🏆 The Wasatch Front’s Top 10 Upcoming Events
The Events That Carry Us From Football Season Into Full-On Fall Along the Wasatch Front
The stadium lights are already on. High school football is three weeks deep, the colleges open the first week of September, and from there the Wasatch Front rolls straight into fair season, harvest festivals, Oktoberfest weekends, and the two or three weeks when the canyons do the thing everybody moves here for. Below are the ten events we'd clear the calendar for between now and late October. This is a living list — as one event passes, another takes its place, so check back before you make your weekend plans.
1 COLLEGE FOOTBALL OPENS
A new era of instate rivalry is about to begin. (Getty Images)
Utah vs. Idaho, Thursday, Sept. 3, 7 p.m., ESPNU | BYU vs. Utah Tech, Saturday, Sept. 5, LaVell Edwards Stadium | Utah State vs. Idaho State, Saturday, Sept. 5, Maverik Stadium | Schedules: utahutes.com · byucougars.com · utahstateaggies.com
High school football is already underway and the Friday night lights have been on since mid-August. But the first week of September is when the whole state shows up — and this year both flagship programs arrive carrying more baggage than usual.
Rice-Eccles, Thursday night. For the first time in two decades, somebody other than Kyle Whittingham walks the Utah sideline. Morgan Scalley spent years as the head-coach-in-waiting, and Thursday he stops waiting. The transition was not exactly gentle: Whittingham, the program's all-time wins leader and its Legend in Residence, appears to have been encouraged toward the door despite a eleven-win season. He landed at Michigan. So did a chunk of Utah's defense. The Utes also sent their entire starting offensive line to the NFL, which is a lot of new furniture for a first-year head coach.
The cupboard isn't bare. Devon Dampier is back at quarterback and Wayshawn Parker gives Scalley a real weapon in the backfield; the rebuilt line will decide how high this thing goes. Idaho is an FCS opponent sitting outside the Big Sky's own preseason top five, which makes it about as forgiving a debut as the schedule offers. Utah won eleven games last year. The expectations did not leave with Whittingham as the Utes start the preseason at #21 in the AP poll.
(A small thing we enjoy: Scalley is the only in-state FBS head coach with a Coaches Poll ballot. Somewhere in Provo, somebody has noticed.)
Provo, Saturday. BYU opens ranked, back in the preseason AP Top 25 (#14) for a second straight year after 23 wins over two seasons and a trip to the Big 12 title game. On paper it's the best position the program has been in since joining the league. Utah Tech comes up from St. George, making it an all-Utah opener.
Off the field, it's been a louder summer than anyone in Provo wanted. Kalani Sitake spent an August podcast airing his frustrations over the resources the football program has received, then spent a Wednesday press conference addressing his relationship with athletic director Brian Santiago — widely believed to be strained. Sitake's line was that he'll always "fight like crazy to get this place to be a premier program." Meanwhile, BYU athletics took the genuinely unusual step of going onto a fan message board to knock down online reports that Santiago had been fired, a sentence we did not expect to write about an athletic department that once communicated exclusively in press release.
Nobody's been fired. Everybody's said the right things. And a football team that's been answering questions about its own front office since fall camp opened is, we'd guess, very ready to go hit somebody in a different uniform.
And up north, Utah State opens against Idaho State at Maverik Stadium, beginning its first season in the rebuilt Pac-12 under Bronco Mendenhall.
(Editor's Note: Thursday night games are the sneaky-good ticket. Rice-Eccles on a weeknight in early September, seventy-five degrees at kickoff, home before eleven. Take TRAX to Stadium Station and skip the parking entirely. And keep Friday nights open — the high school slate runs ten weeks, and the games within a short drive of your driveway are still the best football value in the state.)
2 RED BUTTE GARDEN OUTDOOR CONCERT SERIES
Final four shows: Sept. 9, 17, 20, 22 | Red Butte Garden Amphitheatre, University of Utah, Salt Lake City | Tickets: redbuttegarden.org
If you do one live-music thing on the Wasatch Front before the weather turns, do it here — and you have about three weeks left. Now in its 39th year and one of the longest-running outdoor series in the state, Red Butte packs 31 shows into a botanical-garden amphitheater with skyline views, world-class sound, and a picnic-on-the-lawn ease no arena can touch.
