If you want to name Utah’s best mascot, Cosmo the Cougar of Brigham Young University sits atop that list for many. Game day acrobatics and a mascot national championship will do that for you.
Unless you’re familiar with Herriman’s favorite city official — or a 3-year-old named Lily. Just ask her mom, Kira Beatty.
Lily is obsessed with the Herriman Yeti.
“Any event that the yeti is at, we come to,” Beatty said. “We went to an event for BYU, and Cosmo the Cougar was there. And she's like, ‘Where's the yeti?’ Like, she could care less about Cosmo the Cougar.”
Yet again, the yeti is what brought Beatty up I-15 from Lehi to Herriman’s Crane Park one muggy summer evening. It was the city’s annual Herriman Yeti Foam Party, which is where Lily met the yeti last year. At 39 weeks pregnant, Beatty endured the outing in the park’s grassy field, dodging rain, so her daughter could be face-to-face with a 6-foot-tall yeti in blue swim trunks lumbering through the crowd.
A cannon sprayed soapy foam, and kids shrieked as they ran through it. The yeti doesn’t talk, but Beatty said he does a great job of miming. That’s why she thinks her daughter loves him so much.
“I think she feels like she’s having a conversation with the yeti,” Beatty said with a laugh.
Think of the abominable snowman from the 1964 Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer TV Christmas special — big white furry head, wide blue grin. The Herriman Yeti is a city employee wearing a similar costume.
It took the yeti about half an hour to move across the park because families wanted to hug him, get a high-five and snap a picture. That included Herriman resident Maddie Thompson, who took a photo of her three kids with the big furball.
“I think he honestly brings people together,” Thompson said. “The kids get excited to come see him.”
It’s sad that other cities don’t have a mascot, she said, because it’s fun to tell her kids, “let’s go to the yeti race” or the “yeti foam party.”
The mascot started as wordplay. A former city employee thought Herriman sounded like “hairy man,” so a running joke in city hall was that one of the community’s new schools should make its mascot the yeti.
“Until, I guess we decided, why are we giving other people this suggestion when we could use it as our own mascot,” said Mitch Davis, who has worked in communications for the city for about eight years.
It started with a cardboard cutout for a yeti-themed holiday scavenger hunt in 2016. Then a city employee bought a costume online, and the yeti’s presence just kept expanding.
The story the city tells is that the yeti lives in the nearby mountains and comes down to hang out with residents.
The city now has yeti swag and multiple events each year centered around him. If a new business opens in town, the hairy creature is outside cutting the ribbon. When the yeti is not at an event, Davis said people ask about him.
Over time, elected officials and staff come and go. But with a mascot, Davis said, the yeti can be a constant presence in the community. One long-time resident told the city she wants a declaration saying the yeti is officially part of Herriman because she doesn’t want the mascot to ever go away, no matter who’s in charge.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re a new resident or an old resident, [the yeti’s] going to have a fun time with you and make you feel welcome,” Davis said.
Having something that everyone can embrace to feel like a part of the community is especially important for Herriman, said Mayor Lorin Palmer. The city in the southwest corner of the Salt Lake Valley has more than doubled in population over the last decade. A lot of young families have flocked to the area.
“The hardest part we have out here is keeping our community together,” the mayor said. “And I truly believe the yeti has been a key part of keeping the community focused on something fun and light-hearted. It’s just become a central figure of the city.”
The most common question is, who is in the suit? When Palmer took office, he said learning the answer was his first request.
“I thought that should be a privilege that comes along with this elected office,” Palmer joked.
So if you want to learn this privileged information, run for office, and maybe you’ll get the answer.
Even within city hall, very few people know the identity of the Herriman Yeti. Davis said they want to keep it that way to preserve the fun. At last year’s city holiday party, the yeti got more letters than Santa.
Here’s what we can tell you.
The human behind the mascot is one city employee who has a full-time job, not being the yeti. Part of the fun, the employee said, is that they’ve seen the same kids come up to the yeti year after year. They grow into teenagers who still want a high-five. And, while the suit is great in the winter, it can be very hot in the summer. But after years of experience, they now wear an ice vest inside.
When her two kids were younger, Herriman resident Carolina Antequera said they used to be afraid of the yeti. Now they love him. To her, the Herriman Yeti is a fun thing that makes her smile and represents the city she lives in.
“You feel like it kind of belongs to the community.”
Last year, when the Utah Hockey Club came to Salt Lake City and was searching for a name, they wanted to be called the Yeti. It ultimately didn’t happen. Instead, the NHL team declared itself the Mammoth. During the hype and rumor, though, the Herriman Yeti released a comical statement letting the community know he wasn’t going anywhere.
“I am Utah’s original yeti mascot and my home and heart forever belong in Herriman.”
