The Front Arrives
Utah's Wasatch Front is becoming a national market. In a compressed five-year window, the corridor between Ogden and Provo is acquiring the pieces every major metro is built around — an NHL franchise, an MLB-ready ballpark, a city built from scratch, a canyon-mouth amphitheater, and an aerospace boom — all racing toward the 2034 Winter Olympics.
For most of the last century, the Wasatch Front has been a place the country flew over to get to its skiing, drove through to get to its national parks, or admired from a polite distance as the pretty corridor between the mountains and the lake. A regional story. A nice one. Not a national one. That era is ending.
What’s happening here right now — across pro sports, master-planned development, entertainment infrastructure, aerospace and tech, and the Olympic spotlight returning in 2034 — is not a string of unrelated announcements. It is the simultaneous arrival of the pieces every national-market city is built around, compressed into a five-year window, executed by a small group of families and institutions who appear to have decided, more or less at the same moment, to stop waiting their turn. The Wasatch Front isn’t asking to be taken seriously anymore. It’s making that question moot.
CHAPTER 1
Major League
Start with the loudest piece, because the loudest piece is also the clearest. In April 2024, Ryan Smith — owner of the Utah Jazz — closed an agreement with the NHL to acquire the assets of the Arizona Coyotes and bring professional hockey to Salt Lake City. By that fall, the Utah Hockey Club was playing its inaugural NHL season at the Delta Center. In May 2025, after a fan-voted naming process, the team became the Utah Mammoth. In April of this year, in their second season, the Mammoth made the Stanley Cup Playoffs, securing a first-round series against the Vegas Golden Knights and selling out their playoff plaza outside the arena. On December 31, 2026, the NHL will stage the Winter Classic at Rice-Eccles Stadium — the Mammoth hosting the Colorado Avalanche outdoors, in front of a national broadcast audience, on the same campus the Winter Olympics return to in 2034.
While that’s happening on the ice, Smith Entertainment Group is mid-way through a three-phase, ground-up transformation of the Delta Center itself, converting it from a single-purpose NBA building into a true dual-sport arena — the kind of building that anchors markets like New York, Chicago, Denver, and Los Angeles. Suite renovations on Level 4 begin this summer and continue through 2027. The arena that hosted Stockton-to-Malone in the 1990s is being rebuilt around it for a national audience that didn’t exist when the building opened in 1991.
Two miles west, a different family is making a different bet — at a different scale. In October 2025, the Larry H. Miller Company broke ground on the Power District, a 100-acre mixed-use development on Salt Lake City’s west side anchored, at first, by a new 10-story, 300,000-square-foot Rocky Mountain Power campus. The bigger play, the one the renderings have always been about, is the Major League Baseball stadium that would sit alongside the Jordan River once MLB decides to expand. The Miller family, through Gail Miller’s Big League Utah consortium, has committed $3.5 billion in private investment to the project. Steve Starks, the company’s CEO, has said publicly they want shovels in the ground on the stadium itself within twelve months. MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred has tied any expansion to first resolving the Athletics’ and Rays’ stadium situations, and has said he wants the next markets settled before he steps down in January 2029. Salt Lake City and Nashville are widely understood to be the two frontrunners when that conversation gets real.
The remarkable thing is not that one family is building a hockey market and another is building a baseball market. The remarkable thing is that they’re doing it at the same time, in the same corridor, with private capital, on parallel timelines that both end inside the same decade. There is no other metro area in the country with two billionaire sports families simultaneously pouring this much money into competing visions of what the same region looks like at the major-league level. The Wasatch Front used to have one professional franchise. It’s about to have three, possibly four, in venues purpose-built for a national audience.
CHAPTER 2
Building a City From Zero
If sports is the loudest piece, The Point is the strangest — and possibly the most consequential. When the Utah State Prison in Draper closed and demolition began on the old facility, the state was left holding 600 contiguous acres of developable land at the literal point of the mountain between Salt Lake and Utah Counties. The Point of the Mountain State Land Authority, created by the Legislature in 2018 to govern the site’s future, has spent the last several years working with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill — the firm behind the Burj Khalifa, the Willis Tower, and One World Trade Center — to design what they are calling the first 15-minute city built from scratch in the United States.
