Author: Mary Heers

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May Day in Mendon

May Day in Mendon: Mendon May Pole Courtesy & © Mary Heers, Photographer
Mendon May Pole
Courtesy & © Mary Heers, Photographer

Mendon Glacier Lilly Courtesy & © Mary Heers, Photographer
Mendon Glacier Lilly
Courtesy & © Mary Heers, Photographer

Mendon Glacier Lilly Close Up Courtesy & © Mary Heers, PhotographerMendon Glacier Lilly Close Up
Courtesy & © Mary Heers, Photographer

Mary's Neighbor's May Queen Crown Courtesy & &copy' Mary Heers, PhotographerMary’s Neighbor’s May Queen Crown
Courtesy & &copy’ Mary Heers, Photographer

Never have I seen the coming of spring celebrated with more flair than Mendon’s May Day.

On the first Saturday in May, Maypoles with 20 foot long ribbons appear in the Mendon town square. By ten o’clock a couple hundred residents have gathered around the poles. A piano in the gazebo strikes the first chords and the May Queen and her entourage step around the corner of the church and onto the green. Suddenly everybody gathered in the square begins to sing. “Come to the woodlands, away, away”. Most people know the whole song by heart.

The queen is crowned and the real showstopper, the braiding of the Maypoles, begins. Mendon’s young girls, grades 1-5, pick up the ribbons. Braiding the poles is complicated. The girls have been practicing after school three times a week since the beginning of April. Last week I dropped in on one of the practices and counted: 3 Maypoles, 64 girls, and a little bit of chaos. There’s a march, a minuet. More songs. Stepping in, stepping out, kneeling, skipping. The girls bob up and down as they sing ”Apples blossoms swing and sway..”

Mendon is one of Cache Valley’s oldest pioneer towns, tucked up against the Wellsville Mountains. Winters were long and hard, and the coming of spring eagerly awaited. The beginnings of May Day can be traced back to the days when the young girls in the pioneer settlement raced up the hillsides to gather spring wildflowers to put in their hair.

The first May Queen, Seny Sorenson, was crowned with a hand woven wreath of flowers in 1863. Since then, every year, rain or shine, a queen has been crowned in the town square, and the maypoles have been braided with the same songs and dance steps. 160 years, with only a few changes.

The queen’s name is now drawn out of a hat from a pool of the town’s high school juniors. And this year, for the first time ever, the young girls will be getting store bought dresses. In the past, the mothers were expected to sew the matching dresses for their daughters. Not knowing about this tradition, you can imagine how bewildered I was when I had just moved to Mendon and answered a knock on my door. A woman I didn’t know handed me a dress pattern and proceed to say something about altering the interfacing. I was pretty sure she was speaking English, but I couldn’t understand a word she was saying. Luckily my good friend and neighbor quickly brought me up to speed. This wonderful neighbor had actually been Mendon’s May Queen over 50 years ago. “Do you want to see my crown?” she asked as she opened the door to her hall closet. And there it was, a tight ring of pink and white flowers, secured to a tiny satin pillow with a fading ribbon.

I had one more stop to make. I hopped in my car and drove up to the Deep Canyon trailhead high above Mendon. A short way up the trail I found it– a whole hillside covered with curly yellow Glacier Lilies, the “early blooming flowers” from the May Day song “Maying and Straying…” And believe me, this was a sight worth singing about.

This is Mary Heers, and I’m Wild about Springtime in Utah.

Credits:
Photos: Courtesy & Copyright © Mary Heers, Photographer
Featured Audio: Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers AND Courtesy & Copyright © Kevin Colver, https://wildstore.wildsanctuary.com/collections/special-collections/kevin-colver
Text: Mary Heers, https://cca.usu.edu/files/awards/art-and-mary-heers-citation.pdf
Additional Reading: Lyle Bingham, https://bridgerlandaudubon.org/

Additional Reading

Wild About Utah, Mary Heers’ Postings

Mendon May Day, https://www.mendonutah.net/may_day.htm

May Day Celebration, Mendon City, Utah, https://mendoncity.org/may-day-celebration/

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Giant Hole in the Ground

Giant Hole in the Ground: Rio Tinto Kennecott Bingham Canyon Mine Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer
Rio Tinto Kennecott Bingham Canyon Mine
Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer

Bingham Canyon Mine from the International Space Station 2007 Courtesy NASA
Bingham Canyon Mine from the International Space Station 2007. This astronaut photograph ISS015-E-29867 was acquired September 20, 2007, by the Expedition 15 crew with a Kodak 760C digital camera using an 800 mm lens. The image is provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations experiment and the Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, Johnson Space Center. The image in this article has been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast.
Courtesy NASA

Kennecott Mine from Outside Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer Kennecott Mine from Outside
Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer

Years ago, I was flying in an airplane headed into Salt Lake when the captain came on the intercom and suggested we look out the windows. Below us was a truly huge hole in the ground. This was my first look at the Kennecott open pit copper mine.

