Picture soaring over iconic Wasatch and Uintah peaks in a helicopter, taking in the dramatic views, then touching down to enjoy the incredible architecture of Blue Sky Ranch that mirrors them. The living roofs of the Edge Spa sown with native flora give way to picturesque meadows as you dive headfirst into a weekend of immersive adventure at The Lodge.
Blue Sky guests can enjoy a host of exhilarating activities: heli sports like heli skiing and mountain biking, and rejuvenating spa retreats during winter chills; fireside yoga in cozy yurts or horseback riding lessons from the Saving Gracie Equine Healing Foundation for warm-weather thrills. Each excursion offers a truly nature-oriented experience.
The Blue Sky family are genuine stewards of the earth, and take great measures to ensure that their carbon footprint is as minimal as possible. For your 2022 summer staycation, join in the conservation efforts with Organic Farm School at the entirely female-led, regenerative Gracie’s Farm. The team of farmers work the land using hand tools and animal grazing, for exceptional soil quality that generates equally exceptional produce.
New to the Blue Sky lineup this season is a craft dinner series, hosted in partnership with Templin Family Brewing. This year, they offer several dinner events, each featuring a locally sourced menu designed by Blue Sky’s James Beard award-winning executive chef Galen Zamarra, complete with local beer pairings to complement each dish.
“There is always something new happening at Blue Sky,” says Jessica Cook, director of sales and marketing at Blue Sky. “Our experience curators are always creating new, innovative programming that showcases how amazing Blue Sky is during any season.”
Immerse yourself in the beauty of Utah with a stay in one of Blue Sky’s luxury rooms, including family-friendly Signature and Earth suites, and take your crew on an off-the-beaten-path adventure they’ll remember for a lifetime.
Hilton Salt Lake City Center makes planning a Salt Lake staycation easy, with amenities for any kind of vacationer.
Start your day with a sunrise salutation at Trofi, led by executive chef Tony Coppernoll. “Our breakfast menu offers a variety of flavorful dishes uniquely infused with the honey extracted from our rooftop beehives and garnished with the fresh herbs grown in our on-site gardens,” says Coppernoll. “Whether you’re looking for a hearty meal or light start to your morning, Trofi has something for everyone.” The brunch menu also features classic cocktails with a twist, like the Trofi Bloody Mary with maple pepper bacon, or cherry-infused mimosas.
Earlier this year, Trofi also launched its unique QR code lunch ordering. Guests can access menus, order, and pay entirely from their device, and have their meals delivered on the Trofi patio. With this shaken-up restaurant experience, couples, kids, and even pets are welcome to enjoy the patio amenities while they wait, which include jumbo lawn games, gas fire pits (for chilly days), or just taking in the unmatched views of the city landscape.
After mornings in the hotel, guests are encouraged to hit the town–or the trails. “We are uniquely situated for guests to enjoy nightlife and boutique shopping,” says general manager Garret Parker. “But this Hilton is also minutes from outdoor escapes like Memory Grove Park and the adjoining City Creek canyon trails.”
Staying with Hilton also means taking part in their “Travel with Purpose” strategy, an initiative to drive sustainability and community connection in the tourism industry. At the Salt Lake location, these efforts include relying on local ingredients and resources to reduce the overall footprint of the hotel, while also providing a uniquely immersive Utah experience. Find your own travel purpose this summer, and select Hilton Salt Lake City Center for your downtown escape.
Wine connoisseurs are flocking to taste the happy grapes of Colorado, bathed in the high desert’s perfect mix of sunny days and cool evening temps in one of over 100 winery-owned vineyards. Boasting traditional sweet, semi-sweet, dry and noteworthy fruit-based and honey-infused wines, the Wine Country Inn in Palisade, CO, mixes luxury accommodations with vineyard experiences that are just a car-ride away.
UNWIND IN THE VINES
Located in the heart of Colorado’s wine country and sitting amidst 21 acres of vineyards, the Wine Country Inn offers guests an approachable, authentic wine country experience under safe COVID-19 protocols. With the relaxed atmosphere and luxurious amenities, some guests never venture beyond the property, while others choose adventure by day and wining and dining by night. “You can have a totally immersive experience,” says General Manager Ian Kelley. “Your getaway is whatever you want it to be.” The Inn is dwarfed on the north by the Little Bookcliff mountains, home to around 150 mustangs living on the BLM Wild Horse Preserve. Dramatic views in all directions create unlimited exploration and plenty of photo ops.
