It ranks among the most traumatic days ever in the life of Salt Lake City’s tree canopy.
With powerful winds akin to an inland hurricane, the early morning storm of Sept. 8, 2020, killed one resident, blew over nearly 1,500 publicly owned trees across Utah’s capital city and left nearly 200,000 residences, businesses and schools without power.
Officials declared a state of emergency. In terms of some of the city’s oldest and most venerable trees, some standing a century or more, few places were more devastated than the historic Salt Lake City Cemetery, a 122-acre green expanse spanning the upper reaches of the Avenues.
The verdant memorial space lost nearly 250 trees that gusty day and their toppling blocked roads and uprooted scores of gravestones and other monuments, forcing what is the country’s largest municipal cemetery to close for months.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Hundreds of headstones in the Salt Lake City Cemetery were damaged in the September 2020 windstorm.
Saturday brought a final wave of healing for the storied pioneer-era graveyard: Scores of volunteers turned out for a special tree planting to replace the last 50 or 60 trees felled in that 2020 disaster and to cap nearly five years of restoration work by the city’s forest keepers.
It’s been part of a wider campaign under Mayor Erin Mendenhall since she took office in 2020, to plant thousands of new saplings around the city yearly, including a concerted focus on adding at least 1,000 new trees annually in relatively bare and heat-prone west side neighborhoods.
(Tanya Semerad) Volunteers and city officials replanted nearly 50 trees in Salt Lake City Cemetery on Saturday, replacing the last of nearly 250 trees knocked down in the Sept. 8, 2020, windstorm.
Calling the 177-year-old east-side cemetery one of the city’s most sacred spaces, Mendenhall joined the planting work Saturday with about 50 volunteers. She acknowledged the burial ground’s nearly 130,000 individual plots as holding city residents as well.
“They’re a quiet majority,” the mayor said of the interred, before pitching in on the morning’s planting with wheelbarrow and shovel. “It’s important that we give them voices and that we maintain this space in a respectful manner.”
Overcoming windy ‘day of destruction’
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) The Salt Lake City Cemetery sustained heavy tree damage following hurricane-force winds on Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2020.
Fresh saplings of ponderosa pine, giant sequoias, bald cypress, cedar, catalpa flowering trees and other hand-picked varieties went primarily in the graveyard’s southern edge along 4th Avenue, near the sexton’s house at N Street.
The plantings made up a final phase of fully replenishing the cemetery’s arboretum in that storm’s aftermath, bolstered on Saturday by volunteers from the Friends of Salt Lake City Cemetery. Similar replacement campaigns have unfolded over the years for other hard-hit city green spaces, including Liberty Park and the west side’s International Peace Gardens and Rosewood Park.
“I saw the destruction that day,” said Avenues resident, cemetery fan and former U.S. Forest Service volunteer Doug Fuller, spade in hand. “This is about touching roots, but it’s also investing in the future of our community and repairing something that was pretty devastating.”
The 2020 windstorm swept across northern Utah and the Salt Lake Valley, just as residents were reeling from the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Its havoc delivered gusts approaching 100 mph — and the ensuing wreckage forever changed how officials manage Salt Lake City’s urban forest of 90,000-plus trees and 250 different species.
New approach to city, cemetery tree canopy
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Tony Gliot, Urban Forest Program Manager, Julie Fratto-Smith, and Mayor Erin Mendenhall unveila sign as Salt Lake City announces the newly accredited Mark Smith Memorial Arboretum at Salt Lake City Cemetery on Saturday, Nov. 6, 2021.
“It’s a date that will live in infamy for us,” said Tony Gliot, the city’s urban forester, who remembers waking up that September morning to a profound shock that resurfaces every fall.
“I can tell you that I honestly worry and watch the weather to see whether or not we’re going to have another one of these patterns,” Gliot said. “These types of winds do happen with some frequency in our city, and it is this time of year — along with bookend seasons of heavy ice and wet snow — that put us on high alert.”
The city learned from that day how to respond quickly when trees are damaged, Gliot said. Crews prune trees differently now to make them more resistant to weather. Officials try to give new implants more room to grow a firm and healthy root system in the face of surrounding development.
Folks with the city’s urban forestry services office advise residents on the best locations, varieties, watering and ongoing care for trees, while also drawing from a more diverse list of tree species these days, Gliot said, favoring drought-tolerant ones to make the city’s canopy more resilient.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Children play in the leaves under a European Beech at Salt Lake City Cemetery on Nov. 6, 2021. From left, Henley DeHart, Nora Davis, Mazie Davis, and Emma Carbine.
The forester noted that the cemetery’s own collection of trees was officially designated as an arboretum in November 2021, giving the area special credentials reflecting the city’s commitment to preserving and improving its trees and enshrining the bond residents have with them.
The arboretum is named in memory of the historic cemetery’s 31st and longest serving sexton, tree champion Mark E. Smith, who died in 2019. Gliot called that arboretum declaration something special, “symbolic of an effort that goes on forever,” he said, “to constantly be caring for and replacing our urban forest — and that’s what we’ve done.”