“A crescent shadow starts eating away the sun, but nothing spectacular happens for quite awhile. Then, just as the eclipse is about to begin, the sky darkens like twilight, birds stop singing and get ready to roost—they think night is coming. A shadow comes rushing across the landscape and when you look up, it’s like a science fiction film: The sun is a black disk with filmy spooky light streaming out from it. It’s dark in the middle of the day—almost a sacred feeling.” Joe Bauman, a retired journalist, writer and local amateur astronomer, describes the first eclipse he witnessed. Since then, he has experienced four more.
On August 21 the sun will disappear from the sky in much of the country during the first total eclipse of the sun in 38 years—the first to cross the United States since 1918. The swath of total shadow will run diagonally from Oregon, where the sun will rise while totally eclipsed, southeast to Georgia. The whole event will affect the U.S. for only about an hour and a half; at the center line of the path, the sun will be dark for about two minutes.
People travel from all over the world to view an eclipse, gambling that the weather will be clear enough to actually see it. In Hawaii in 1991, eclipse tourists only saw the clouds get darker.
Utahns don’t have far to travel to not see the sun this August: Parts of Idaho, Wyoming and Oregon are all within the 70-mile-wide path of totality. In Salt Lake City itself, the eclipse will be 91 percent total. “But a partial eclipse is nothing like a total eclipse,” says Bauman. “It’s one of the most beautiful things you can see in Nature.”
Bauman has some tips for viewing the great absence.
– Give yourself plenty of time to get there—traffic could keep you from seeing the phenomenon. You don’t want to be sitting in your car when the sun goes dark.
– Don’t ever look at eclipse with your naked eye until totality—it can damage your eyes. Wear eclipse glasses or use a pinhole viewer.
– If you don’t have a filter, don’t take a photograph until it’s total.
– Look away instantly when you see the “diamond ring” effect as the eclipse is ending. That’s the brilliant light flash as the sun’s corona is uncovered.
– Most importantly, don’t lose the wonder of the moment in the recording of it.
You’ll want to be somewhere in the yellow band on eclipse day.
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High school sweethearts, Meghan and Stafford Tingey were married in October at the LDS Temple in Salt Lake City. Meghan shares some of her favorite wedding day moments as well as a bit of planning advice for future brides. “I used a wedding planner app to help me plan my wedding day. You can find everything from wedding dresses to florists and create checklists to plan everything,” she says.
“I chose a florist from the app who had great reviews and was reasonably priced. We had our consultation and our colors and everything planned. I had this weird feeling so, I didn’t have the florist drop off the flowers on our wedding day. Instead, I asked if we could pick them up the day before and when I got the flowers they weren’t what I ordered. My colors were maroon, greenery, white and blush. I got hot pink roses and babies breath. So, my bridesmaids and I went to the grocery store, chose flowers and stayed up until 3 AM putting arrangements together!” Meghan says. “Everything else turned out really great.”
“The only food I ate on my wedding day was a grilled cheese. After our luncheon at the Joseph Smith Memorial building, my photographer and I were hungry so, we ditched everyone and went to In and Out Burger. My favorite images from my wedding day were from that moment,” she says.
“I can’t remember a lot about my wedding day. It was such a blur. I do wish I would’ve spent more time dancing,” Meghan says. “Looking back, I would’ve done more little things with my bridesmaids to create those memories like going to the movies, sleepovers or hair braiding.”
“I want to do it all over again. I loved everything about it. Despite the flower mishap, it was the best day ever. I got to spend that special moment with everyone I love. We were able to celebrate mine and Stafford’s love for each other and you can’t get much better than that,” she says.
Locally-harvested cuisine from Utah’s top five caterers.
Farm to tableisn’t new. For years, menus have boasted local food for good reasons: it is undeniably fresh, environmentally friendly (saves transportation costs) and supportive of locally-owned business.
What is new is entire wedding menus filled top-to-bottom with locally-grown gourmet offerings, not just a single dish. From appetizers and salads to entrees and desserts, five Utah caterers prep their favorite farm-fresh dishes.
“If you’re looking to source locally for your menu, spend a day at the farmer’s market,” Cuisine Unlimited’s Derek Deitsch says. “Couples can see all the different produce available from local growers.” But keep in mind seasonality, he warns. “What you see at the start of summer might not be fresh later in the year, so ask [your caterer] what will be in season leading up to your wedding day.”
Pictured:
Micro lettuce blend with pine nuts and grape tomatoes, dried olives and wildflower-encrusted goat cheese
Huckleberry spritzer with Utah honey panna cotta, raspberry compote and fresh honeycomb garnished with blueberries
Pictured:
Roasted Utah elk topped with fresh huckleberry salsa with mini squash and celery-root puree, served with Champagne
Our fashion experts here at Utah Bride & Groom magazine, have teamed up with local designers and stylists to bring you the hottest bridal fashion trends for 2018.