In 1847, when Brigham Young and the first Mormon pioneers arrived in the Utah territory, this bit of land we were flying over was an 8,000ft mountain, part of the range the Native Americans called the Oquirrhs. Back then two brothers were grazing their cattle in these mountains when they noticed some gold that had washed down the mountain and settled in a sandy stream bed. They took the gold and showed it to Brigham Young. Brigham Young told them to “forget it.” Growing food for the survival of the settlers was his top priority.

The Bingham boys went back to grazing cattle, but by 1873 the news had gotten out that there was gold in these hills. People started to move in, many of them recent immigrants. The Finns and Swedes settled up Carr Canyon, while the Austrians and Slavs settled near the Highland Boy mine. The town of Bingham grew up around 30 saloons, its many brothels , as well as many boarding houses where single men rented a room and took their meals. I really enjoyed reading a memoir written by Violet Boyce, whose Aunt Becky ran one of these boarding houses. She tells us the softer side of life in the early mining town, like one miner, Pete Kalvos, who had a beloved pet magpie. Now this bird was the chief suspect when Aunt Becky’s thimble, teaspoons, and jeweled pin disappeared. Aunt Becky got so mad she took the bird outside and told it to “git.” Joe moped around the house until the bird returned. Luckily by then Aunt Becky had cooled off, because some repair work on the chimney had revealed the magpie nest and all the missing items.

Everything changed in Bingham Canyon in 1906 when new entrepreneurs and engineers decided the real future of the canyon was in copper, and the best way to get it out was with an open pit mine. Dynamite started blasting away the hillsides. Violet writes how vases were knocked off shelves and pictures turned sideways on the walls in her house. As the mine kept expanding, the walls of her house crumbled. Eventually the whole town was devoured.

Nowadays, if you go to the Visitor Center at the Kennecott mine, you can stand on the viewing platform on the upper lip of the huge bowl-shaped pit. It’s a breath taking 2 ½ miles wide, ¾ of a mile deep – and still getting bigger. Trucks the size of two-story houses lumber up the inside of the bowl carrying away the newly blasted debris. It now takes 2 tons of this mix of rock, dirt and ore to eventually produce 9 pounds of pure copper.

The story of this giant hole in the ground is woven into Utah’s history, but it’s also left its mark on our planet Earth. The Kennecott open pit copper mine is one of a handful of man-made structures that can be seen from the International Space Station as it passes over us, 250 miles away.

This is Mary Heers and I’m Wild About Utah

Credits:
Photos: Courtesy NASA and Mary Heers,
Featured Audio: Courtesy & © Anderson, Howe and Wakeman
Text: Mary Heers, https://cca.usu.edu/files/awards/art-and-mary-heers-citation.pdf
Additional Reading: Lyle Bingham, https://bridgerlandaudubon.org/

Additional Reading

Wild About Utah, Mary Heers’ Wild About Utah Postings

Crump, Scott, The Oquirrh Mountains, Utah History Encyclopedia, https://www.uen.org/utah_history_encyclopedia/o/OQUIRRH_MOUNTAINS.shtml

Strack, Don, Years of Discovery, to 1863, Railroads and Mining in Utah’s Bingham Canyon, Discovery to 1863, UtahRails.net, https://utahrails.net/bingham/bingham-discovery.php

The Bingham Mine – Our National Historic Landmark, Rio Tinto, https://www.kennecott-groundbreakers.com/stories/the-bingham-mine—our-national-historic-landmark

Milligan, Mark, GeoSights: A View of the World’s Deepest Pit – Bingham Canyon Mine Overlook, Utah Geological Survey (UGS), Utah Department of Natural Resources, Survey Notes, v. 49 no. 2, May 2017, https://geology.utah.gov/map-pub/survey-notes/geosights/geosights-bingham-canyon-mine/

