The county fair closes out in South Jordan, a Tongan festival fills Jordan Park, and Saturday finally dries out

The fair opened Wednesday at the Salt Lake County Equestrian Center on 11400 South in South Jordan and closes Saturday night. It is the fair's 79th year, and this is the first one under a new carnival operator, Brown's Amusements, which brought a bigger ride lineup than the fair has run in a while. Two things on the schedule have never been here before. Monster truck racing is new, and so is medieval jousting with the Knights of Mayhem, the armored full-contact outfit that does this for a living. Around them the fair is doing what a county fair does: the Utah Rodeo Circle J riding events, a roaming dinosaur, School of Rock and Hired Guns on the music stage, the Thrillbillies slip-n-slide, Wave Runner water balls, a live-action fishing pond, and Noah's Ark exotic petting zoo, which is back after sitting out. The weather makes the choice for you. Tonight carries a 40 percent chance of storms through the evening, and an arena show on wet dirt is a different night than the same show under a clear sky. Saturday is sunny and 84 and it is the last day, so that is the one to take. Gate prices and the day's arena times are posted on the fair's own site, and the arena lineup shifts by day, so pull it up before you leave the driveway rather than guessing at the entrance.

Nearly two years after getting nine acres south of downtown rezoned, Intermountain Health has put real drawings on the table for the hospital it wants at 800 South between State and Main. The main building runs 10 stories and 209 feet, with more than 521,000 square feet inside, and a seven-story medical office building at 142 feet faces Main Street. Two parking garages, one six stories and one seven, hold 1,203 stalls between them with retail on their ground floors. The site that has sat as a fenced hole in the middle of the city gets a public plaza at the corner of 700 South and Main, an elevated walkway between the garage and the medical offices, and, in a detail nobody expected in a hospital plan, reserved space for food truck stalls.

Early move-in at Trailhead starts today, which puts 1,447 beds onto the University of Utah campus in one building. It is six stories and 349,342 square feet, built for first-year and upper-division students in the same halls, and the ground floor is closer to a small commercial strip than a dorm lobby: a pho restaurant, The Other Side Coffee and Donuts, a 35-seat cafe, a grab-and-go shop and a gaming hub. That matters past campus, because every bed the U adds up the hill is a renter not competing for a basement apartment in Sugar House or the Avenues in August.

Welles is the Arkansas songwriter who built an audience posting one-take topical folk songs filmed standing in a field, and he is now filling amphitheaters off it. Ratboys open. Gates at 6:30, music at 7:30, and tickets run $50 for garden members and $55 for everyone else.

Friday Fun Nights fills Riverton City Park with food trucks, a summer market and live music from 5:30 to 8:30, then rolls an outdoor movie at dusk. Tonight it is The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. The park has three playgrounds and a splash pad, and all of it is free.

Salt Lake beat FC Juarez 3-0 at America First Field in front of 14,099 to finish Leagues Cup Phase One at 2-0-1 and seven points, good for a top-four finish among the eighteen MLS clubs in the tournament. The goal difference is the story: plus seven, best of any MLS side, from outscoring three opponents eight to one.

Salt Lake stole the series opener 4-3 with a ninth-inning rally, then gave it back the next night 5-2 when El Paso broke a 2-2 tie after the sixth. The comeback was the good kind: Pablo Reyes singled to start the ninth, the bases loaded behind him, Cade Marlowe tied it on a sacrifice fly and Christian Moore walked in the winner.

A sports bar that opened last month in the old Trolley Wing Co space on Blue Vista Lane, where everything but the bread is made in house. Order the chicken tenders, which are brined before they are fried and come out with a salty-savory finish that has no business being on a wings-and-screens menu. The sweet potato tots are house-made and cooked in beef tallow, the brown butter nuts run out early, and the kitchen also turns out beef taquitos, roasted carrots and a Brussels Caesar.

Third Saturdays at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts mean free admission to the whole museum plus an art-making session for families from 1 to 4. This month it is kumihimo, the Japanese braiding technique, worked on small looms in the classroom with thread you take home. The reason it is kumihimo is upstairs: the museum has two Japanese swords on view whose handles and scabbards are wrapped in exactly these silk braids, and the braid is the part most people walk past to look at the blade.

Friday night in downtown Salt Lake City, the Australian comic works the club room.

Friday evening in Taylorsville, food trucks and live music in front of City Hall from 5:30.

Saturday night in Salt Lake City, in the all-ages garage off 700 West.

Utah averaged 76.7 degrees in July, the second-warmest July in 132 years of records and half a degree short of the mark set in 2003. Salt Lake City did set one: 109 degrees on July 12, the hottest day the city has logged since record-keeping started in 1874. What kept the month from breaking the state record was the back half, when monsoon moisture arrived and knocked the highs down. The same system left 1.31 inches of rain on the state, which made it the 31st-wettest July on record, an odd pairing that describes this whole summer.

The Point has moved from dirt work to actual buildings on the 104 acres where the state prison used to sit. The opening piece is a residential complex called Chroma with 363 apartments over 42,000 square feet of ground-floor retail, plus a 2,000-foot walkable street called The Promenade meant to be the center of the district, and a 5,000-seat event center that Mountain America Credit Union bought the naming rights to and Oak View Group will run. The state put $165 million into infrastructure and the private side is spending $2.3 billion on this first phase. It eventually spreads to 600 acres, with a University of Utah Health campus planned next door.

The convention center's last events run in the summer of 2027, and then it closes for three years while it is rebuilt as part of the $1.8 billion downtown redevelopment district, with the doors expected back open in 2031. That is a long hole for a building that hosts roughly 200 conventions and more than 375,000 attendees a year, and every one of those is a hotel night, a dinner and a cab ride downtown. Some of that business is expected to shift to the Mountain America Exposition Center in Sandy while the work runs. The rebuilt version gets two ballrooms instead of one.