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Show The Ogden Photo by Howdy Mitchell. Valley news August 15, 2019 USPS MARKETING MAIL POSTAGE PAID PERMIT NO. 11 EDEN UT POSTAL PATRON EDEN-LIBERTY-84310 HUNTSVILLE-84317 OGDEN CANYON- 84401 HCR 843AO Your Community Newspaper Tour of Utah Cycles into Ogden Valley August 14: Road closures announced Tour of Utah cyclists will pedal thru Ogden Valley, finishing Stage 2 of this year’s Tour of Utah at Powder Mountain’s Hidden Lake Lodge parking area in Eden August 14. It is expected that approximately 1,000 to 3,000 people will be in attendance. Tour of Utah organizers, working in conjunction with UDOT and the Weber Sheriff’s Office, has announced road closures associated with the race, which is scheduled to begin at 12:20 p.m. in Brigham City, and end around 3:45 to 4:00 p.m. at Powder Mountain. Impacted Areas in Weber County After crossing the Weber County line, the race will travel east on W. 2700 North and E. 2600 North, passing thru North Ogden. A Utah Sports Commission Sprint line will be contested in North Ogden in front of the North Branch of the Weber County Library located at E. 2600 North and 500 East at race mile 34. The race is expected to pass this area between 1:33 to 2:05 p.m. The race will use 1050 E. to travel east on 3100 N. and the North Ogden Divide (Mountain Road/Pass). A Utah Office of Tourism King of the Mountain (KOM) climb will be contested across from the trailhead parking lot at the top of North Ogden Divide at race mile 38.7. The race is expected to pass this area between 1:45 to 2:20 p.m. The race will use 3500 E. to merge south on S.R. 162 towards Eden. The race will turn right on S.R. 158 to make two laps around Pineview Reservoir. Moving in a counter-clockwise Photo by Noelle Tuttle of Eden. Wolf Creek Pathway Completed: Pathways thanks community for its supportFinal with formal celebration tidy up and installation of signage is in proThe multi-use path to and from Wolf Creek to Eden along Wolf Creek Drive is now finished, and a party celebrating the opening of the pathway will be held Thursday, August 15 at 4:00 p.m. at its top end at Wolf Creek Resort. It will be held to thank our sponsors and donors. Please come and celebrate with us! This path is already serving all sorts of nonmotorized users—runners, folks walking to the store, family bike groups, and equestrian users. cess. Please … do not drive or park on the path! Weber Pathways managed the three-year construction project with board member Miranda Menzies of Eden as the project lead, and would like to thank project sponsors and donors, especially Weber County, UDOT, the Outdoor Recreation Office of the Governor, and Wolf Creek Resort. A special thank you, too, to community donors the Blair Lierd and Judy Lewis families; this path is dedicated to their memory. The path leads from Wolf Creek to Eden Ogden Valley Balloon & Artist Festival Planned for August 16, 17 & 18 This year’s Ogden Valley Balloon Festival in Eden is scheduled for August 16, 17, and 18. The Balloon Festival is being held at Eden Park, with morning hot air balloon launches, arts and crafts, kids’ games and food booths, as well as continuous live entertainment. The popular Balloon Glow will take place Friday and Saturday evenings, August 16 and 17, at dusk, at approximately 8:45 p.m. at Eden Park. “We are so happy Eden Park is allowing us to take advantage of this wonderful location,” commented Terry Murphy, Chairperson for the festival. “The site offers a nice shaded area for the arts and crafts vendors, a perfect viewing area for all of the live entertainment from 4:00 to 10:00 p.m., and a spacious area for our food vendors with a lovely bowery with picnic tables for diners to relax and enjoy the full medley of local foods. The views looking northeast over BALLOON FESTIVAL cont. on page 10 Community’s Help Needed to Address Potentially Serious Outbreak of Phragmites at Pineview Reservoir The first of July, an article in The Ogden Valley news introduced phragmites sp, an invasive plant, to Valley residents. This invasive perennial grass infests shorelines and riparian areas, degrading and destroying wetland habitat. Also, if this invasive weed were to invade the shores of Pineview Reservoir, it would quickly become a monoculture of phragmites, diminishing the aesthetic and recreational value of the reservoir and surrounding area. The goal of a multiagency and non-government group is to prevent phragmites from PHRAGMITES cont. on page 11 The Value of Open Space in Combating Global Warming By Shanna Francis One of the many perks growing up in Ogden Valley and raising a family here, in past years, during the summer, you could always count on the temperature being at least 10 degrees cooler than down in Ogden, with summer evenings cooling even more dramatically. The downside—summer showed up two or three weeks later than on the other side of the Wasatch, and left two or three weeks earlier; thus, you also had to be more selective about what you planted. As far as cold hardiness, you wouldn’t think of planting anything that had over a Zone 3 rating—able to withstand sustained temperatures 30 degrees below