Ashley and Jeremy, who were married in the Newport Beach LDS temple, first found each other thanks to a mutual friend, a fast food restaurant, and their undergrad program. “We met at Chipotle in Orem, UT. We had a mutual friend who introduced us. I guess, Jeremy saw me and wanted my number, and the friend he was sitting at the table with knew me,” Ashley says. “I was going to school at UVU. He’s from Arizona and was attending BYU at the time.”
“He called me after a little while and then we texted for a long time before we went on our first date a few months after we met,” she says. “We went to the Cheesecake Factory in Salt Lake, then walked around City Creek. We started hanging out a month after our first date with friends and then we began officially dating last June. He came home to Newport Beach with me for Christmas where he surprised me with a proposal at the beach the day before Christmas Eve, December 23.”
“My sister is a photographer and she asked us to do a shoot for her portfolio. Of course, we chose the beach. It was 7:30 in the morning and I remember that the light was perfect outside,” Ashley says. “She told me to walk toward the ocean, so I did and when I turned around Jeremy was down on one knee. My parents popped out after he proposed. I had no idea they were all in on it together!”
“As far as wedding planning went, everything fell into place perfectly. I had a lot of people who came together to help me. It was easy. I knew my photographer and videographer from Utah and nothing went wrong. I didn’t over plan and it just fell into place. It felt like a dream. It felt magical and everything went perfectly. It was amazing,” she says.
“Jeremy was emotional and a little teary eyed. My favorite part of our wedding was being with my family and being able to just be with Jeremy,” Ashley says. “While we were getting married and looking into each other’s eyes, it was like we were in our own little world.”
Ashley and Jeremy Mohn were married June 10, 2017 in the Newport Beach LDS temple. Their reception was celebrated with friends and family in Ashley’s backyard in Corona, California.
Heather, lilac, wisteria, orchid, thistle and bellflower. With their naturally alluring hues, it’s no wonder these flowers are names of shades of soft purple. “With the range of colors flying off the runways, I’m so happy to finally see color in weddings,” La Fete’s Allison Baddley says. The planner-slash-designer showcases a bouquet filled with tree peonies, frilly tulips, clematis, frittilaria, anemone, lilac, sweet peas, scabiosa, iris, French lavender, allium, thistle and columbine. “I prefer to focus on one element—such as a couple’s favorite color or a detail from a venue like wood or leather—and weave it throughout the wedding, much like an interior designer does to a home,” Baddley says. But what about those brides hung up on a multi-colored wedding? “Even when a bride says, my colors are navy, pink and white, I try to focus on one of these colors as a focal point.”
Georgia and Lino —who spent their nuptials in the Bahamas—have their Utah based athletic teams, friends, and a dare to thank for their worlds colliding.”We were both from out of state when we met. I’m from Massachusetts and Lino is from California. I was here going to school at the University of Utah and on the Red Rocks women’s gymnastics team. Lino was here and on the U.S. speed skating team,” Georgia says.
“We met downtown while we were both out with groups of friends and we ran into each other. My friends and I had actually dared one of our friends to go talk to his friend and then he and I just hit it off,” she says. “We took it slow for a few months, we didn’t know what our futures held at that point and we were both trying to figure out our lives. I was a senior in college and he was on the speed skating team.”
“And then we started getting a little more serious…and then it got very serious,” Georgia says.”I’m not extravagant or showy and I didn’t want a big thing where everyone is watching. So, we took our dogs out for a walk and he proposed to me while we were out with our little family, just the 4 of us. I didn’t know it was going to happen that day, because it was his birthday and we were celebrating him…”
“We had plans to go out to dinner. I knew he wanted to propose, because he’d asked my parents for permission, but I didn’t know for sure when it was going to be,” she says.”We were married July 1, 2017 in the Bahamas at a Resort—it was a lot of fun, we had a gorgeous stay. When we first got there it was raining for the first few days, but on the day of the wedding it was clear blue skies and beautiful outside.”
My wedding day was a blur I remember I wasn’t nervous until I started walking over to the venue with my bridesmaids.””When my dad started walking me down the isle, I saw Lino’s eyes start to water up,” Georgia says. “I try to put a defense up so that I don’t cry… I just started laughing while he was almost crying! But by the end of the ceremony I did tear up.”
