There were bumps in the road for this 19-year-old mogul skiing Parkite.
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Mindy Gledhill refuses to take no for an answer. “I was really drawn to singing when I was a young teenager,” she says. “I tried out for the school musical and the chamber choir. I didn’t get into anything.” But that wasn’t the end of the story for the Provo-based singer-songwriter. “I’m a really driven person by nature, so rather than letting that determine my path, I decided to create my own path.” Gledhill got an internship at a recording studio, formed her own band that played at open mic nights and school assemblies and then went to BYU where she majored in commercial music. “I got the ball rolling myself,” she says matter-of-factly.
“I would say at one point I was a poster child for the LDS church,” says Gledhill, explaining that her songs and voice were featured in Especially For Youth (commonly called EFY) albums released by the church and her first album was on a church-owned label. “I started my career playing church music but 10 years ago it evolved into the indie-music scene,” she says. But when she left her LDS-owned label she turned to the web to release music with the help of sites like YouTube and MySpace. “The internet made it possible for me to reach people on the other side of the world. It was a really exciting time. It still is,” Gledhill says.
The move away from her label wasn’t her only transition with the church—Gledhill left the LDS church as well. “I would say that all of my upbringing and beliefs unraveled over the last couple of years,” she says. “I became an activist for LBGT rights and women’s rights—that’s been my personal journey. I started to find my power as a woman and find my voice as a woman and that was an incredible thing for me. ”
Her album Rabbit Hole is heavily influenced by her experiences leaving the church behind and the new beginning it has created. Says Gledhill, “This new album goes through what it’s meant for me to have an existential crisis and the journey that has been painful and beautiful.” — Christie Marcy
See more Small Lake City Concerts here. Salt Lake Magazine’s Small Lake City Concerts were produced by Natalie Simpson of Beehive Photography and Video.
Aspiring first timers or fully-certified master gardeners, we’re not urban agriculture snobs here. Let’s list some quick-n-dirty vegetable and herb varieties that you can get into the ground (or a patio garden box) just in time for spring gardening season.
Radishes, love ’em or hate ’em, are the easiest and most forgiving to grow. A radish seed is large enough to manually handle and can be planted in small boxes or directly in a garden row. They enjoy coolish temps. If you notice anything munching on them, add some netting (for birds) or sprinkle with Diatomaceous Earth (for bugs). Don’t forget to eat the greens and pick a sunny spot.
Favorite varieties: cherry belle, English breakfast, Easter egg
Lettuces are also incredibly straightforward and easy to start—just add rich, loamy soil. The seeds are light and almost impossible to pick up individually, so we recommend using a wet pencil tip to collect seeds (a clever hack). Lettuces enjoy being watered and will get destroyed and inedible if frozen. So by all means, cover if temps dip under 40 degrees, weed through regularly and voila.
Kale, once established in a garden bed, is simple to grow—you’ll probably discover volunteer kale next year. Very cold-weather hardy, a small patch of kale is an easy way to feel like a successful gardener.
Favorite varieties: White or Red Russian, Thousand, Dinosaur or Lacinato.
Cilantro grows quick and bolts (or goes to seed) when hot, making it ideal for fast but temporary harvesting before the June heat sets in. Tenting over plants with a shading cloth or planting in areas that aren’t in full sun is something to consider.
March weather is notoriously unpredictable, especially in Utah, where a week of sunshine is often followed by days of unrelenting snowfall. But for steadfast gardeners and loyal landscapers, the early spring season is a time to reevaluate your awakening outdoor areas. Of course, it’s not quite time to plant delicate blooms in the ground, but getting a head start on your plein air projects will undoubtedly sow the seeds of green-thumbed success. To help you get started, Ginger Belnap, owner and principal landscape designer of Meadow Brook Design, offers her top five tips for Utah spring landscaping.
1) Be careful with fertilizer
Winter storms hit the Wasatch Front sporadically between March and April, and a surge in moisture can impact your lawn. Too much rain produces runoff that carries fertilizer away that hasn’t had the opportunity to soak into the soil. Belnap suggests keeping an eye on the weather and applying fertilizer two days before a heavy storm to avoid deficiency. The type of fertilizer used is just as important as timing, and using the nutrient-rich version gives your lawn the best chance at revival after a long winter. “In the spring, you want to apply a high-nitrogen fertilizer to give your lawn a quick green color,” says Belnap.
