A year in Festival City USA.

Every June the university turns into the host of the Utah Summer Games, a statewide amateur sports meet that has run since the 1980s. Athletes of every age come from all over Utah to compete across dozens of sports, and the fields, courts, and pools around SUU fill up for weeks.

The opening ceremony, with the torch and the parade of athletes, is a proper small-city spectacle, and most events are free to walk up and watch. If someone in your house plays a sport, this is the week the town runs like a miniature Olympics.

Groovefest is the free music festival I send people to when they think Cedar City is only about Shakespeare. It landed here in 2000, and every year in the last week of June it takes over Main Street Park with days of live blues, folk, bluegrass, Americana, and jazz, plus food and art, all of it free to attend.

It is a genuine community event, run largely by volunteers, with a campfire concert up the canyon and a kids' side to it. Bring a blanket, a lawn chair, and a light jacket for when the sun drops behind the mountains.

The July Jamboree is the Rotary Club's classic car show, and it is one of the best free evenings of the summer. On a Saturday in mid July, historic Main Street closes to traffic and fills with hundreds of hot rods, muscle cars, trucks, and motorcycles for a downtown show and shine.

There is a Friday kickoff the night before, and the Saturday street festival brings vendors, food, and music alongside the cars. You do not have to care about engines to enjoy it; you walk the street and take in the town at its friendliest.

For a few days in mid July, Main Street Park turns into a Renaissance village. The Utah Midsummer Renaissance Faire has run for more than forty years, with costumed characters, jousting and combat demonstrations, craft and food vendors, and stages of music and comedy.

It slots into the same summer stretch as the Shakespeare season, so plenty of visitors do both on one trip. The costumes and the staged combat are half the fun, whether or not you turn up in one yourself.

If the Shakespeare Festival is the grand production, the Neil Simon Festival is its warmer, funnier cousin. This professional company, now formally SimonFest Theatre Company, still goes by the Neil Simon name around town, and it stages a summer season of comedies and dramas at the Heritage Center Theater in historic downtown.

The season runs mid July into August, overlapping the bigger festival, so a theater-minded visit can catch both. The Heritage Center is an intimate room, which makes for a very different feel from the open-air Engelstad stage a few blocks away.

The Iron County Fair is the classic county fair, held over Labor Day weekend up the road in Parowan, about twenty minutes north on I-15. It has the whole lineup: a rodeo, a demolition derby, livestock barns, a carnival, and a parade, and half of Cedar City drives over for it.

The grounds are free to wander; the rodeo and the derby are ticketed. It is the unofficial close of summer around here, and it is worth the short drive for the derby alone.

This is the event that explains Cedar City better than any brochure. On a Saturday in late October, the Livestock and Heritage Festival trails a big band of sheep straight down Main Street to mark the historic fall move off the mountain. It is the most Cedar City traffic jam of the year, and nobody involved is being ironic.

Around the parade there are sheepdog trials, wool and spinning demonstrations, antique tractors, and Dutch-oven cooking. It is agriculture remembering itself in public, it is free to watch, and it overlaps the best of the county's leaf season up Cedar Canyon.