“I think that it’s so important to just sit back and enjoy, just take it all in. Which is really difficult, because of all of the excitement and emotions. It’s good to soak in the moment and appreciate that everybody is there for you and your future spouse,” says Georgia. “My favorite part of my wedding day was switching off from my dad to him [Lino]. I just remember thinking, this is real now.”
Lino Innocenzie and Georgia (Dabritz) Innocenzie were married July 1, 2017 in the Bahamas.
Our first glimmer that we had passed through a secret door was a road sign on the two-lane blacktop that said “No fossils in this part of Monument.” How often do you encounter a sign telling what’s not to be found in a park or monument? A better sign, as we soon learned, would have been “Jaw-dropping vistas and solitude in this part of Monument.”
Call Dinosaur National Monument the Rodney Dangerfield of Utah’s national wonders—in a state with five iconic national parks, its heart-stopping magnificence gets no respect.
National monuments, a public-land concept that even Utah politicians can’t seem to grasp, have been at top of mind lately. Utahns are riveted over the controversy surrounding the rollback of the state’s newest monuments, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. Yet somehow, the wonders of 330-square-mile Dinosaur National Monument, located uncomfortably close to Utah’s northeast drilling fields, has flown under the radar for more than a century.
Like most things, it comes down to publicity. The Utah Tourism Office bombards tourists with clever marketing campaigns on the state’s “Mighty Five” national parks—Arches, Canyonlands, Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef and Zion. Yes, the M5 are impressive, but Dinosaur, the unsung monument, spreads across 200,000 acres. That’s six times the size of Bryce Canyon, more than twice the size of Arches and fully equal in expanse to Capitol Reef.
Much of the attention deficit is because adventure seekers, even three hours away in Salt Lake City, think Dinosaur National Monument is just its “Wall of Bones,” a rock face with more than 1,500 partially exposed fossils from the Jurassic Period. The spectacular Quarry Exhibit is, of course, particularly fascinating for families wanting to plant the seeds of paleontology, geology and history in young minds. But Dinosaur National Monument is much more.
The Earl of the Dinosaurs
Paleontologist Earl Douglass at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh was given a mission worthy of Indiana Jones: “Dig up dinosaur bones east of Vernal.”A few weeks later, Douglass was hiking the rocky ridges in northeast Uintah County on Aug. 17, 1909, when he saw a rock formation that had an uncanny resemblance to a sauropod dinosaur’s tail, sticking out of a rock ledge. It was, in fact, what it looked like, although the jury is still out on whether it should be called Apatosaurus or Brontosaurus (“Thunder Lizard”) as it had been when Douglass spotted it.
“It was a beautiful sight,” said Douglass, who would soon be joined at the excavation by his family and would not stop hunting the area’s 149-million-year-old fossils for the next 14 years. At this point in the story, grade-school-age dinosaur nerds usually black out in ecstasy.
Since Douglass’s sauropod, 800 sites have been excavated in the monument, turning up dinosaur fossils from the vicious 28-foot-long Allosaurus and Deinonychus of the “terrible claw” to Abydosaurus (another sauropod). To protect this paleontological treasure trove, President Woodrow Wilson designated 200,000 acres around it as a national monument in 1914. And other than President Barack Obama refurbishing the Quarry Exhibit Hall in 2009, nothing else has changed much in the last few million years.
Secret Dinosaur National
Dinosaur National Monument’s fossils make the three-hour drive from Salt Lake City worthwhile. But a more fundamental connection with the region’s geology awaits if you continue east, across the Colorado state line. There you’ll find the other Dinosaur National that straddles the Utah-Colorado line—where it’s cut into crazy layer cakes by rivers.
You’ll encounter vistas and hikes offering views matching any in southern Utah’s much-hyped and over-crowded red-rock country. The best part is that you’ll share your experience with few other visitors. You’ve entered the more than 90 percent of Dinosaur National that is wilderness. The quickest way to scout for hikes and camping is to drive the 31-mile Harpers Corner Road auto tour that begins just beyond the town of Dinosaur, Colorado. Stop at the Canyon Area Visitor Center just off U.S. Rt. 40 for a brief audio-visual program that will orient you to the lonesome side of the park. Pick up a tour guide and get any necessary backcountry permits at the bookstore. And check on talks, walks and stargazing programs. Along Harpers Corner Road, you can pull off at Plug Hat Nature Trailfor a short, quiet hike that will introduce you to the pinyon-and-juniper forest ecosystem.
At the end of the road, a short hike leads to the Harpers Corner overlook where the Green and Yampa rivers meet at Steamboat Rock. Those odd stone disks underfoot? They’re the petrified stumps of ancient trees. A turnoff on Echo Park Road, impassible when wet, will take you past overlooks on the Yampa River, including Wagon Wheel and Castle Park.
