Pioneer Days Celebration

From two o’clock on Friday, July 24, 2026, anyone with a piece of chalk could claim a square of sidewalk around Veterans Memorial Park, next to the Monticello Public Library. No spaces were assigned. Children, families and groups of friends chose a stretch of concrete and worked while people walked past, because the city kept the sidewalks open to the public throughout. The city set out chalk and let people bring their own, but banned paint and anything oil-based. Prizes donated by San Juan Counseling went to the best overall square in three age groups, 3 to 5, 5 to 12, and 13 and up, and to the most creative. Artists signed their work so the judges could find it. Winners were named that night, just before the movie.

The chalk competition is one part of Pioneer Days, a two-day celebration the City of Monticello puts on each July. Monticello is the seat of San Juan County and had 1,824 residents at the 2020 census. It sits at the base of the Abajo Mountains, also called the Blue Mountains, where a stand of trees on the slope resembles a horse’s head and neck and can be seen from any point in town. The 2026 celebration ran Friday and Saturday, July 24 and 25. The San Juan Record noted that the weekend also draws a number of family and class reunions.

Friday at the pool and the park

Friday opened at 10 a.m. at the city pool with a single-elimination pickleball tournament capped at 16 teams. Dave Anderson and Lisa Anderson won the 2026 championship. Isaac Boone and Dylan Knight finished second, and the organizers wrote that the runners-up “put up a heck of a fight!” From 1 to 5 p.m. the pool charged one dollar to swim. At 2:30 the home run derby began at the city ball fields, and Landon Baker of the WECO Shock team won it. That morning the organizers had posted a request: “If you see us be sure to bring us a stick of deodorant, cause it’s hot out here!”

By 3 p.m. vendors were at Veterans Park and the ball fields. Free inflatables ran in the park until dark. A dunk tank raised money for the parks and recreation committee until 9. The Recreation Committee also ran fundraising games from 5:30 to 8 p.m., including a family cornhole competition, with proceeds going toward the next year’s projects.

At 4:30 p.m. play began in the Blue Mountain Invitational, a men’s fastpitch softball tournament that ran through Saturday night. The San Juan Record calls it the longest consecutively running fastpitch tournament in the nation. Bayles Page Break took the 2026 title, and WECO Shock, the home run derby team, finished second. The organizers’ congratulations to the champions ended, “as always it has been a pleasure to have you!”

When it got dark, around 9:15, the city showed The Sandlot at Veterans Park, a showing the organizers count as a standing tradition. People brought blankets, and the Recreation Committee sold concessions.

Saturday down Main Street

Saturday started early at Monticello High School. Registration for the Blue Mountain Pioneer Day 5K opened at 6 a.m. The 5K started at 7, and a one-mile fun run for children followed at 7:45. The race raises money for the high school cross-country teams, under director Jeff Hunt, and its online results run back to 2016. In 2026, construction at Loyds Lake moved the staging to the high school’s south lawn, and the course became a road race around town.

From 7 to 10 a.m. the Lions Club served breakfast at the LDS Stake Center Pavilion on Main Street. Out at the Hideout Golf Course, a long drive competition ran from 9 to 11 a.m. and again from 3 to 5 p.m. The Hideout is an 18-hole course built near the reclaimed site of the uranium mill that the federal government ran in Monticello from 1948 to 1960. It was paid for with money left over from the Department of Energy cleanup.

The parade, which the San Juan Record calls the weekend’s main event, formed at the high school and came down Main Street at 10:30. Jay Whitney Redd was the 2026 Grand Marshal. Children had asked to sit in the dunk tank themselves, and the organizers agreed. Right after the parade, around noon, kids could take what the page called “the Hot Seat” for $5.

At 11 a.m. the vendors and inflatables returned to Veterans Park, along with a cornhole competition for players 16 and over. ThrowBra won it, up from second place the year before, and Team Blacks finished second. The library held a quilt show from noon to 3. At the city pool, lineup for the children’s coin dive began at 12:45. Children up to age 12 dove in age groups from 1 to 2 p.m., and an open swim and timed obstacle course followed until 5.

Drought had made the fire hazard high in 2026, and personal fireworks were banned. The celebration closed after dark Saturday with a professional fireworks show fired under the oversight of the Monticello Fire Department. Afterward the organizers posted, “Out with a bang we went!”

Four families from Bluff

The town at the end of that parade route dates from 1887. A cattleman, Patrick O’Donnell, was likely the first white man to build a cabin in the area, in 1879. The following year Latter-day Saint pioneers of the San Juan Expedition came through Hole-in-the-Rock and settled Bluff on April 6, 1880. Also in 1880, the church apostles Erastus Snow and Brigham Young Jr. passed through the future site of Monticello on their way north. They were impressed by it, and their visit became one of the reasons for settlement there.

Farming along the unpredictable San Juan River went badly. Church leaders turned to the higher country under the Blue Mountains, where streams and springs came down from the slopes. In March 1886 Francis A. Hammond, the LDS stake president of San Juan County, sent scouts from Bluff. They found the land already in use: the Kansas and New Mexico Cattle and Land Company of Edmund and Harold Carlisle lay a few miles north, and the L.C. outfit was headquartered in the South Fork of Montezuma Canyon.

Hammond sent settlers anyway: the families of George A. Adams, Frederick I. Jones, Parley R. Butt and Charles E. Walton. They camped at Verdure, six miles south, on March 11, 1887. By the first part of July they had planted crops, surveyed an irrigation ditch and laid out a townsite. Disputes with the Carlisle cowboys and with Ute Indians over water and land followed, with warning shots, heated arguments and lawsuits. Lawyers told the settlers that the Carlisles had very little legal claim, so the settlers claimed all the water of the South Fork and three-fourths of the North Fork. In the spring of 1888 most of the families moved up to North Montezuma and began building the town.

Early names for the place were North Montezuma Creek, Piute Springs and Hammond. At a meeting in 1888 three names were considered: North Montezuma, Hammond and the biblical Antioch. The younger members of the community rejected all three. Hammond then proposed Monticello, after Thomas Jefferson’s estate, and everyone approved. The town became the county seat in 1895 and was incorporated as a city in 1910.

The Twenty-Fourth of July

The date the town celebrates belongs to the whole state. July 24 is Pioneer Day, an official Utah holiday. It marks the arrival of the first company of Latter-day Saint pioneers in the Salt Lake Valley between July 21 and 24, 1847, when the valley was part of Mexico. The Utah Historical Society notes that their settlement forever changed the lives of the Indigenous peoples already living there.

By 1897 the holiday was well established. The fiftieth-anniversary jubilee of that year lasted five days, and the Utah State Historical Society was founded during it, on July 22. The jubilee parades carried Native Americans, the Pony Express and businesses from most of Utah’s counties. Green Flake, the enslaved Black man who had driven Brigham Young’s wagon for much of the original journey, came back from Idaho for the festivities.

The first celebration had been held two years after the arrival, on July 24, 1849. It had celebratory gunfire, music, patriotic speeches, a reading of the Declaration of Independence and religious rhetoric. In the afternoon came a communal meal, shared by the Latter-day Saint settlers, local Native Americans, and gold miners passing through on their way to California.