Storytelling Across Contexts - Peach Days Car Show Case Study
One of my favorite parts about my job is to attend events that a museum seemingly has no place at, like a car show...
Brigham City Peach Days is an century-old, annual celebration that celebrates the agricultural heritage, particularly peaches, of Brigham City, Utah. Along with typical festival events like a parade and carnival rides, Peach Days also hosts Utah’s largest car show. It just so happens that the Natural History Museum of Utah (NHMU) has a massive outreach van with a dinosaur on the side... so I entered us into the car show!
To my dismay, we have yet to win our category. However, we win in other ways by getting to engage the public, unexpectedly, with dinosaur-themed activities and demonstrations. In September 2025, we also collaborated with a University of Utah Ph.D student who studies how car emissions impact air quality and is a part our Science Communication Fellowship program at NHMU. We spoke to over 1,000 car show guests in a single day, cementing this event in our yearly community engagement schedule (I think we may have cornered the dinosaur-van-at-a-car-show market).