in it. Given what we wrote Monday about the April freeze taking most of the state's stone fruit, the shake is a decent way to find out what did make it through.
Our take
It is a farm with an ice cream counter attached, which means the line moves slowly and nobody in it minds. Order the peach shake now and the cider slush in October, and do not let anybody talk you into a cone when the shake is the reason you stopped.⚠️ Heads up: Closed Sundays, and the parking area is shared with the produce customers, so a Saturday afternoon means circling.
$ foodfamiliessouth county
🌲 Get Outside
Skip the weekend Snowmelt water is still cold up the North Fork, but this is the wrong stretch for the campfire version of it
Tibble Fork sits at the top of the North Fork road, non-motorized only, with no engines allowed on the water or along the banks. Day use runs $10 per vehicle for three days, $20 for seven, or $60 for the season, and an America the Beautiful pass covers it. There are vault toilets and nothing to drink, so carry your own. Dogs stay leashed, and the Mineral Basin route above it is closed.
Stage 1 restrictions apply across the whole drainage on top of the site's rules. No campfire within a quarter mile of SR-92 and the Alpine Loop, the North Fork road, or Forest Road 010, and no overnight camping within a quarter mile of those routes either.
Our take
Meltwater at that elevation holds its temperature into late August, which is the entire appeal in a stretch like this one. Take a paddleboard and a lunch on a weekday. If the picture in your head has a fire in it, hold that thought until the restrictions lift.⚠️ Heads up: Parking is legal only in a marked stall or a designated overflow area, and the Forest Service writes tickets on the roadside pull-offs people keep using anyway.
$ outdoorsfamiliesnorth county
🎟️ Also Happening
🎲 Family game night in Payson
The Center of the Universe Cafe on Main Street runs it weekly, and you can bring your own game or borrow one of theirs.
🎸 The rooftop concert returns downtown
Friday the 21st at Nu Skin Plaza in Provo, free and outdoors, on Center Street at 100 West.
🎡 Imaginaria at Ashton Gardens
The summer kids' festival runs at Thanksgiving Point in Lehi through Saturday the 22nd.
📰 Valley News
US-189 gets a second uphill lane, and traffic moves onto it later in the year
The widening through Provo Canyon is taking the road to two lanes in each direction, and crews spent the season digging out the steep hillside where the new uphill lanes will sit while paving continues behind the concrete barrier. Traffic moves onto those new lanes before the season closes, so the crews can cross over and rebuild the downhill side, which includes a signal going in where the road meets SR-113 toward Midway. The $105 million job wraps in late 2027. Until then the drive runs at 45 miles an hour with narrowed lanes, narrowed shoulders, and slow trucks pulling on and off.
Lehi sold a quarter fewer houses in July than it did last July, at about the same price
The July numbers out of Lehi show 119 homes sold against 145 in July of last year, with the median price at $629,000 compared to $625,765 a year ago. Time on the market did not move, holding at 54 days. What is sitting unsold is asking less than it was: the median list price on active inventory came in at $599,000, down 4.1 percent year over year, across 444 active listings. Prices flat, volume down, and asking prices on the unsold half sliding is the shape of a market where buyers stopped chasing.
American Fork is building a roundabout next to the FrontRunner yard and drilling a new well
The city's capital list has crews working through the summer on a $1.2 million roundabout at 300 West and 200 South, which started on the sixth of July and is scheduled for substantial completion by the end of September. It ties into the UTA FrontRunner facility, so it is a piece of the same freight and commuter traffic problem the rest of the north county keeps running into. On the water side, the $5.5 million Dixie Well near the 900 West and 620 South roundabout is drilling this summer with completion in 2027, and a $1.2 million rehabilitation of the Boley Well on Alpine Highway is in plan review.
The Debate
💙 Good Neighbor
Nominate the Valley's quiet MVPs
Every issue we spotlight one neighbor, teacher, coach, or cause quietly making the Valley better, plus an easy way to pitch in. Know someone who deserves it? Send them our way.
Nominate a neighbor →That is the middle of the week. Walk Riverside on Friday morning while the temperature is still reasonable, get to the Springville buskers by 6:30, and if you are driving south, Rowley's closes at nine and not at all on Sunday.
Tell us what we missed. Reply with the openings, events, and good-neighbor stories your corner of the Valley should know about.
Forward this to whoever thinks the valley empties out after the parades.
— The Provo FOMO crew
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