Grid City fills South Salt Lake, Tony Hawk skates the Huntsman Center, and the valley goes back to school Tuesday

Grid City Music Fest runs Friday through Sunday in South Salt Lake's Creative Industries Zone, the pocket of warehouses and studios off 2300 South and West Temple. This is its fifth year, and the format has not changed: nine stages, more than 80 bands, and every one of them local. No headliner flown in, no national tour stopping through on its way to Denver. The thing that makes it work is the bus. A free shuttle loops the venues all weekend, which turns a spread-out industrial neighborhood into one walkable festival and means you can follow a band from a bar to a warehouse without moving your car. There are more than 70 murals on the buildings between stages, and the whole route doubles as an outdoor gallery you did not plan to look at. Street parking around the zone is free. The money detail is the one people get wrong. Saturday and Sunday are open, no ticket, doors at noon both days. Friday is where it gets particular: the Opening Night Showcase at The Commonwealth Room is free if you register in advance and $10 if you walk up, with the Terence Hansen Trio, BadFeather and Advent Horizon on the bill. Friday's festival gates open at 4. Registering takes two minutes and saves you the ten dollars, which is the rare case where planning ahead pays a literal dividend.

The lake sits at 4,190.40 feet, which is inches above the 4,190.20 it hit in 2021 and still about two feet above the all-time low of 4,188.5 set in November 2022. It already peaked for the year back in April and has been dropping since, the way it does every summer. State water officials say the reason it is not setting a new record in a drought year this bad is conservation, that the cutbacks of the last few seasons are the difference between where the lake is and where it would otherwise be. That is the good news and the whole margin at the same time: the buffer between a bad year and a record year is now measured in inches.

Tuesday is the first day for Salt Lake City School District students of every age, for Canyons District elementary, junior high and high schools, and for Jordan District high schools. Jordan's elementary and middle schools follow on Wednesday, and Canyons kindergarten starts Thursday. Granite already went back last week, so by Wednesday morning the entire valley is running on the school-year clock again. That means 20 mph school zones are live, buses are back in the right lane, and the 7:30 stretch of every arterial in the county gets noticeably worse than it was last Tuesday.

The Drops of Jupiter tour is Train marking 25 years since that record, with Barenaked Ladies and Matt Nathanson on the bill ahead of them. Doors and the first set start early, at 6:45, and tickets have been running from about $25.

Salt Lake wraps a road trip in El Paso and comes back to Daybreak for a six-game set against the Reno Aces, Tuesday through Sunday. First pitch is 6:35 on the weeknights and 6:05 on Sunday. It is the second-to-last home series of the season.

Utah's largest free art festival takes over the old stadium from noon to 10 p.m. Saturday. More than a dozen muralists and graffiti artists paint live through the day, there is an artist marketplace, food vendors, a lowrider exhibit, and the 15th annual Skate Deck Show at the Urban Arts Gallery. Music runs from rap to blues, with dancers and drag performers on and off the stages.

Salt Lake led Minnesota United 1-0 with eight minutes left on Saturday at America First Field and drew 1-1, which extends a winless run in MLS play to five. Friday the Leagues Cup quarterfinal had no opponent and no site. It has both now, and neither one is home.

Utah went down twice to Bay FC on Friday in Sandy and won it anyway, 3-2, on a Mina Tanaka penalty in the 79th minute. That is win number 11, more than the club has ever managed in a season, and there are still matches left to add to it.

A small handmade-dumpling house on 4500 South doing soup dumplings, Lanzhou-style beef noodle soup and pan-fried pork buns. Order the pork soup dumplings at $10.99. There is a beef version at $11.99, but the pork is the one that gives the broth inside its flavor, and the broth is the entire reason to order them. The beef noodle soup is the other thing to know about: the base carries a slight chili-oil heat and there is more oil on the table if you want it hotter. They also make a chocolate soup dumpling, which sounds like a dare and mostly is.

The Summer Road runs 2.5 miles of dirt from the end of Highway 210 in Little Cottonwood up to the Albion Basin campground, where the Cecret Lake trail starts. August is when the wildflowers in the basin peak, and at roughly 9,500 feet it runs 20-odd degrees cooler than the valley floor on a 93-degree afternoon. Driving the road costs $12 per vehicle. Walking or biking up past the fee booth costs nothing.

Monday night in Salt Lake City, with JW Francis opening on the lawn at the mouth of Emigration Canyon.

Friday night in Draper, running through mid-September.

Friday evening in Millcreek, 5 to 9, running every Friday into late October.

Statewide reservoir storage sits at 54 percent of capacity, which is 13 points below normal for the middle of August and 16 points below where the same reservoirs were a year ago. The cause traces back to winter: snowpack peaked on March 9 at 8.4 inches of water, roughly half of a normal April 1 total, after the warmest winter on record. Streamflows across most basins have kept dropping through the summer, and both boat ramps at Yuba State Park are now closed because the water is too low to launch from safely. The big multi-year reservoirs are handling it. The small ones with one or two years of storage are the ones in trouble.

A year after the fire that gutted the building at 323 S. Main downtown, construction has started on a rebuild that does not just restore what burned. The plan adds a second floor to the bar and an outdoor rooftop patio above it, on a lot that is only a tenth of an acre. Total cost runs about $3.8 million against roughly $1.8 million in insurance money, and the owners have gone to the city's redevelopment arm for a $1 million disaster-relief loan to cover half of the $2 million gap. The same group runs White Horse next door and Franklin Avenue, so this stretch of Main has been dark on one storefront for a full year.

Crews raised the first wall panels at the northwest corner of the new West High School, the first thing on that site visible from the street since the ceremonial groundbreaking in March. The panels are being cast on beds at the site rather than trucked in finished, a tilt-up method the district chose to hold down the cost of a roughly $300 million rebuild of Utah's oldest high school. Phase One covers the main building, the academic tower and the field house, and is due in 2030. Students move into that, and then the athletic facilities get rebuilt where the current school stands, with the clock tower staying.

The northbound I-215 ramps to eastbound and westbound I-80 closed at the end of July for about five weeks and are due to reopen before Labor Day. The northbound ramp to Redwood Road is a longer wait, closed into early October. Airport traffic has been routed to I-15 and I-80 or out to Bangerter in the meantime. All of it belongs to the I-215 West project, a $190 million job that passed its halfway mark in June and covers repaving, 18 replaced bridge decks and repairs to 12 more bridges, with the whole thing finishing in 2027.