The closing stretch is short and strong: Bonnie Raitt with Jon Cleary on September 9 (SOLD OUT), Utah's own The National Parks making their Red Butte debut on September 17, The Record Company with Cracker on September 20, and The Revivalists closing the season on September 22.
(Editor's Note: Buy in person at the Garden Visitor Center to skip the online fees — and don't wait, because the closing nights routinely sell out. Gates open 90 minutes before showtime. If you've only got one night left in you, make it The National Parks; a Utah band's first time on that stage is its own kind of event.)
3 SNOWBIRD'S OKTOBERFEST
Saturdays & Sundays through October 11 | Noon to 6 p.m. | Snowbird Ski and Summer Resort, Little Cottonwood Canyon | Admission: Free (parking fee) | Info: snowbird.com
No cover charge, and about seven weekends left. Utah's original Oktoberfest draws more than 60,000 people a season to the base of Little Cottonwood, and it's less a beer festival than a standing invitation to spend a fall Saturday in the mountains.
The biergarten pours more than fifty varieties, German-style and Utah-brewed alike, with a wine garden alongside and non-alcoholic options for anyone driving. The food is the real argument: bratwurst and weisswurst, sauerkraut and spaetzle, beef rouladen, warm pretzels, Bavarian roasted almonds, and apple strudel worth the drive on its own. The Marktplatz fills in with local artisans, and there's enough live music and open space to keep a family occupied for an afternoon.
What earns it a spot on this list is longevity — this is the one event here that's still running when the aspens go gold, which means you can pair it with No. 8 and make a full day of it.
Know before you go: Admission is free but parking is not. No dogs — Little Cottonwood is protected watershed. Runs rain, snow, or shine, and mountain weather at that elevation does what it wants, so bring a layer. Buy a one-liter stein once and reuse it all season for a discount on refills.
(Editor's Note: Don't drink and drive, and don't fight the canyon. Snowbird runs a free shuttle to and from the park-and-ride at 9400 South Highland Drive, where rideshare is easy. Walk-ups are first-come; reserve ahead if you can.)
4 The Great Salt Lake Bird Migration
Now through late October | Peak late September into mid-October | Antelope Island Causeway, Farmington Bay, Bear River | Info: fws.gov/refuge/bear-river-migratory-bird
The biggest event on this list doesn't sell tickets. Every fall the lake forty minutes from downtown fills with more birds than any stadium on this page will hold all season. Millions stop here on migration, with hundreds of thousands present on any given day, and the eared grebe and Wilson's phalarope are the headliners.
Adobe Stock provides this image of an eared grebe.
The grebes are the reason to go in the next six weeks. Come September, as much as 80 percent of North America's entire eared grebe population lands on this lake to eat brine shrimp and molt out of their summer plumage before continuing south. Through October they can't fly at all while the new feathers come in — they simply float, and feed, and fatten up for the trip. Rafts of them stretch to the horizon.
Where to go. The Antelope Island causeway is the easy one and the best one. Seven miles of open water where brine shrimp and flies pull in American avocets, western sandpipers, red-necked phalaropes, and Bonaparte's gulls. About half a mile short of the island, the road crosses a bridge over the channel draining Farmington Bay — that's the spot, and the tens of thousands are usually right there. You do not need binoculars to understand what you're looking at.
Farmington Bay, just south, is an 18,000-acre wetland complex, and the Eccles Wildlife Education Center there has a 1.2-mile trail plus indoor viewing — the pick if you're bringing small kids or anyone who won't last an hour in the wind. And Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge near Brigham City runs a 12-mile auto tour route through habitat used by more than 250 species, with up to half a million ducks and geese concentrating on the refuge units and 30,000-plus tundra swans arriving from mid-October.
