Like a lot of family farmers and ranchers these days, Heather Limon and her brother Dalon Hinckley have to be creative to stay afloat.
That explains the couple thousand people right now standing in their field.
It’s harvest time, and from the middle of September until the end of October, the Cross E Ranch hosts what it calls the Sunflower Festival. For $18 for grownups and $13 for kids, the public is invited to step through the gates and step back in time. There’s everything from pig races to corn mazes to pony rides to hay rides to face painting to picking your own pumpkins and plenty more. For dinner, there’s hamburgers that were Cross E cows just a couple weeks ago, and the festival’s signature donuts that Dalon and Heather learned to make while attending a seminar on Ag Entertainment — that’s the fancy name that describes farms that engage in this sort of behavior.
The Cross E is the closest decent-sized ranch to downtown Salt Lake City still standing. You could leave the City Creek mall and be there in 10 minutes. The boundaries used to include land where the Salt Lake International Airport now sits — until the state bought it from the Hinckleys in the early 1960s to expand the airport. Less than 65 years ago, the runways that today bring in jets from around the world were the domain of the Cross E’s 3,000 cows.