The concept is simple to describe and hard to do. A 15-minute city is one where everything a resident needs to live — housing, work, school, retail, healthcare, parks, transit — sits within a 15-minute walk or bike ride from where they live. The Point’s framework plan commits roughly 40% of developable land to housing (approximately 7,400 residential units), the balance to offices, retail, mixed use, and an innovation district. The state is actively recruiting a “nationally recognized research institution” to anchor that district, and the project targets 35,000 to 40,000 jobs at build-out. About 140 acres of the site are reserved for parks, greenways, and a connected pedestrian and bike network. What gets lost in the master-plan language is the geography. The Point sits roughly halfway between downtown Salt Lake City and downtown Provo. It’s near to existing TRAX light rail. It’s within easy reach of Silicon Slopes, the corridor between Lehi and Draper where Adobe, Ancestry, Qualtrics, and a constellation of venture-backed software companies built their headquarters over the past fifteen years.
When The Point is built out — and “when” is the operative word; ground is already being broken on phase-one parcels — the Wasatch Front will effectively have a third downtown sitting between its first two. Not a suburb. A city. There is no other state currently attempting this. There is no other 600-acre infill site of this scale, on publicly owned land, with state authority backing, being designed from a blank page in the United States. It is a long-term project, measured in decades rather than years. But the design decisions are being made now, the framework is approved, and the first parcels are moving from rendering to permit.
What it means in practice: the Wasatch Front is not just growing. It is choosing — at a structural level, with the full weight of state policy behind it — to grow differently than the rest of the West has grown.
CHAPTER 3
World-Class Entertainment
For more than a hundred years, the entrance to Provo Canyon at the base of Mount Timpanogos has been marked by an active gravel pit. Anyone who has driven up 189 toward Sundance or Heber has seen it — a working scar at the threshold of one of the most beautiful canyons in the American West.
That scar is about to become an amphitheater.
This past May, the Osmond family announced Vesper Amphitheater — a year-round outdoor concert venue planned for a 24-acre parcel at the mouth of Provo Canyon. When the covered section is enclosed, it will seat 8,000. When fully open, it will hold 20,000. Groundbreaking is scheduled for spring 2027. As part of the project, Vesper has committed to ceasing all mining activity at the site, restoring approximately 110 acres of native habitat, adding 20 miles of trail connectivity, preserving fly-fishing access on the Provo River, and pursuing conservation easements with the city of Provo. Dark-sky lighting protocols and advanced sound-mitigation technology are built into the design.
The announcement was led by David Osmond, son of Alan Osmond, and Donny Osmond — David’s uncle and one of the most recognizable entertainers Utah has ever produced. It came one month after Alan Osmond’s death on April 20 at age 76. Alan was the eldest of the Osmond Brothers, the leader of the family group, and a generational presence in Utah’s entertainment history. The Vesper announcement, in its quiet way, is the next generation of the family making a long-term commitment to the place that made them — and doing it in a form built to outlast any of them.
What matters for the broader story: Vesper is the third major venue project announced in the corridor inside eighteen months, stacked alongside the Delta Center’s dual-sport retrofit and the Power District ballpark in waiting. The Wasatch Front has had concert venues — including the 25,000-seat Utah First Amphitheatre in West Valley City. What it hasn’t had is a year-round destination amphitheater, the kind Utah has only known down south at Tuacahn, built here at major-tour scale and able to run straight through winter. Now it will — and it will sit at the entrance of one of the most photographed canyons in the country, on land that was, for a century, an industrial wound.
That’s not a detail. That’s the whole story in miniature.
CHAPTER 4
Air Taxis on an Olympic Clock
Every story in this piece has its own internal timeline. The Mammoth’s playoff arc. The Power District’s stadium readiness. The Point’s master-plan phases. Vesper’s 2027 groundbreaking. Each one moves at the speed its own economics allow.
Underneath all of them is a deadline that doesn’t flex.
In July 2024, the International Olympic Committee selected Salt Lake City–Utah as host of the 2034 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. That decision did something easy to underestimate: it converted a long-term regional ambition into a non-negotiable infrastructure clock. Every venue upgrade, every transit improvement, every hotel expansion, every airport project, every aspirational piece of mobility technology now has a date attached. The date is February 2034. It will not be moved.
The cleanest current example of what that does is happening above the corridor, not on it.
In March of this year, the Utah Department of Transportation announced that Utah had been selected by the FAA to lead a five-state federal pilot of the eVTOL Integration Pilot Program — a three-year effort to test electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (the technical term for what most people will eventually call “air taxis”) and integrate them into the national airspace ahead of full type certification. Utah is leading the partnership in coordination with Oregon, Idaho, Arizona, and Oklahoma. Joby Aviation — one of the two best-capitalized eVTOL manufacturers in the world — is a named industry partner. Flights are expected to commence once final operating approvals are in place, with the government targeting first operations by summer 2026.