2) Think of the big picture
Even seemingly low maintenance and water-wise landscapes require maintenance. Do your future self a favor by planning out the landscape of your entire yard before you begin spring gardening. “An efficient landscape design takes advantage of the entire yard, fostering a sense of function, flow and beauty,” Belnap explains. Factors to consider when planning your landscape include:
- Defining areas organized by plant type
- Including distinct borders
- Not forgetting pathways
3) Prioritize Privacy
Without added privacy, even a well-designed landscape loses its charm and comfort. While you wait for the season’s last freeze, take the opportunity to research garden features that provide both visual appeal and the feeling of seclusion. Strategically placed fences may separate a neighbor’s property from yours, but other solutions include decorative screens and evergreens. Even a row of potted topiaries can designate a private sitting area apart from the busier yard areas when placed in an appropriate position.
4) Focus your family values
If you plan on undertaking a total landscape overhaul this spring, Belnap advises investing in features you know your family will use and enjoy. “If your family enjoys playing games, prioritize a level lawn space to play soccer or football,” she says. “Or maybe installing a pickleball court is a better fit for your family and lifestyle—be creative!”
5) Remember bigger isn’t always better
It might be tempting to go ahead and invest in mature shrubs and plants that will immediately fill in your sparse landscape. But planting juvenile greenery gives your yard an opportunity to grow and change with the seasons while also being easier on your budget. Belnap thinks of this as a long-term investment, like “choosing small trees over shrubs as they take longer to grow and require less long-term maintenance.”
While you’re here, subscribe to Salt Lake magazine and get more home and garden tips from our sister publication Utah Style & Design.
After a five-year hiatus, the Outdoor Retailer (OR) trade show is returning to Salt Lake City in 2023 in spite of Utah officials’ ongoing attacks of two national monuments in the state. In 2017 OR left Utah in response to the state’s hostile stance towards conservation, particularly Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments. The Biden administration restored the monument boundaries to those originally designated by former president Barack Obama in 2016, which had been significantly reduced in the interim by the Trump Administration.
Utah officials had pressed the Trump administration to take unprecedented action in overturning the monument designations, leading OR’s owner Emerald Expositions to relocate the twice-yearly show to Denver because such anti-conservation sentiment was antithetical to the goals and values of the outdoor industry.
Under Governor Spencer Cox, Utah has continued to pursue a lawsuit against the Interior Department to not only reverse Biden’s protective order but also to negate the 1906 Antiquities Act that allows presidents to designate monuments. Nevertheless, Outdoor Retailer cited in a statement their partnership with Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall, “whose values align with ours following tremendous investments in clean energy and a strong commitment to public lands,” as justification for a return to Utah.
So, the OR show is coming back to the Salt Palace Convention Center while a Washington-based law firm, Consovoy McCarthy, is seeking to gut the 1906 Antiquities Act at the behest of Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes. It’s a stunning reversal of conscience for those affiliated with OR, and not one that everyone is on board with. 24 companies, including influential behemoths Patagonia, REI and The North Face, said in a joint statement they would not return to a show in Utah. How the absences of industry mainstays will affect the viability of Outdoor Retailer remains to be seen, but Salt Lake is a town with a successful AAA baseball team, so Utahns have proven they’ll show out for the minor leaguers.
Meanwhile, the efficacy and even necessity of trade shows has come into question during the pandemic as outdoor industry sales have surged in the absence of such shows. Traditional sales and distribution models are evolving, in part because it appears the internet is here to stay. Trade shows themselves are relatively unsustainable with all the travel they require, so perhaps overlooking the Utah’s anti-conservation efforts while the federal government is doing the protective heavy lifting isn’t too much of a logical leap. Conservation and consumerism rarely align, after all.
Still, Mayor Mendenhall is right in thinking Outdoor Retailer’s return is a boon to Salt Lake City. The show brings an estimated $45 million to Utah each year, and its presence in Utah reaffirms the state’s place at the center of the outdoor industry. It’s even possible collective industry action could press Utah leaders to reverse course and support conservation at home. I wouldn’t get my hopes up, however, as Governor Cox insists the state’s actions are in opposition to federal overreach rather than conservation. Many states’ rights arguments have a sordid history with dubious intentions, but I’ll leave it up to each individual to decide whether they back the protection of lands with ancestral native ties to numerous tribes or “local” control over historically federal lands for myriad commercial uses.
And that’s where we’ll leave it for now. OR is returning to Utah while the state Legislature has set aside $5 million to fund the lawsuit seeking to gut protected lands and the 1906 Antiquities Act. OR leaving certainly didn’t change the state leaders’ minds. Who knows? Maybe coming home will.
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Every day some finance bro on an expense account discovers there’s something other to drink than Bud Light and Jägermeister and has to tell me about it. Yeah. Bro. Say “the angel’s share” again and order the table another round of $75 Pappy Van Winkle shots. Thanks. I’ve had more ounces of whiskey than days this 25-year-old Goldman Sachs account exec has been alive and there’s not enough of it in the world to tolerate listening to him saying “notes of leather” one more time. Would ordering a shot of Beam drive him away?