zero. Yet, today, you can successfully landscape with Zone 4 trees and shrubs. What was once quite common—a winter with 30- or 40-degrees-belowzero temperatures—has become a very rare phenomenon. Gone, too, to the chagrin of many local ski resorts—heavier average snow fall, and lower snowlines, where falling rain turns quickly to snow. In past years, many a winter it was that you could walk on top of the solidly-frozen snow that commonly buried or reached close to the top of the TOUR OF UTAH cont. on page 8 UDOT Provides Traffic Advisory for Ogden Canyon Work Project Those traversing Ogden Canyon have probably noticed the electronic signs at both its mouth and head, notifying drivers that they should expect delays, beginning Monday, August 12. A query directed to UDOT resulted in the following explanation. A chip seal project will begin on areas that were paved last year through the canyon, including the repaving associated with bridge work at the upper end of the canyon. UDOT contractors will also be conducting barrier work. In conjunction with these projects, drivers should expect significant delays, with flaggers directing single-lane traffic through work areas. According to UDOT Public Information Officer John Gleason, it will take about a week and a half for the work to be completed, and will take place during daytime hours. New Cub Scout Pack & Boy Scout Troop Being Organized: Parents & scouts invited to attend open house A new Cub Scout Pack and Boy Scout Troop are being formed to serve families in the upper Ogden Valley. A steering committee was formed to ascertain the demand for new Scouting Units. A poll of currently registered Scouting families was just completed, and the results show a substantial need to have an additional Scouting Unit to serve the Huntsville, Eden, and Liberty communities. An open house joining night will be held August 29 at 7:00 p.m. at the Eden Park Bowery. Anyone with a desire to be involved, either as a youth participant or adults willing to serve, may come to the open house or contact Bob Froerer at 801-391-3250. We look forward to seeing you!” Ogden Valley Branch Library Goes Back-to-School at the Head of Its Class! By Lynnda Wangsgard Improvements have been underway all summer to bring the Ogden Valley Branch up to the same forward-facing standards of the other new, and recently renovated, libraries in the Weber County Library System. Background - Twenty-five years ago, County Commissioners Spencer Stokes, Joan Hellstrom, and Randall Williford authorized construction of a library to serve residents of the upper Valley who had, theretofore, been served only once every two weeks by a bookmobile. Several foundations, families, school children, and hundreds of library supporters chipped in to help their dream of a community library become a reality. When the Ogden Valley Branch opened, it was one of the most dynamic public libraries in the Intermountain West. It was the first in Utah to provide public Internet access, the first to sport a full-blown commercial serving kitchen that could host weekly meal-service for retirees and support diverse gatherings in its community room/cafeteria; the first to offer a technology centric auditorium, and other like-endowed gathering places. During the intervening years, area residents have logged almost one million, five hundred thousand (1,500,000) visits, borrowed more than one million (1,000,000) books, signed up for more than one hundred ninety thousand (190,000) computer sessions, and attended tens of thousands of meetings and programs hosted at the Library. Recently, however, the building has been showing its age, and as libraries have evolved into places where people come to teach, as well as to learn, the technology infrastructure, designed during 1994, has increasingly become unable to provide the robust, flexible support demanded of a modern platform for learning. The strained facility had slowly lost much of its pizazz, as well as its place at the head of its class. LIBRARY cont. on page 13 fence lines stretching across the valley. Is there anything that can be done to lessen the impact of Western industrialization, modernization, and development on the environment and the accompanying trend of a world that continues to heat up, oceans that persist in rising, and arctic ice caps that refuse to slow their progressive demise? Consider the many factors that contribute to elevated temperatures in the environment and the value of open space to offset these dynamics. Canadian environmentalist and author Maude Barlow writes, “While no doubt greenhouse gas emission-driven climate change does have an important and negative impact on watersheds, warming temperatures and speeding up evaporation, there is another story that needs to be told. The fact that destroying water-retentive landscapes is, in and of itself, a major cause of climate change that is not part of the analysis or discussion in climate change circles…. There is an urgent need to create a global recovery plan for water.” What is this plan? Many forward-thinking and intuitive biologists, and those closest to the ground OPEN SPACE cont. on page 12 Accident at Trapper’s Loop August 5. |