CASTLE DALE — For the first time since it began 32 years ago, the Castle Valley Pageant and its 300 Mormon volunteers had to go on without its passionate founder.
Montell Seely, a pioneer at heart who originally wrote the pageant in 1978, died in a tragic accident just days after the pageant's last performance in 2008.
Seely, 74, and a local girl, Hanna Wagstaff, 14, were both killed while re-enacting the very pioneer journey that inspired him to write the pageant. The group of 12 trekkers who were retracing a pioneer route to Castle Valley were ascending a canyon road when disaster stuck. The driver of a Chevy truck, who was temporarily blinded by a low morning sun, was traveling the opposite direction and crashed into their handcart.
Their deaths, while honoring the obedience of their ancestors, were perhaps ominously foreshadowed by an emotional scene in the pageant that Seely wrote three decades before where death steals a child from his pioneering parents along the same journey.
"Montell's family still has so much do with the pageant," said Mark Justice, president of the pageant. "But we've really felt that loss."
Despite losing the devotion of its author, the pageant is still apparently steeped in enough nostalgic tradition to attract hundreds of dedicated participants and thousands of attendees, many from around the world, to its "hard-to-find location in the sticks."
Under the direction of a pageant presidency, each volunteer donates from 40 to 60 hours of time in preparation for the series of eight performances.
The not-so-kept secret is that the pageant is only half the show. Two hours before actors take their place on the acre-sized stage, families pour into the bowl-shaped outdoor theater and wind their way through a simulated pioneer village, complete with assorted huts and a tepee. A few yards from where people are sampling chili simmering in a Dutch oven over a fire, a scruffy, bearded blacksmith hammers red-hot metal over a bulky anvil. The line to churn ice cream in an old-fashioned barrel isn't as long as the line to sample the cold treat. A cow stands docilely in its stall as children stumble in front of one another to get a chance at milking her. Up the hill a bit, a covered wagon, pulled by a couple of the two dozen horses that are a part of the show, whips around a short trail, giving its urban passengers a shot at a frontier experience.
Missionaries circulate in the crowd, shaking hands and handing out referral cards to those who may be unfamiliar with the church but want to learn more.
About 2 to 5 percent of attendees are nonmembers, according to Ron Sanders, the pageant director. That totals anywhere from 50 to 150 each night.
Kevin Gynn is one of them. Somewhere between a whisper and a laugh, the middle-aged man from southern Utah pointed to the missionaries in the crowd and said he won't admit to them he's not a member of the church but enjoys the atmosphere.
"I don't think I'm ready for Mormon lessons," he said. "At least not yet, but I've been coming to these for years. They do a good job. … I've brought a lot of friends, too."
Before The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints officially started sponsoring the pageant in the early 1990s, the roughshod amphitheater, at the end of a long dirt road, was largely built with "bailin' wire," Sanders said. Since then, however, the church has made several improvements, like adding permanent electricity (a generator provided power before). It also built several lighting towers, and made the raw landscape safer, like replacing a barbed wire fence with chain-link one, said Lorin Morse, a senior lighting designer for the church who runs the show's complex lighting.
The village opens at 6 p.m., and the 90-minute pageant starts at around 8:30 p.m. Performances run nightly Aug. 3-7.
For more information, visit www.lds.org/placestovisit/location/0,10634,1782-1-1-2,00.html.
e-mail: jhancock@desnews.com