Bro. Forget Pappy. Japanese whisky (no “E”) is the new, although not new, thing and one Salt Lake bar is ahead of the curve. Post Office Place has always had Nipponese leanings, being the next-door sibling of Takashi. But POP General Manager Rich Romney and Beverage Director Crystal Daniels have taken that inclination to the next level and built out a full library of Japanese juice. They back it up with a deep knowledge of the intricacies of booze from a country 5,000 miles away.
Daniels found her passion for Japanese whisky and rice whisky (more on that in a minute) when, like all of us, her palate finally grew up. “When I was young I drank a lot of Scotch because I thought it was badass.” What she discovered with Japanese spirits, however, was a wide spectrum that ranges from delicate to intense. “I used to think I needed something that would punch me in the face, but now I enjoy spirits that whisper to me.”
Daniels didn’t stray that far from her youth, actually. See, the roots of Japanese whisky come from Scotland. In the 1920s, Japan was one of the biggest markets for Scotland’s famous spirits and two men, Shinjiro Torii and Masataka Taketsuru, set out to make Japanese whisky. Taketsuru traveled to Scotland to learn from the masters and brought back the knowledge that would meld Scottish technique with Japanese fastidiousness at Japan’s first distillery, the Yamazaki Distillery.
“Eventually, Japanese whisky would taste more in common with Irish whiskey than Scotch,” Romney says. “The Japanese like to consume whiskey with food and the early distillers learned to make their own spirits more nuanced, less aggressive.”
But wait, there is more. It’s called “rice whisky” and paradoxically you can only get it in the United States—Takashi even has its own label. Rice whisky is made from shochu, a distilled rice (or grain) spirit made in Japan, but in Japan, there are rules about what shochu can be and it can’t be whisky, even though it can. An enterprising importer saw that shochu makers were trying new things, aging the spirit in various casks for example, but couldn’t sell their variations in Japan, and thus “rice whisky” arrived in America as a whole new category of spirit.
And all of this, a new frontier of whisky, is waiting for you at Post Office Place. A good place to start is POP’s Japanese Whisky Wednesdays when every pour is 20% off. Daniels and Romney will be there as your guides.
“I always ask someone who hasn’t tried a lot of Japanese whiskys what their preference is from bourbon to Scotch, and can help them discover something familiar but entirely new,” Daniels says.
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Sammy Brue is making quite a name for himself in Utah’s music scene right now, but that’s not always where he figured he would end up. “Before I became a musician, I was super into tennis and had a dream of becoming a professional,” says Brue. This long-haired, hippie-lost-in-time seems the opposite of a tennis pro in crisp whites but we’re lucky that he never made it pro. Brue has innumerable, often unexpected interests that infuse his music with a transcendent quality some singer-songwriters only wish they could harness.
Brue unabashedly credits fusing those perfect notes and lyrics to his superpower of constant observation. “I’ve always been an observer. I like watching things happen around me and thinking about them,” he says. “Every week or so, I make a list of things that have either inspired me or just make me feel good to set the vibe for the week.” His desire to experience every facet of what life has to offer gives him a fascinating eye for the strange—especially in one so young—that imbues his music with the raw appeal of Johnny Cash or Gillian Welch.
Brue credits the folk/Americana/rock scene in Utah with giving him everything from role models in his youth to connecting him with incredible musicians he is proud to call friends today. But being a young (read: under 21) musician in this state has some unique challenges.
“It really has been challenging for me here. It’s time to change the liquor laws so that young performers can work when they have the opportunity,” he says. “A year or so ago, I was on tour with my label mate, Justin Townes Earle, and we went to almost every corner of the country playing in all kinds of venues, but the one place I couldn’t play with him was here in Utah, my home state.”
Utah should take note because Brue is blowing up (we’re pretty grateful he wanted to do a Small Lake City Concert for us). Heck, this kid was dubbed an “Americana Prodigy” by no less than Rolling Stone magazine. Through it all, he focuses intently on his music and continues his self-described search to find the words and sounds to take him on the next step in his journey. Whatever Sammy Brue encounters next, he’s definitely up for it: “I want to live a fantasy. I want to live the weirdest paragraph known to man.” —Ashley Szanter
See more Small Lake City Concerts here. Salt Lake Magazine’s Small Lake City Concerts were produced by Natalie Simpson of Beehive Photography.
The Children's Hour Bookstore in Salt Lake City has new book recommendations for the whole family this spring.
