First ‘Magical and Surreal’ Lantern Festival Lights Panguitch Skies

On Saturday, October 7, well after the sun went down, the Panguitch City park was alive with people and lights. It was the night of the very first Panguitch Lantern Festival, and the only one of its kind in Southern Utah.

With numbers one might expect from an early day of the Balloon Festival, but hardly of a day in October, around 300 people from places like Heber and Las Vegas, and a few locals, enjoyed games of horseshoes, cornhole and spikeball in the town park.

The air smelled of s’mores. Happy people cooked marshmallows around an open campfire. Following the main event, lots of people even stayed for the dance. Anyone will tell you, it was a really fun environment.

Still, the best part was yet to come.

The Lantern Festival started at 5:00 p.m., but the regular buzz and hum of the night started to change as the sky slowly turned to black: that was when the lanterns came out. Small groups gathered around large lanterns to light and send off. Each would climb to join the quickly growing mass of floating lights, rising off the earth of the small town.

This was a moment Karma Albrecht, an event organizer who works for Panguitch City, called truly “magical and surreal.”

You see, this is the first year of the event, and Karma had been so ready to make it happen.

‘The perfect year’

“It was the perfect year to do it,” said Karma, excitement growing in her voice as she talked about an event she’d spent her days planning. Most years, it is too dry in Southern Utah for an event like this, and in many places they won’t even give it a thought — in St. George, for example, she explained.

But this year was wet, and in Panguitch, that just might be enough to pull it off. Karma started going to the city council members, getting a couple of them on board with the idea.

The plan was that most people would go and find their lanterns and return them to the city, which they did, making a simple and fairly unimpactful cleanup process. In addition, Panguitch is in a good position to host the event in their crisp October nights. The temperature difference between the air inside and outside the lanterns would make them float. It was a good plan, barring any fire danger.

When she got a “go” from the fire marshal, Karma already knew what she needed to do.

‘Give Light’

Hoping to create an event that would both attract tourists and bring the community together, she called the Panguitch Lantern Festival with the theme, “Give Light.”

“I wanted us to be able to share our light with others in our community,” she said, “for people to have a quiet moment to remember their loved ones or to have a romantic interaction or just mainly for the community to come together and share their light with one another.”

Karma’s job is to attract tourists to the unique aspects of the community, which is so important to the economy of Garfield County. She hopes word will get out, and the Panguitch Lantern Festival will continue to grow.

“I hope to spread the word because we don’t have an event like this in Southern Utah,” she said.

– by Abbie Call

Feature image courtesy Eric Fawson.

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