The Uber driver dropped me at the gate a few minutes after seven in the morning. I was at least an hour earlier than I needed to be, but for some reason I felt that I had to be there and I wasn’t wrong. The silence of the place made what was about to unfold over the next few days all that much more surreal for me. With some leaves floating along the ground near the track office, I maneuvered through a few gates and up to the crossover bridge of the Young Kia Drag Strip at Rocky Mountain Raceways and grabbed the sunrise shot: empty track, nobody in the stands. I wasn’t the only person there…the track crew were just starting to get things together for morning preparation…but it sure felt like I was.

We lament tracks that disappear around here. Brian Lohnes’s main hobby is to visit every track, dead or alive, in his lifetime and more often than not, when he does document them, it’s after he’s jumped a barrier and snuck through some tall grass or overgrown brush first. It’s growing harder and harder to find a place where a racetrack isn’t immediately demonized for one of many reasons: noise, cultural impacts, the draw of better money for different purposes, name it. I still stand in awe that NCM Motorsports Park even exists, considering the amount of backlash that came about after it opened up. I stand in awe of places like Wild Horse Pass in Chandler, Arizona and Gateway Motorsports Park in Madison, Illinois, that operate near large metropolitan areas. I love locations like London Dragway in Kentucky, Little River Dragway (the former Temple Academy, my first drag strip) in Holland, Texas, and Jake’s Dragstrip in Moulton, Alabama that stick to the small-town feel of racing, where you pay the entry fee, get a burger at the stand, and soak up local racing all night long. Rocky Mountain Raceways feels like a medium track as far as dragstrips go, but add in the circle track and the motocross track and you start to see the true loss that Utah racers are going to experience.

For Friday and most of Saturday, my experience with RMR was not good, but it was not the track or track staff’s fault. That was completely due to the frustrations I was facing trying to livestream the event to you. It’s difficult to focus on the cars when you’re screaming at the computer. But every frustration, every moment of anger, melted away Saturday evening. Everything that I truly needed to know about what was going down happened right as the sun was starting to set in the west, highlighting wildfire smoke in an otherwise sunny evening. I don’t know how many people actually poured through the gates. I can only tell you about the miles of cars parked along the frontage road to the track, with people hiking to the gates. I can tell you about singing of the Canadian and American national anthems and the tears that flowed. I can tell you about a man who wanted to see the jet cars run so badly that he pulled himself out of the hospital and into the passenger’s seat of a car to see it for himself, possibly for the last time on his clock. Kids clung to fences for a closer look at the flames of the cars. Racers were throwing the “how to properly race” book out of the window in favor of half-track burnouts that got the crowd roaring. 

I left the party early. Officially, I had work to do, but in hindsight I’m not sure I wanted to see the final moments of Rocky Mountain Raceway. Seeing a second round of jet cars lighting up the night sky would’ve been amazing. But hearing the final announcements, seeing fans walking to their cars knowing full well there was no coming back…no, I don’t think I wanted to witness that at all. I didn’t want to see the looks on the faces of the staff who were coming down from the high, knowing that their beloved track was about to become another part of the thirty-four already existing properties in the Freeport West portfolio, all of which look like warehouses. I didn’t want to see the faces underneath the raccoon mascot heads, the ones who had been dancing and reveling in the racing all night. I want to remember stands filled, fencelines filled, concession stand lines filled. I want to remember racers who were ready to put on a show, not just to collect points but to entertain the crowd. I got to see that magic. It might have been a one-night-only show, but it was there for all to enjoy, in the golden glow of a setting sun.

Farewell, Rocky Mountain Raceways.