People trickled in toward the epicenter on Main Street, moving as if with a collective consciousness, a cheerful zombie army out in force on a sunny Monday morning.
But not just any Monday — the 128th annual Miners Day, a Park City staple.
The national holiday honoring laborers took on a Park City twist in the 1940s, when the city’s Miners Union Day — established in 1896 to give miners a day off — merged with Labor Day. The city has since celebrated Miners Day in recognition of the town’s most influential laborers and mining heritage.
In recent years, the mornings begin with the dog-friendly Miners Day Bark City 5k Run, which Patrick Saucier and his dog Aspen won this year, and the Miners Day breakfast. Saint Mary’s Catholic Church cooked a classic spread of eggs and pancakes.
And then there was the Running of the Balls, a play on the Spanish tradition in which bulls are let loose to chase people through the streets. In a more Park City Rotary fashion, golf balls fly down Main Street.
Hands raised for Parkites? A loud cheer. Anyone visiting from out of town? Less loud, but more enthusiastic, cheers. A visitor came from Illinois to see a friend, and the two stumbled on the event and joined the fray, buying balls from the last-minute sales offered up to the minute before the drop.
Darryl Goldberg held his kindergartner son, Max, on his shoulders for a better view of the ball track on Main. He and his wife, Anna, had moved to Park City in December from Long Island and were celebrating their first Miners Day as locals. They purchased a silver ball, one of 200 balls priced at $100, for a chance to be the winner of the “Silver Strike” contest and earn a first-place prize worth $3,000.
Almost 20,000 yellow golf balls were sold for this 21st iteration of the event, with proceeds helping raise money for Park City Rotary’s Community Grants and Scholarship programs. The group gives $30,000 in small grants to organizations that have less than $1 million in their budgets and large grants of up to $100,000 to organizations that have $2 million in their budgets.
The anticipated event happened in a flash, a satisfying patter of balls bouncing on pavement as they poured from the drop tower, newly built this year, and tumbled down toward the people racing in front. Volunteers then sorted the balls, and people dispersed, either to restaurants for a drink or early lunch, or to find a spot along the parade route.
“What a Park City scene,” one announcer said from a balcony as the balls were picked up below him and the chute was quickly disassembled to make way for the parade.
Unlike the sea of people lining the street for the Fourth of July parade, the Miners Day parade had a much more relaxed feel, sparsely attended in places.
“It’s nice,” one local said with a laugh, a section of shade on lower Main all to herself minutes before the start of the event. She and her friend attend both summertime parades in support of their husbands, Park City firefighters who march in the events, this year in dress uniforms with shiny, silver decorative axes in hand.
Though a smaller lineup, floats ranged from individuals running for political offices to businesses to public service staples like schools, police officers and firefighters. Some were decorated in the mining spirit with helmets and pickaxes, fake beards and chests of gold, but it wasn’t a requirement.
Like the Fourth of July parade, the route finished at City Park, where the rest of the day’s festivities would commence: concerts hosted by Mountain Town Music, a fenced-in beer garden, sack races for the kids and a collection of food trucks. The Friends of the Park City Library hosted their usual Miners Day book sale, which raised money for community and librarian programming.
Mucking and drilling competitions returned this year for the first time since before COVID, and people in the industry could compete for a $1,000 first-place prize.
The two essential mining tasks — carving holes in rock and scooping large amounts of broken up ore, also known as muck — are extremely loud and extremely dusty, attendees seated in the metal risers quickly realized. Hosted during the midday heat, in full sun, it was also a demonstration of the hard labor that inspired the holiday.
All that didn’t stop 74-year-old Remijio Portillo from taking first place in the mucking event, filling his two-cart machine with ore using its electric loader in 50.92 seconds. Brian Still, a competitor from South Jordan, was the first-place finisher for drilling, boring two holes in the 10-ton piece of sandstone with the fastest time of one minute and 55 seconds.
With the competitions completed an hour and a half ahead of schedule, the sprawl of City Park was packed with families to enjoy the day off work or out of school. Not even the gridlocked traffic down the canyon could dampen the day, a bookend to summer, leaving the impatient wait for ski season’s return.
The top 10 winners of the Running of the Balls are:
- Adam Oldenburg
- Adriane Juarez
- Alex Nichamin
- Amy Christensen
- Amy Sorensen
- Asher Murphy
- Benjamin Hughes
- Beth Armstrong
- Bloom Pamela
- Catherine Knaus
The winner of this year’s Silver Strike ball is Eileen Gallagher. Here is the full list of 50 winners: cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0795/4772/8148/files/2024_Winner_List_by_First_Name.pdf?v=1725314292