Bingham Canyon Mine, USA, Captured 20 April 2021, by the MSI instrument, aboard the Sentinel-2 satellite, NASA, https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/news/worldview-image-archive/bingham-canyon-mine-usa

1904 to 2022, Bingham Mine through the Years, https://youtu.be/yvoQuH9C2d0?si=wQhMZWXYs-M-zclW

Massive landslide at Utah copper mine generates wealth of geophysical data, GSA Today, The Geological Society of America, https://rock.geosociety.org/net/gsatoday/archive/24/1/pdf/gt1401.pdf

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Stop. Look. Listen to the voices of our young people

Which Side of Air Quality do You want to Live on? Courtesy: 2025 Utah High School Clean Air Marketing Contest Copyright Maria Yellowman, Artist, of Whitehorse High School (part of the Navajo Nation)
Which Side of Air Quality do You Want to Live on?
Courtesy: 2025 Utah High School Clean Air Marketing Contest
Copyright Maria Yellowman, Artist, of Whitehorse High School (part of the Navajo Nation)

Smoke Thru Drive-Thru When You Eat Out Courtesy: 2025 Utah High School Clean Air Marketing Contest Copyright Sander Ounesonepraseuth, Artist, Granger High School
Smoke Thru Drive-Thru When You Eat Out
Courtesy: 2025 Utah High School Clean Air Marketing Contest
Copyright Sander Ounesonepraseuth, Artist, Granger High School

“Please, Please, Please” parody of Sabrina Carpenter, Courtesy 2025 Utah High School Clean Air Marketing Contest, Copyright Lila Mortensen, Artist, Ridgeline High School Please, Please, Please Don’t Idle by Me, “Please, Please, Please” parody of Sabrina Carpenter
Courtesy 2025 Utah High School Clean Air Marketing Contest
Copyright Lila Mortensen, Artist, Ridgeline High School

Each fall, for the last 10 years, a challenge has gone out to Utah and Southern Idaho’s high school students to create a poster that sends a strong message to the rest of us that the air we breathe is dangerously dirty and we need to do something about it. Judges were called in, and by February the more than 1,000 entries were whittled down to 61 finalists. These posters were then taped to the glass walls in the foyer of USU’s art museum for all of us to come see.

The first poster that stopped me in my tracks was a drawing of our round planet teetering on a steep incline. The planet was split into 2 halves – one with blue water, green lands, a leafy tree, a bicycle. On the other half, all black and white, a car, a cigarette, a dead tree. A rope tied to the planet was wound around the chest of a young boy, who was straining to hold the globe at this dangerous tipping point. I felt the tension in the rope and the uncertainty of the outcome. There was no one in the poster coming to help the boy.

I moved on to the poster of a kid sitting at a bus stop, waiting, while a car passing in front of him was spewing clouds of exhaust. I felt a sharp pang – this kid seemed so vulnerable. We now know that over 50% of the dangerous particles trapped in our winter cold air inversions is caused by emissions from gasoline powered cars. And although it is unreasonable to ask people to stop driving, we can ask people to turn off their engines whenever possible.

“Stop Idling” was in fact the main message presented by these posters – in many incredibly creative ways.

In one poster a troubled young child stared out at us from a car creeping along in a fast-food line-up. Up ahead we saw another car, license plate IDLE, spitting three messages out the tailpipe: “permanently altered,” “whole world,” “seems to change.” Overhead the sign read “Smoke-Thru- Drive-Thru. And at the pick up window, next to the picture of fries, was the shocking message: “These fries are to die for.”

Another poster showed a kid playing a video game in his home. Outside the window you could just make in the hazy atmosphere a car warming up in the driveway, tailpipe puffing away. The message running along the bottom of the poster read, “Turn the Key B4 It’s Game Over.”

Another poster showed a close up of the mirror on the side of car. A kid in a gas mask was emerging from a thick cloud of black smoke, along with the reminder: “Objects in the rear-view mirror are closer than you think.”

Certainly the football player in another poster looked a lot less glamorous in a gas mask.

And finally, a picture of a girl with long blonde hair showed her turning to say something to us, but her face was hidden behind a thick plume of smoke. Her words, however, came through loud and clear:” PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, Don’t Idle by me.”

This is Mary Heers and I’m Wild About Utah.