CYCLE
Visitors are tempted by a variety of attractions: touring vineyards, wineries and tasting local wines; renting electric or conventional cruisers for tranquil, leisurely bike rides through the Fruit and Wine Byway; attacking the more serious terrain on the challenging Palisade Plunge mountain bike trail that opens in July, rafting the mighty Colorado River, sampling the abundant fruit from orchards, visiting enormous lavender farms, shopping for art by local painters, potters and sculptors in the local galleries.
WINE, WINE AND DINE
A daily afternoon wine reception is standard at the Wine Country Inn—the area’s first wine-themed resort serving its own Ten Acre Farm wines pressed from grapes grown on-site. A deluxe breakfast is also complimentary. In the evening, the Tapestry Lounge offers light dining, signature cocktails, beer and wine, while Caroline’s Restaurant boasts classically prepared favorites like rainbow trout, lamb and beef served with locally grown produce paired with Colorado wines. “The terroir is the same, so this area is a celebration of food and landscape,” emphasizes Bridget Zlab, WCI F&B Director. “Our guests experience firsthand how food and wine complement each other to create memorable dining.”
Nestled at the base of the western Little Bookcliffs mountains, the 80-room Victorian style Inn and Colorado’s fifth established winery are joined by 20-plus acres of established vineyards of mostly Bordeaux-style varietals that are the backbone of Grande River Vineyards’ product line. European-trained and certified Rainer Thoma, who tends the vines and makes the wines, aims to elevate wine profiles and to add cold-hearty vines to the mix.
Co-owners Richard and Jean Tally plan to use Grande River’s pioneering heritage in Colorado’s wine industry as a foundation for establishing an updated winery operation producing high quality traditional wines.
“We have a rare opportunity to build a strong wine destination based on the symbiotic relationship between the hotel and the winery,” Richard explains.
As a full service boutique hotel, WCI is a popular venue for weddings, celebrations, reunions and corporate retreats. The Inn can now book vineyard and winery tours, special tastings and wine dinners for individuals or groups of friends and family. This new wine destination is perfect for a celebration or a chance getaway.
“You can have a totally immersive experience,” says General Manager Ian Kelley. “Your getaway can be whatever you want it to be.”
Caroline’s Restaurant serves locally-sourced, classically prepared Colorado foods and wines, while Tapestry Lounge features wine, cocktails and small plates. The culinary team can customize in-house catering for events. A complimentary afternoon wine reception and hearty breakfast are standard at the hotel. The Winery Tasting Room is open daily from 9 am to 5 pm, and sells food with its wine.
The area’s surrounding natural landscape is wide open for exploration. Whether you’re a leisure traveler soaking up the laid-back ambiance or a thrill-seeking cyclist attacking the Palisade Plunge, the Inn and winery are your “Gateway to Colorado”— just a tank of gas away.
So fill ’er up, Salt Lakers, and motor on over to Western Colorado’s new, bona fide wine destination.
Get ready for the jazzy sounds of summer. She & Him bring their limited-run Melt Away Tour–A Tribute to Brian Wilson to Red Butte Garden on June 14, 2022. She & Him is an indie-pop duo featuring TV’s New Girl Zooey Deschanel (She) and singer-songwriter M. Ward (Him).
She & Him’s 2022 summer tour is in support of their upcoming album Melt Away: A Tribute to Brian Wilson, set for release on July 22. Red Butte Gardens’ audience will be among the first to hear the duo’s reimagined interpretation of the music of Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys. She & Him didn’t take the easy road by covering “best of” hits. Instead, they scoured Brian Wilson’s massive 60-plus year catalog and carefully chose 14 songs to stamp with their own cool jazz indie-pop style that She & Him fans know and love.
“Darlin’” is the first single off the new record and they filmed a whimsical, campy video to go along with it.“Darlin’” is a fairly deep cut. The song did break the top 20 for the Beach Boys in 1967 but isn’t exactly a signature Beach Boys hit. They cover “Wouldn’t it be Nice” from Pet Sounds (1966), but the rest of the 14 tracks are lesser known Beach Boys or Brian Wilson solo offerings. Wilson even puts his stamp of approval on the album by joining the duo on “Do it Again.”
Deschanel’s voice has a range and quality that fits well in a jazz cabaret or a smokey blues club (it will also sound great in the natural acoustics of Red Butte Garden.) The Beach Boys’ sound and Wilson’s writing style have always been synonymous with summer, sun and sand, but with an unmistakable jazz feel often lost in the good-vibration tempo and falsetto male vocals. She & Him strips that away to expose the jazz roots. I’m looking forward to hearing how She & Him deconstruct the sound and make it something fresh and new.