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Legislative boundaries sound boring. Get about two sentences in talking about them, and most people’s eyes will glaze over. Hey, you. Wake up, please. See what I mean? That dull veneer is kind of the point because it keeps people from paying attention to something that matters a lot: representation in government. As happens every 10 years, legislative districts were redrawn in late 2021. Summit County was split between four State House districts (4, 23, 59 and 68) and two State Senate districts (3 and 20). The County was also split into two Congressional Districts at the federal level (the first and third). Summit County residents of all stripes should be miffed as the community’s influence will likely be diminished.
“It’s certainly worse than before, but we’ve been gerrymandered for 10 years in Summit County,” says Summit County Democratic Party Chair Katy Owens. “It just represents a further effort to dilute the voice of Summit County voters.” Owens’ counterpart, Summit County Republican Party Vice-chair (acting as temporary chair) Karen Ballash did not respond to requests for comment.
Without question, winners and losers emerge after each round of redistricting. However, in this instance, it seems the will of a majority of Utah voters was deliberately subverted and Summit County is in the crosshairs of the skewed redistricting effort. A statewide ballot initiative in 2018 passed by 7,000 votes asking for the creation of a non-partisan commission to draw political boundaries. In drawing the new boundaries, the Utah Legislature completely ignored the recommendations and maps created by the independent commission.
“The commission was very open and transparent, taking feedback from public meetings and posting maps during the process,” Owens says. “The legislature dropped their map on a Friday night at 11 p.m. and voted for it on a Monday without any public input. It was clearly drawn as incumbent protection.”
So, what does redistricting mean for representation? It’s difficult to pin down exactly, but Summit County appears to be in a representative black hole. “We don’t have a single representative who lives here in Summit County despite how populous the county is and how influential it is to the state’s economy,” Owens says. “But some people do argue that we have numerous people in the legislature who could advocate for the county and a single representative may not have much bargaining power,” she concedes.
For the next decade, Summit County will be represented in small slices. Time will tell how the community will be impacted, but in the meantime, it’s difficult to argue with voters who feel slighted.
The Federal Split
Voters in Park City are now part of the third congressional district for the first time since the 1990 census. Unincorporated Park City voters including residents of Snyderville, Jeremy Ranch, Pinebrook and Summit Park remain in the first district, splitting what has been a relatively cohesive voting bloc in two. Leaders of both political parties have long held the county would hold more influence if included in a single district.
Get more Park City news from Salt Lake magazine.
The word “craft” is an oft overused descriptor for breweries, but it couldn’t be more apt when applied to Offset Bier. Upon walking into the brewery and taproom the first thing you’ll notice is the unmistakable scent of mashing grains, fermenting wort and I honestly don’t know what else that brewery smell is, but it’s just really good and lets you know delicious beer is being made just out of sight. You can tell you’re in for something that’s not just tasty, but also unique to a place.
That’s exactly what Conor Brown and Patrick Bourque were aiming for when they conceived of Offset. The duo wanted to provide a space in Park City where people could enjoy the product of their community right in the heart of their community. It’s part of a by-locals-for-local ethos that’s as refreshing as the brews on tap and is reflected in almost every aspect of the business.
Offset’s beers aren’t widely available. You have to come to source at the brewery itself to buy beers to take home, and they’re only available to enjoy at a handful of local establishments in Park City. That’s because Brown and Bourque are focused on quality and creativity that reflects the place they live rather than widespread distribution.
The brewery’s rotating handful of beers range from modern experimental hop-focused brews that highlight creative and bold recipes to traditional European-style lagers that emphasize meticulous brewing processes. Right now, visitors to Offset can try varieties from the Riwaka Single Hop Pale Ale to the German Style Altbier Brown Ale to the Extroversa Fruited Quick Sour. And where else are you going to get a Kölsch served from a traditional German gravity keg?
The Offset taproom is open only during traditional après hours from Wednesday to Sunday, making it pretty clear they value catering to a core group of local skiers, bikers and runners. One of the Offset’s first house beers was a pale ale called Dopo, which is Italian for after. “It’s aromatic but light enough to enjoy a couple after running or skiing,” Brown says. The brewery even organizes a weekly Thursday ski or run group, where people of all abilities are invited to meet up for a jog from the brewery or to skin up Park City Mountain at 5:30 p.m. before heading back to the tap room to enjoy a couple beverages.
Stop into the new taproom for small-batch, locally produced beer that will blow away any misconception about Utah brewing culture. You can view Offset’s current tap list as well as their list of beers to go on the brewery’s website.
1755 Bonanza Dr., 435-659-7517
Read more on drinking in Utah.