Know before you go: All three are free. Antelope Island charges a state park entrance fee. Dawn and the last two hours of light are worth the alarm clock; midday is quiet. Bear River's regular auto tour route has been closed since spring for a maintenance project and is slated to reopen mid-September, with an alternate route running in the meantime — call ahead before you drive up. Bring more layers than the forecast suggests. There is no shade out there.
(Editor's Note: Make it a Saturday. Bear River at sunrise, then ten minutes into Brigham City for Peach Days on September 11–12 — parade, car show, and a peach in your hand by mid-morning. And one for the drive: those gulls working the shallows are California gulls, the Utah state bird, honored downtown with a monument on Temple Square for the 1848 cricket episode. A bird named for another state, on a monument in this one.)
5 PARK CITY KIMBALL ARTS FESTIVAL
September 10–20 | Utah State Fairpark, 155 N. 1000 West, Salt Lake City | Tickets: utahstatefair.com
Eleven days, sixty-five acres, and a tradition that predates the state itself. The first version was held in 1856 as the Deseret Fair, in a tithing office across the street from where the Salt Lake Temple would eventually rise — which makes this one of the oldest continuously running events in Utah, and easily the biggest thing on the fall calendar.
The formula hasn't needed much updating: a midway, livestock barns full of 4-H and FFA kids who've been working toward this week all year, competitive canning and quilting and pie, grandstand concerts, rodeo, and fair food engineered to be eaten standing up. It opens the first Thursday after Labor Day and runs through the following Sunday.
(Editor's Note: Weeknights beat weekends by a wide margin — same fair, half the parking headache. If you're bringing kids, the livestock barns in the late afternoon are the sleeper attraction; that's when the exhibitors are around and happy to talk about their animals.)
6 SALT LAKE CITY GREEK FESTIVAL — 50TH ANNIVERSARY
September 11–13 | Holy Trinity Cathedral, 279 S. 300 West, Salt Lake City | Fri & Sat 11 a.m.–10 p.m., Sun 11 a.m.–8 p.m. | Info: saltlakecitygreekfestival.com
Fifty years. Billed as Utah's largest and oldest cultural event, running continuously since 1976, and hosted by a Greek community that's been in this valley for well over a century — building businesses, building Holy Trinity, and building a festival that half the city treats as a standing September appointment.
The draw is what it's always been: gyros and souvlaki off the grill, pastry tables that require a strategy, live music, and folk dancing by kids who've been rehearsing since spring. Cathedral tours and cooking demonstrations run alongside. The organizers have promised additions for the anniversary year that haven't been done before.
(Editor's Note: Go Friday at opening or Sunday afternoon. Saturday night is the full-throttle version, which is wonderful and also a forty-minute line for baklava. Parking downtown is the usual scavenger hunt — the Green Line puts you within a few blocks. And bring a cooler; the pastry booth is not a place you want to be making disciplined decisions on foot.)
7 BRIGHAM CITY PEACH DAYS
September 11–12 | Historic Downtown, Main Street, Brigham City | Admission: Free | Info: boxelderchamber.com/peach-days
Since 1904. It's the longest continually celebrated harvest festival in Utah and reportedly the second oldest in the country, and it pulls something like 75,000 people into a town of nineteen thousand for one weekend in September.
Two parades, the Peach Queen Pageant, the car show and the motorcycle show, a carnival, and better than 200 vendor booths lining Main Street. Saturday, September 12 closes with a free headlining concert by Maddie Wilson on the Main Street Stage. And there are peaches — the actual reason any of this started, fresh off the Box Elder County orchards, sold on the street by the box.
(Editor's Note: This is the one on the list that most feels like Utah before the freeway. Pair it with No. 4 and make a full Saturday: Bear River at sunrise, downtown Brigham by mid-morning, car show after lunch, home by dark. Get there early for street parking or plan to walk a few blocks. Bring cash for the fruit stands.)
8 THE CANYONS TURN
Peak mid-September through early October | Guardsman Pass, Alpine Loop, Big & Little Cottonwood | Conditions: visitutah.com
Our Family Pick. For about three weeks, the mountains on the other side of the windshield do something worth taking a day off for — and unlike almost everything else here, it's free, it's an hour from most driveways, and you can do it with a car full of people who don't agree on anything.