On June 14, Red Butte Garden will host an early solstice party with She & Him crooning out some sizzlin’ summer Beach Boys sounds with their own breezy indie pop style. They’re sure to add some of their great original music to the evening’s setlist.
Who: She & Him
What: Indie-pop duo covering classics and original compositions
Where: Red Butte Garden Amphitheater
When: June 14, 2022
For tickets, visit Red ButteGarden’s website. Discover the latest in culture and arts around the city and the state. And while you’re here, subscribe and get six issues of Salt Lake magazine, your guide to the best of life in Utah.
Melissa Leilani Larson has established herself as one of Utah’s most successful playwrights and screenwriters. She has written stage adaptations of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion; Little Happy Secrets, a playabout a woman at BYU who falls in love with her roommate, and the Mormon-focused films Freetown and Jane and Emma.
Larson’s works have traveled through various settings, time periods and genres, from Victorian drawing room comedies to Latter-day Saint historical dramas to contemporary realism. But for her latest play, Mestiza, or Mixed, which premieres on Thursday, June 9 at Plan-B Theatre,Larson focused on a subject she never tackled so directly—her own life.
The play follows Lark (Joy Asiado), a 30-something aspiring screenwriter living in Utah. Lark has a passion for her art and plenty of interesting ideas, but her life is frustratingly stalled. None of her screenplays have been produced and she is saddled with mounting student loan debt. She has a competitive, fraught relationship with her sister Ava (Jayna Balzer), feels misunderstood by her mother Carrie (April Fossen) and is estranged from her beloved father, who recently separated from her mom. Meanwhile, Lark’s girlfriend Alex (Lily Hye Soo Dixon), a fellow writer whose brazen self-confidence is almost exactly opposite of Lark’s introverted personality, is more undermining than affectionate.
Lark is also a “mestiza,” or a person of mixed Filipinx and European heritage—her mom is white and her dad is a Filipino immigrant. White people often incorrectly guess her race, other people of color don’t see her as part of their community, and even Alex, who is also Asian-American, calls her “the whitest brown girl I know.” Lark describes her own race as a “weird middle place,” and she feels unsure of how, or even if, to claim her own identity.
Carlos Nobleza Posas in “Mestiza, or Mixed” at Plan-B Theatre (Photo courtesy Plan-B Theatre)
For Larson, these themes hit close to home. Like her protagonist, Larson is a mixed-race Filipina artist living in Utah, and though Mestiza is not directly autobiographical, she drew from the experiences of herself and her family in the script. Larson says that growing up, it was rare to see multiracial families—especially Flipinx ones—in theater or the media. “I’ve never expected to see myself on stage because of the way my family looks,” she says. “And I thought, ‘Well, why not try?’”
Mestiza is a story rooted in the experiences of a mixed-race Filipinx family—the complex family dynamics, dysfunctional romance and professional setbacks are specifically tied to Lark’s identity, even if the character’s personal struggles will be broadly relatable to audiences of all races.Larson also writes about the professional and creative evolution of an artist trying to turn their craft into a career. “There are times as an artist where you just feel like, ‘Hey, I made something really pretty, but also I’m bad at this. I’m never going to make any money. I’m never going to get to that place where I’m doing this for a job,’” Larsen says.
While writing Mestiza, Larson explored her own vulnerable feelings about race and cultural divides. In one key scene, Lark is chosen as a finalist at a film festival, and a critical online commenter assumes from the black-and-white headshots of the screenwriters that every recipient is white. Larsen based this on an experience she herself had, which party inspired her to write the play. The moment—and the raw conversation with Alex it inspires—illustrates the ways Lark feels invisible.
Lark and Larson both share a self-consciousness about their own race, which leaves them feeling unmoored from their communities. “I’ve struggled with feeling Filipino enough,” she says. This struggle, paradoxically, could make it more difficult for Larson to write about racial identity—and the insecurity surrounding that identity—so directly. While Larson felt plenty of trepidation about writing so personally, she ultimately felt freed by the opportunity to wrestle with these complicated topics through fiction. “I know this is relatable because I can relate to it,” she says.
Mestiza, or Mixed will be at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center from June 9-19 and streaming online from June 15-19. For tickets, visit Plan-B’s website. And while you’re here, subscribe and get six issues of Salt Lake magazine, your guide to the best of life in Utah.