The framing from the Utah side has been remarkably direct. Senate President Stuart Adams said at the announcement that he had told the Legislature nearly a decade ago that someday electric air taxis would fly in Utah and that he wanted the state to lead that effort. He declared that day had arrived.The explicit, stated goal: have air taxis functioning to deliver passengers to 2034 Olympic venues.
Aaron Starks, CEO of 47G — representing Utah’s aerospace and defense sector, anchored by Hill Air Force Base — described the use case as Provo to Moab in 36 minutes, Cache Valley to Salt Lake in 18 minutes. Subscription-based commuter pricing is on the table.
This is not a hypothetical. It is a federal pilot program with named manufacturers, named partner states, and a target launch window inside the next year.
Without the Olympics, this project might still exist — Utah’s aerospace cluster is real, with or without the Games. With the Olympics, it has a deadline, a stage, and a global audience watching whether it works. The same logic applies to the new airport, to the Delta Center renovation, to the Power District’s surrounding infrastructure, to the planned expansion of the Salt Lake City light rail system. The Olympics aren’t an event. They’re a forcing function on everything around them. And the things being forced — air taxis, dual-sport arenas, expanded mobility, faster transit — are precisely the things that turn a regional market into a national one.
CHAPTER 5
The Conversation No One Else Is Having
Are we alone in the universe?
There is one more arena in which the Wasatch Front has moved, almost without anyone naming it, from the regional margins to the national center. It does not involve a stadium, a runway, or a ribbon-cutting. It involves a question that, until very recently, serious people did not ask in public.
Are we alone in the universe?
For the last several years, that question has been migrating out of the places it used to live — late-night radio, supermarket tabloids, the back pages of speculative magazines — and into the places it never used to. The front page of the New York Times. Congressional committee rooms. Pentagon press briefings. The offices of United States senators. In April 2020, the Department of Defense formally released three Navy videos showing objects it could not identify. In June 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence delivered a report to Congress examining 144 incidents that could not be explained by any single cause. In July 2023 and again in November 2024, congressional hearings produced sworn testimony from military pilots and intelligence officers describing encounters and programs the public had not previously known existed. In February, President Trump issued a directive calling for transparency on unidentified aerial phenomena. The releases came fast. On May 8, the Pentagon opened a public portal — PURSUE, at war.gov/UFO — and posted a first tranche of declassified UAP files; a second batch followed on May 22, with officials saying more will come on a rolling basis. The files document decades of military sightings that were never explained — infrared footage, sensor locks, mission logs. By the government’s own account they settle nothing about origin; analysts stress the records point to no evidence of anything extraterrestrial. What they mark is the shift itself — the most secretive corner of the government now publishing this material to the open web for anyone to judge. And on June 12, Steven Spielberg — who has shaped how Americans picture alien contact since Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. — released Disclosure Day in IMAX, putting the question in front of a mass audience at the same time the files went public.
The cultural posture has shifted. The eye-rolling has not entirely stopped, but it has quieted.
What has not quieted is Utah’s place in the conversation.
One of the most studied pieces of land in the entire phenomenon sits 150 miles east of Salt Lake City, in the Uintah Basin — 512 acres of high desert that has been under continuous private investigation since 1996. The basin itself, by some accounts, is the most active region for reported unidentified aerial phenomena in the continental United States. Locals call it UFO Alley. The reporting record stretches back to the 1960s, when a Roosevelt schoolteacher named Junior Hicks began systematically documenting sightings from his neighbors. A Utah State University biologist, Frank Salisbury, found the consistency of those accounts credible enough to write a book about them in 1974.
That investigative thread continued for decades, mostly out of public view, until a Las Vegas businessman named Robert Bigelow purchased the property in 1996 and installed a private research team. In 2008, that work expanded into a federally funded program — the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, or AAWSAP — created with $22 million in Department of Defense funding pushed through the Senate by Harry Reid of Nevada. The program ran investigations on the ranch and at other locations from 2008 through 2010. A successor program continued related work through 2012. The existence of both was not publicly known until December 2017, when the New York Times reported it.
In 2016, Bigelow sold the ranch. The buyer was Brandon Fugal — chairman of Colliers International in Utah, one of the most successful commercial real estate executives in the Mountain West, and a man with no public history on the subject. Fugal kept his ownership private for several years, then eventually allowed a documentary crew on site. The result, The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, premiered on the History Channel in March 2020 and became the most-watched non-scripted series in the network’s recent history. Season seven premiered May 19 and is airing through the summer, under the most direct tagline the show has ever used: Are we alone in the universe?