The most spectacular way to Dinosaur’s remote canyons is by whitewater rafting on the rivers carving its geology. The Green and Yampa Rivers surge down from the high Rockies, winding their way across plains cutting through the Uinta Mountains. The rivers hose through tight channels amid dizzying cliffs—the result is whitewater rapids with names like Hell’s Half Mile. Families, groups and singles can leave the planning and heavy lifting to professional guides approved by the monument. The trip can be a day float or a multi-day adventure.
Funky Fossiltown
Going into Dinoland or coming out, Vernal is a trip.
When you can’t look at another interpretive plaque about another fossil or hike to yet another fabulous panoramic overlook, head for Vernal. There you’ll find a tourist town trapped, as it were, in 1950s amber, complete with cute pastel dinosaurs of subspecies that not even Hanna-Barbera could dream up. If a pink Brontosaurus with tres-glamorous false eyelashes doesn’t banish your camp fever, a burger with a couple local craft brews will. We recommend Vernal Brewing’s Allosaurus Amber.
At The Utah Field House of Natural History State Park Museum, a fossil garden and kid-friendly hands-on approach educates visitors. The visitor center at the museum offers maps, recreational tips and a staff that knows the local attractions, lodging and restaurants.
Altogether Vernal makes an excellent base camp for Dinosaur National Monument day trips, but note— the town is mostly closed on Sundays.dinoland.com.
Drives & Hikes
Tour of the Tilted Rocks is a 10-mile auto tour route along Cub Creek Road, starting at the Quarry Visitor Center. You’ll pass petroglyph and pictograph panels created by ancient North Americans, exposed geologic layers and Josie Bassett’s cabin, built in 1913. nps.gov/dino
Despite sounding like a Lord of the Rings landmark, the Gates of Lodore is where John Wesley Powell began his float through the canyon in 1869. A short hike from the campground offers expansive views nearly unchanged from when the one-armed Civil War veteran led his expedition down river. nps.gov/dino
Sheep Creek Geological Loop: A gravel road follows Sheep Creek mountains west of Flaming Gorge Reservoir. Interpretive signs along the drive describe geological features and wildlife in the area. It makes a great fall drive. utah.com/scenic-drive/sheep-creek
John Jarvie Historic Ranch: The ranch, along with a general store, a dugout, the stonehouse, the blacksmith shop and a cemetery, offers a window into 1800s pioneer life. utah.com/jarvie-property
McConkie Ranch Petroglyphs: The McConkie trail leads to crisp and larger-than-average petroglyphs. utah.com/hiking/vernal
Ouray National Wildlife Refuge: Just west of Vernal on U.S. 191, a Green River wetland provides an ecosystem for wildlife including Canada geese, grebes, owls, prairie dogs, cranes, muskrats, porcupines, red-tailed hawks and mule deer. fws.gov
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Megan and Jeffrey—who recently tied the knot at San Diego’s LDS Temple—have a church group to thank for their worlds colliding. “We met through the singles activities through our church. We kept running into each other at various events,” Megan says. “He was pretty shy, but his parents really liked me and urged him to date me. Which I think was a little intimidating for him.”
“We spoke every once and awhile and after a couple of months, he finally asked me out,” Megan recalls. “We were just instantly friends, I felt super safe and that’s what drew me to him, emotionally and physically. It was an immediate connection for both of us. Our first date, we went up Provo canyon to go stargazing and he brought a high powered telescope and we were looking at the stars.”
“Eventually, we went ring shopping and I found the ring I wanted from a local jeweler. Obviously, I knew he was going to propose, because we had talked about getting married before,” Megan says.
Jeff picked me up one day and with a worried look on his face he said, ‘They sold the ring.’ But I didn’t quite buy his story. It turns out he’d actually bought the ring, but he kept it a secret from me for two weeks.
He asked me if we could do Valentine’s day early, he wanted to take me up the canyon. But he kept asking me if I was going to get work off early, so I had a feeling that something was going on.”
“He picked me up and brought his spotting scope and he told me that we were going scouting for elk. As he was looking through the spotting scope, I could see something in the distance and thought it was a road sign of some sort on the side of the hill.”
“He told me to look through the spotting scope. When I did there was a sign that read, ‘Megan will you marry me’ and there was a bouquet of flowers sitting below it.”
“I was so excited, I didn’t know what to say. I just turned around and he was on his knee. I said yes.”
Megan and Jeffrey were married on June 17th in San Diego at the San Diego LDS Temple. They were joined by friends and family in a beautiful backyard reception.
The Earl of the Dinosaurs
Secret Dinosaur National
Funky 
Drives & Hikes
