Farewell to Evermore — America’s Most Eccentric Theme Park
Evermore Park closes its Portal to Daywalkers
In an official statement from the park, Evermore Park in Pleasant Grove, Utah, announced its permanent closure.
“The Portal has Closed it is with Deep Sadness and Gratitude that we announce the closing of Evermore Park. The past decade has been filled with its share of trials and tribulations, but mostly Magic and Imagination.”
Like everything about Evermore this announcement is filled with romance and melancholy, and half-truths. Evermore hasn’t been open for a decade; it opened in 2018.
“We won several lifestyle and themed industry awards including being selected by Time Magazine in 2019 as one of the top 50 places in the world to visit.”
Sorta. “Time for Kids” did a list of “World's Coolest Places 2019 — 50 fun places for families.”
But that’s the Evermore experience. The exaggerations of founder Ken Bretschneider (also co-creator of Los Angeles’ “The Void”) and his staff led often to disappointment, but just as often it led to something inexplicably magical. Somehow the park and its performers drew an intense sense of dedication and a gusto for performative drama out of many of its guests — in Park parlance “Daywalkers” who have entered through Evermore’s “Portal — in spite of the park’s confusing premise, erratic offerings and lack of very much to really do.
Often visitors would arrive unclear of how to even buy a ticket to get in the gates. When in the park, guests — many of whom showed up in costumes as elaborate as the performers — could end up wandering through dirt fields with all the buildings locked up. My own family went one day and the park seemed to have run out of food by lunchtime.
But people kept coming back.
Something akin to a Renaissance Faire with permanent themed elements, Evermore’s primary novelty was a long-term narrative, with recurring characters, in an environment that was deeply connected to the seasons. During the Autumn, Evermore became the “World of Lore” with dark and light sides depending on the time of day. In Winter, the park became the Dickensian “Aurora”. Heading into summer was “Mythos.”
Guests might leave at the end of one seasonal event and return to find that the characters they’d met prior suddenly were all afflicted with a magical plague, or that romances had cropped up that needed involvement from the park visitors to reach, um, fruition. Or the guests might return to a park with no focus whatsoever, barely open, with no one in character at all.
You never knew.
Evermore seemed like a park with a dedication to finding a new kind of immersive interactive experience for folks burnt out on high-tech environments. It took risks, made mistakes, had triumphs and, as often, seemed like a failed amateur RenFaire. But, for not-quite-a-decade, it had something really interesting to say about how much an audience was willing to excuse in order to participate in bold interactive storytelling.
In spite of its obvious flaws, my kid couldn’t stop talking about it after their visit. There was something magical there, even if it couldn’t hold itself together, and we should salute big, eccentric, swinging-for-the-fences moves in theme parks because, as the major players in the field become more and more beholden to their stockholders, they are urged to take fewer and fewer risks.
Evermore Park was all risk, frequently in lieu of expertise, but sometimes, it worked.
It behooves me to point out the most extensive piece of Evermore Park reporting, Jenny Nicholson's’ almost 4-HOUR long YouTube review. It pulls no punches and is fascinating (and a little harrowing).
If you’re really interested in what this park was, here it is.
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Kelly McCubbin is a columnist for Boardwalk Times