What sets the program apart from a long tradition of paranormal television is its production posture. The team uses radar, scientific instruments, controlled experiments, and rigorous documentation. The investigations are filmed largely in real time. The participants do not pretend to know what they are dealing with. They report what they observe, test what they can test, and acknowledge what they cannot explain. Fugal has stated in extended public interviews — with Shawn Ryan, with Jesse Michels, with others — that what he and his team have documented on the property changed him from a skeptic into someone who believes something genuinely unexplained is taking place there. He has also stated, on the record, that he has not personally taken a dollar related to his involvement with the show.
This matters to the broader story this issue is telling, and it matters in a way that is easy to miss.
The thesis of this piece is that the Wasatch Front is, in a compressed five-year window, acquiring the pieces every national-market city is built around — and that it is doing so through private capital, family commitment, and a willingness to stop waiting its turn. Major-league sports. A city built from a blank page. A world-class amphitheater on land that was, until recently, an industrial wound. Aerospace technology being tested under federal pilot programs. The Olympic Games returning in 2034. These are the visible, ribbon-cutting forms of what arrival looks like.
The disclosure conversation is the invisible form. It is a national arena — and at this moment, an unusually consequential one — in which Utah is not a participant. Utah is at the center. One of the most-studied properties is here. The most-watched television franchise on the subject is filmed here. The private investigator who has poured much of his own money into the question lives here, runs his business here, and has made the ranch the centerpiece of his public profile. The dominant religious tradition headquartered in this state has, since the 1830s, taught that the universe contains inhabited worlds beyond Earth — a theological fact that does not prove anything about the phenomenon, but does shape the cultural soil in which the conversation grows.
That combination — geographic, historical, commercial, cultural — has produced a region in which the question of whether we are alone is, to a degree unusual in American life, simply normal to ask.
If federal disclosure arrives in the form most observers now expect — gradually, through additional Pentagon releases, additional congressional hearings, additional public testimony — Utah will not be a bystander to it. Utah will be in the middle of it. The state has been in the middle of it for longer than most people realize, and the structural reasons for that are not going to change because the news cycle does.
There will be a longer story in these pages, in a future issue, on the full history of the basin, the federal program, and the cultural and religious threads that make Utah’s role in this conversation as durable as it is. For now, the point worth naming is the one this issue has been making in every other section: the arenas in which the Wasatch Front leads nationally are no longer the ones outsiders expect. Some of them are pro sports. Some of them are master-planned cities. Some of them are amphitheaters at the mouth of a canyon.
And one of them is a question about the cosmos that the rest of the country is, finally, ready to ask out loud.
CHAPTER 6
The Room Where It Happens
The two buildings that made everything possible
There is one piece of this story that doesn’t get its own ribbon-cutting, doesn’t make highlight reels, and doesn’t trend on social media. It is also the piece that quietly made everything else possible.
In October 2022, the Hyatt Regency Salt Lake City opened — 25 stories, 700 rooms, more than 60,000 square feet of meeting space, connected to the Salt Palace Convention Center. The project had been envisioned by Salt Lake County and its industry partners for more than a decade. It is the first hotel directly adjoining the Salt Palace, and it is the building that finally let downtown Salt Lake City compete for the kinds of national conferences, NHL All-Star Weekends, NBA midseason events, and major Olympic functions that require a single headquarters property within walking distance of a convention floor.
Combine that with the new Salt Lake City International Airport — the only major U.S. airport built completely from scratch this century, opened in 2020 and now in its fourth phase of concourse expansion — and the Wasatch Front has, for the first time in its history, the two pieces of arrival infrastructure that every national-market city is built around. A front door that can absorb millions of visitors. A headquarters hotel where the people running those visits can stay. Without those two buildings, none of the other stories in this piece would carry the same weight. With them, every other story carries more.
This is what readiness looks like when it gets built quietly. It doesn’t trend. It just opens, and then everything else becomes possible.
CHAPTER 7
An Honest Counterweight
None of this is free. A magazine that loves the place it covers has to be willing to say what the costs are.
Three things, named plainly.
Sundance is leaving. In March 2025, after four decades in Park City, the Sundance Institute announced that the Sundance Film Festival will relocate to Boulder, Colorado beginning in 2027. Utah submitted a joint Salt Lake City–Park City bid. Utah lost. The Sundance leadership cited Boulder’s college-town density, walkability, and tech ecosystem as deciding factors. The festival’s last edition in Utah is January 2026; the first Boulder edition follows a year later. Sundance did not just bring revenue to Park City. It built Park City’s modern identity. Its departure is a loss, and pretending otherwise serves no one. The honest read is that the Wasatch Front is becoming a national market for many things — and is, at the same time, ceasing to be the home of one of the most important cultural institutions it ever hosted. Both of those things are true. We will live with both.