The rough calendar: color starts at the highest elevations, Guardsman Pass and the Wasatch Plateau, in mid-September, and wraps across most of the state by early October. Guardsman climbs to about 9,700 feet and drops you over into Park City and Heber Valley, which makes it a loop rather than an out-and-back. The Alpine Loop runs roughly twenty miles between American Fork Canyon and Provo Canyon and takes about forty-five minutes without stops, which nobody manages. Big Cottonwood to Silver Lake is the easiest one to pull off after work. And if the hiking's over for the year, Snowbird's Aerial Tram to Hidden Peak gives you the whole thing from above without a single switchback — the same trip that gets you to Oktoberfest at the base.
One more, for the completists: the Cecret Lake trail above Alta is famous for July wildflowers, but the same 1.7-mile walk in late September trades lupine for gold. And the spelling isn't a typo on our end. "Cecret" is a leftover from Little Cottonwood's 1800s mining boom — the men who named these places weren't winning spelling bees, and it stuck so thoroughly that the U.S. Geological Survey still prints it that way. They did the same with Snowbird's "Iron Blosam."
Know before you go: Weekend traffic in the Cottonwoods during peak color is genuinely bad — go on a weekday or go at sunrise. Guardsman Pass is seasonal and closes with the first serious snow, which can arrive in early October. Check road status before you commit. No dogs in the Cottonwood canyons; protected watershed.
(Editor's Note: The single best hour of this entire list is Guardsman Pass from about ninety minutes before sunset. Bring a thermos. Watch for moose and elk on the Deer Valley side — they're there, and they do not yield.)
9 TIMPANOGOS STORYTELLING FESTIVAL
September 10–12 | Ashton Gardens at Thanksgiving Point, Lehi | Tickets: timpfest.org
Thirty-seven years on, this is the largest storytelling festival in the western United States, and it happens in Lehi every year on the weekend after Labor Day. Professional tellers come in from across the country, set up in tents across the Ashton Gardens, and spend three days doing the oldest thing there is.
Thursday, September 10 is a $10 sneak peek — doors at 3 p.m., with access to the gardens, music, tents, and an evening concert. Friday and Saturday run all day and into the night, and Friday evening splits three ways depending on your crowd: Bedtime Stories for families with small kids at $5 a head, Story Showcase for all ages, and Shivers for anyone who likes the hair on their arms to stand up. Saturday closes with The Last Laugh.
New this year: everything moves into the Ashton Gardens proper, as the old Show Barn comes down for Thanksgiving Point's STEM expansion.
(Editor's Note: Bring your own food and non-alcoholic drinks — it's allowed and it's cheaper. Six or more full-event tickets gets you 25% off, so this is one to organize with another family or two. Can't make it? TimpFest Online carries every program from October 15 through February 1.)
10 FANX SALT LAKE COMIC CONVENTION
September 24–26 | Salt Palace Convention Center, 100 S. West Temple, Salt Lake City | Tickets: fanxsaltlake.com
Three days, roughly a hundred thousand people, and the last time it will ever look like this.
The Salt Palace has anchored downtown for more than five decades, and beginning in 2027 it closes for a three-year renovation. FanX, which has filled the building every year since 2013, splits into two smaller events after this one. Organizers have said plainly that they're maxing out the final full-building show — the most vendors the floor will hold and more celebrity guests than the convention has ever booked. They also expect it to sell out for exactly that reason.
The format is the usual sprawl: celebrity panels and autograph signings, photo ops, Artist Alley, Literary Lane, gaming, the official Cosplay Contest, KidCon, and a film festival. Whether or not any of that is your thing, the cosplay on West Temple that weekend is free to look at and worth the walk.
(Editor's Note: Pre-register your wristbands on Wednesday, September 23 at the Salt Palace, any time between noon and 8 p.m., and skip the Thursday morning line entirely. The venue sits in the downtown Free Fare Zone — Temple Square and Arena TRAX stops are both a short walk, and parking that weekend is a lost cause.)
RETURN to THE MAIN EVENT Home Page and select another category to find other fun adventures for adults and families!