Credits:
Photos: Courtesy Mary Heers,
Featured Audio: Courtesy & © Shalayne Smith-Needham,
Text: Mary Heers, https://cca.usu.edu/files/awards/art-and-mary-heers-citation.pdf
Additional Reading: Lyle Bingham, https://bridgerlandaudubon.org/

Additional Reading

Wild About Utah, Mary Heers’ Wild About Utah Postings

USU Extension Celebrates 10 Years of Clean Air Contest With Exhibits, Community Art Day, Utah State TODAY, Utah State University, January 29, 2025, https://www.usu.edu/today/story/usu-extension-celebrates-10-years-of-clean-air-contest-with-exhibits-community-art-day

Utah High School Clean Air Marketing Contest, USU Extension Sustainability, Utah State University, https://cleanaircontest.usu.edu/

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Changing the Landscape of a
Northern Corner of Utah

NGC-ATK Landscape, West of Corinne, UT Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer
NGC-ATK Landscape, West of Corinne, UT
Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer
As I was driving through Logan Canyon, I caught the news that the Brigham City Museum of Art was opening a new exhibit called “Rural to Rockets.”

“Irresistible,” I muttered as I swung my car off the highway at the Brigham City exit. This promised to be the story of a major change in the landscape of one corner of Northern Utah.

Brigham City’s story began in 1854 when 50 pioneer families in Salt Lake committed to build a new city based on the co-operative movement. They promised to pool their resources and work together for the good of Zion. They agreed “not to be greedy for higher wages,” and “ask only for reasonable return on investment.”

The 50 families brought cattle and sheep with them. From the cattle hides they made boots and shoes for sale in their co-op store. The wool from their sheep was milled into blankets and clothes.

They purchased a small cotton farm in Southern Utah and took turns going down to tend it. The women who wanted silk raised mulberry bushes to feed their silkworms. During the cold weather these women sewed the silkworm cocoons into the lining of their dresses and wore them next to their bodies to keep the cocoons warm. Eliza Forsgren took her hand woven big beautiful black silk dress to the Chicago World Fair in 1893 and came home with a gold medal.

Brigham City settled into being one of Utah’s successful small rural towns.

Everything was upended in 1957 when Thiokol Corporation bought 10,000 acres nearby to build their new rocket manufacturing plant and test facility. Engineers and rocket scientists and their families moved in. 187 homes were built in one year. The school was overwhelmed and went on half days as new schools were hurriedly built. At its peak, Thiokol employed 6,000 workers.

I got back in my car to go take a look at what this rocket facility looks like today. As it came into sight, I was immediately struck by the substantial fence – 10 feet high chain link with 3 strands of barbed wire on top. The fence ran across the hillsides for hundreds of acres before disappearing out of sight. Inside the fence I saw windowless box shaped buildings dotting the hillsides, and a few whips of smoke.

NGC-ATK Rocket Garden, West of Corinne, UT Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer
NGC-ATK Rocket Garden
West of Corinne, UT
Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer
Outside the headquarters of the new owners of the facility, Northrop-Grumman, I found a small outdoor museum called a “Rocket Garden.” It included a full-size model of a former NASA launch rocket and an older Intercontinental Missile.

But the really stunning surprise was a whole new look of the landscape that pointed to a bright future. A giant solar farm had moved in next door.

This is Mary Heers and I’m Wild About Utah

Credits:
Photos: Courtesy Mary Heers,
Featured Audio: Courtesy & © Anderson, Howe and Wakeman
Text: Mary Heers, https://cca.usu.edu/files/awards/art-and-mary-heers-citation.pdf
Additional Reading: Lyle Bingham, https://bridgerlandaudubon.org/

Additional Reading

Wild About Utah, Mary Heers’ Wild About Utah Postings

Boam, Rod, Rocket Garden is a bonus for Golden Spike National Park visitors, Cache Valley Daily, Cache Valley Media Group, Mar 26, 2019, https://www.cachevalleydaily.com/news/local/rocket-garden-is-a-bonus-for-golden-spike-national-park-visitors/article_fe49306a-8ab6-5c32-a2b8-7acf6f40640e.html

Northrop-Grumman in Utah, https://www.northropgrumman.com/careers/northrop-grumman-in-utah

Udy, Boyd, Fifty Years at the Rocket Ranch, Life at Northrop Grumman, https://www.northropgrumman.com/life-at-northrop-grumman/fifty-years-at-the-rocket-ranch

Rural to Rockets, Box Elder County Takes Off, Brigham City Museum, https://brighamcitymuseum.org/event/rural-to-rockets-box-elder-county-takes-off