Drought is real. This past May, Governor Spencer Cox signed an executive order declaring a statewide drought emergency across all 29 Utah counties. Every megaproject described in this piece is also a water question. The Power District. The Point. Vesper’s habitat restoration. The new neighborhoods that will fill in around the Delta Center renovation. The hotel rooms and Olympic venues that will absorb millions of additional visitors. Every cubic foot of demand we add now is a cubic foot the Great Salt Lake, and the rivers that feed it, will not see. Growth and water are not separate stories. They are the same story, told from two ends.
Affordability and displacement. A corridor that becomes a national market is also one where longtime residents pay more, drive further, and watch neighborhoods they grew up in change in ways they didn’t choose. The west side of Salt Lake City, where the Power District is rising, has been chronically underinvested for decades. The same families who were the reason it stayed affordable will be among those most likely to feel priced out as it stops being so. That contradiction is real, and the moral seriousness of how the next decade handles it will tell us as much about what we became as any ribbon-cutting will.
These costs do not erase the gains. The gains are real. But a magazine that talks only about the gains is a brochure, not a magazine.
CHAPTER 8
What the Front Becomes
The Wasatch Front of 2034 will not be the Wasatch Front of 2020. Some of that will be wonderful. The first major-league baseball Opening Day in Salt Lake City. The first NHL Stanley Cup banner raised at the Delta Center. The first air taxi lifting from a vertiport in Provo on its way to a venue in Park City. The first concert at Vesper. The opening of the first completed neighborhood at The Point. The Olympic torch arriving at Rice-Eccles for the second time in a generation. Some of it will be hard. A Sundance January with no festival in Park City for the first time since 1985. A summer of brown lawns and shrinking reservoirs. A west side where the people who built it are no longer the people who live there. A lake that, despite everyone’s best intentions, may not have enough water reaching it in time. Both versions of the Wasatch Front are coming. They will arrive together, in the same years, often in the same neighborhoods. Telling the actual lived version of that story — not the press-release version and not the doom version — is the entire reason this magazine exists.
The Front is arriving. We’re going to be here for it.
Sources
• Office of the Governor of Utah, Executive Order Declaring a State of Emergency Due to Drought Conditions (May 21, 2026)
• NHL.com / Utah Mammoth, “Smith Entertainment Group Unveils Next Steps on the Transformation of the Delta Center” (May 8, 2026)
• NHL.com / Utah Mammoth, 2026 Stanley Cup Playoff Activations release (April 17, 2026)
• Deseret News, “When will Salt Lake City get a major league baseball team?” (March 25, 2026)
• KSL TV, “Groundbreaking for SLC’s new power district makes way for potential MLB stadium” (October 27, 2025)
• Point of the Mountain State Land Authority, framework plan documentation (thepointutah.org)
• Deseret News, “Plans for Point of the Mountain development at old Utah Prison site take shape”
• Design Workshop, The Point project documentation
• Deseret News, “Osmond family plans to build ‘world-class’ concert venue at base of Provo Canyon” (May 20, 2026)
• PURSUE/war.gov UAP releases (May 8 and May 22, 2026)
• The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch (History, 2020; S7 May 19, 2026)
• NYT AAWSAP report (Dec. 2017)
• Salisbury (1974)
• Disclosure Day (Universal, June 12, 2026)
• KSL.com, Vesper Amphitheater announcement coverage (May 20, 2026)
• ABC4, Donny Osmond / Vesper Amphitheater announcement (May 20, 2026)
• Utah News Dispatch, “Federal government taps Utah to test new electric flight technologies” (March 11, 2026)
• Joby Aviation, “Joby to Begin U.S. Operations in 2026 Under White House Air Taxi Program” (March 9, 2026)
• Hyatt Hotels Corporation, Hyatt Regency Salt Lake City opening announcement (October 18, 2022)
• Hensel Phelps, Hyatt Regency Salt Lake City project documentation
• Sundance Institute, “Sundance Institute Announces Boulder, Colorado, as the New Home for the Sundance Film Festival / Beginning in 2027” (March 27, 2025)
• CBS News, Sundance Boulder relocation coverage (March 27, 2025)
Mountain & Main Magazine utilizes AI tools for research assistance and draft development.