Craft Lake City fills the Fairpark, balloons go up over Sandy, and smoke has the air unhealthy through Thursday

The DIY Festival turns 18 this weekend and fills the Utah State Fairpark with more than 500 Utah makers, three dozen food vendors, three stages carrying upwards of 30 acts, and about 50 STEM exhibitors in the GFiber building. It runs Friday from 5 to 10 p.m., Saturday from noon to 10, and Sunday from noon to 6. The artisan market alone is over 300 booths, which is the part people underestimate. Kid Row, where roughly 60 sellers under 18 run their own tables, opens only Saturday from noon to 4, so a family that shows up Sunday for it will find an empty row. The kids' area has bottle rocket building and a glow-in-the-dark photon tent, and there is a fenced bark park if the dog comes along. Advance single-day tickets are $13 and sales close Thursday night at 11:59, after which you pay the day-of price at the gate. Kids 12 and under get in free with a parent. Dogs need their own $5 ticket, which surprises somebody at the entrance every single year.

The south arm of the lake, the main body, has dropped to just under 4,191 feet above sea level, its lowest reading since 2022 and roughly eight feet under the minimum healthy range the state set in its 2024 plan. The record low of 4,188 feet came in November 2022, so the margin is now about three feet. Hannah Freeze, the new Great Salt Lake commissioner, is leaning on a water-leasing program that pays farmers to send unused allocations to the lake at the end of the irrigation season, with $2.75 million behind it this year. Her working target is 250,000 acre-feet a year delivered to the lake, against an estimated 850,000 acre-feet a year needed to get it healthy within two decades.

Six apartment projects within a few blocks of each other are filling in the industrial core South Salt Lake zoned for a downtown, and together they add more than 1,200 units to a city of about 25,000. That works out to something near a 5 percent population increase from one cluster of buildings. The biggest is Market Center at 2280 S. State, 478 units with every one of them income-restricted at 60 percent of area median, currently building its parking podium. Utopia, 187 units on Utopia Avenue, is the other large piece, and 330 Belhaven finished with 84 units and is leasing now.

The Irish trio out of Limerick brings its folk rock to The Grand at The Complex tonight with Tadhg Nolan opening. Doors at 7, music at 8, advance tickets have been running about $41.

The plaza in front of Taylorsville City Hall runs live music and a Food Truck League row every Friday night through September 25, free to walk in. The trucks are on site 5:30 to 8:30 and the lineup rotates weekly, posted on the Food Truck League site under Taylorsville League Night.

Portland scored 34 seconds in, the fastest goal in the NWSL this season, and then Utah scored the next five. Cece Delzer got two of them, one just before half and one two minutes after it, and the Royals now have ten wins in a season for the first time since 2019.

Salt Lake got swept in all six at Sugar Land to close out July, including a 4-3 loss on August 2 that was their seventh consecutive defeat. The homestand against Oklahoma City that started Tuesday runs the rest of the week.

Order the khao soi. It is the northern Thai bowl that gets a coconut curry poured over soft egg noodles and then a nest of fried crispy ones dropped on top, and Anny Sooksri has been making it here since long before half the valley learned the name. The heat scale runs 1 to 10 and it is not decorative, so a 2 is where a first-timer should land and a 4 is a real commitment. The curries are the rest of the argument, massaman especially. Sooksri bought the historic Murray Chapel across the street and plans to move the restaurant into it, so the current dining room has a shelf life.

Thursday evening at Meadows Park in Salt Lake City, a free neighborhood concert on the grass.

Thursday in downtown Salt Lake City, a free afternoon of live music at the main library.

Wednesday the 12th through Saturday the 15th at the county Equestrian Park in South Jordan, its 79th year.

The state's air quality forecast for Salt Lake County has particulates in the unhealthy for sensitive groups range today and tomorrow, driven by smoke drifting in from fires burning around the state. The pollutant is PM 2.5, the fine particulate that gets deep into the lungs, and the county is under a mandatory action day. The weather service has patchy smoke in the valley through Thursday morning before the pattern shifts and the heat takes over.

Salt Lake County's industrial market spent two years with more space than tenants, and the second quarter turned it around. Net absorption came in at about 530,000 square feet, up roughly 39 percent from a year ago, and vacancy fell from 8.9 percent at the end of 2025 into the 6 to 8 percent range depending on which brokerage you read. Roughly 2.6 million square feet is under construction across 21 projects. Two of those are data centers in West Jordan at 318,000 square feet each, which is a different kind of tenant than the warehouses that built this market.

The $190 million rebuild of the west belt passed its halfway point this summer and the ramp closures are starting to unwind unevenly. Westbound I-80 to southbound I-215 is scheduled to reopen mid-month. The connection from Redwood Road to northbound I-215 stays closed until July 2027, which is the one that keeps catching people who only drive it occasionally. The work covers three miles of repaving plus ramp and bridge repairs stretching across 14 miles of the belt route.