ESCALANTE, Utah (May 28, 2022) — On Saturday, May 28, Escalante celebrated its second annual Wild Potato Days festival in the Escalante Heritage Park.
The festival was first organized last year by committee members Karen Munson, Harriet Priska, Marlene Stowe and Joette Marie Rex, all of Escalante, with special collaboration from the staff of Red Butte Gardens in Salt Lake City. Activities included potato decorating by the kids, a potato toss, and a potato cook-off.
Some joke that if Escalante is too hard to pronounce, we could just go back to calling it Potato Valley — originally named for the pea-sized wild potatoes found by the valley’s earliest pioneers.
Solanum jamesii, or the “Four Corners Potato”, was cultivated by early Native Americans in the American Southwest, and later became a help for the pioneers and traveling cavalry. In recent years Solanum jamesii has gained more regional attention from botanists and anthropologists, who now make a special hobby of cultivating the potato in planter boxes. They also discovered that the potato has not been forgotten since pioneer times — they found instead some old-timers like DeLane Griffin had been growing them in their backyards for decades!
– The Byway
Feature image caption: Some exotically dressed potatoes sit in the grass enjoying a companionable silence. Courtesy Karen Munson.
Read more Potato Days news in Escalante to Celebrate 4th Annual Wild Potato Days.