Miners Day in Park City

Where has the summer gone that this weekend is already Labor Day, or as it is known in Park City, Miners Day. This is the weekend Park City celebrates its mining heritage with a funky small-town parade down Main Street, followed by music, food and games in the City Park and the ever-popular Mucking and Drilling Contest.

Now you may be wonder just what the heck is a mucking and drilling contest. This is a throwback to the mining days and there are two separate contests: the first, the drilling, is where former and current miners compete to see who can drill three holes in a slab of granite in the shortest amount of time using the old pneumatic drills. Best described as contraptions, these drills are about five feet long and weigh up to 70 pounds, are horrendously noisy, and will vibrate your eye teeth out of your mouth. Watching the miners pick up this piece of machinery, set it against the wall of granite and quickly drill a hole in a precise location is truly amazing. What comes next, however, is the mucking. Mucking is a term used by the silver miners for getting rid of the waste rock in the mine of which there is plenty. To do this another contraption is used which consists of an ore cart on a rail (again pneumatic driven) and with a pneumatic-powered bucket on the front. So the miner/contestant runs the cart forward on the track to the pile of muck, scoops up a bucket full which then is lifted up and over the top and drops in the ore cart. The part of the ore cart with the bucket is on a hinge which can swivel left or right or straight. So the miner is constantly angling the bucket to pick up the most amount of muck and then has to get it straight so it drops straight into the cart. The contest is to see who can fill the cart with the most muck in the smallest amount of time. As you can see, we are easily amused here in Park City. So that is Labor Day/Miners Day in Park City which will of course include the mandatory barbecues and a sad farewell to summer which feels like it just started yesterday.

In real estate news, probably the biggest news coming up that will have the most affect on buyers is that on October 1, conforming loan limits change from about $729,000 to close to $600,000. The affect that this will have on our market remains to be seen but it could be fairly significant. The gist of this change is that prior to October 1, purchases with a loan amount up to around $729,000 are available at the lower conforming rate, and now after October 1, any loan amounts over the new $600K limit will have to be jumbo loans which traditionally come at a cost of at least half a percent. The National Association of Realtors, bankers and lenders are lobbying hard to get Congress to extend this to at least the end of the year. Let's hope they are successful as this will allow buyers to continue purchasing and save significant amounts of money during the course of their loan.

Fall is one of the prettiest time of the year in the mountains with warm sunny days and cool evenings. If possible, make plans to visit for the fall colors which normally reach their peak mid-September to early October.