Highland Games return to Cache Valley

In the spot where the sagebrush grows, the traditional Scottish Highland Games are making a return to Logan for the first time in 20 years. 

According to the Utah Heavy Athletics website, the games were first organized in Scotland in the 11th century when King Malcom III held a royal contest to find the strongest and fastest people in his kingdom. Now, they’re a way that people use to compete, find community and celebrate Scottish heritage.

“It’s been in Utah probably for 30 years, maybe a little bit longer than that,” Ben Kitchens, the athletic director for the event, said. “It’s really not started to blossom until maybe the last, like, five years.” 

Kitchens helps to run the event but is also a competitor in the sport itself. He shared more about the training regimen the athletes go through. 

“For an average games, you’re doing upwards of five to six hours of nonstop activity with very heavy implements,” Kitchens said.

Milly Garren, a recent Utah State University graduate and former Aggie track and field athlete competing in the sport, also commented on the difference in training.

“We do a lot of Olympic lifting,” Garren said. “You’ll have some more specific workouts, so those are just a little bit different practices — or, I mean, you’re still throwing. It’s the difference would be just you have nine events to work through, so you just kind of have to spread out your time.”

Athletes need to combine traditional strongman training with endurance exercises and movements specific to the Highland Games in order to perform at their best during the competition, according to Kitchens. 

“I was curious, and I tracked how many calories I expended, and it was upwards of, like, 6,000 calories just in one competition,” Kitchens said.

Highland Games consist of traditional Celtic and Gaelic tests of strength, including stone put, caber toss, Scottish hammer, weight for distance, weight over bar and sheaf toss. Every event involves throwing some heavy object, either a large stone, weight or a tapered pine pole called a caber, according to the Utah Heavy Athletics website. 

“One of the ones that is kind of, maybe, more well known with the community is called the caber toss, which kind of looks like a big tree or a big telephone pole that varies in lengths and weights depending, again, on the class that you compete in,” Kitchens said. “For my group, the cabers will vary anywhere between 15 to 20 feet long and anywhere between 85 to 130 pounds, and the whole goal of that is to pick it up and flip it end over end.”

According to Kitchens, another event, sheaf toss, involves using a pitchfork to launch a bag, or sheaf, of hay above a bar. 

“It’s based off of farmers that would take their pitchforks and throw hay bales,” said Maia Garren, Milly’s sister and USU alumna who holds the school record for women’s indoor weight throw. “They throw it as high as they can. Obviously, those farmers’ hay bales were a lot heavier than what we are throwing, but we’re essentially mimicking that same idea where we have a pitchfork and we have a bag that we use. It’s got twine in it — they’re weighted bags — and we’re trying to throw it up over a bar as high as we can.”

According to Kitchens, sheaf toss tends to be a crowd favorite.

“That one’s pretty fun to watch because you actually have to, like, turn your head up to see it go over the bar,” Kitchens said. “That’s a pretty fun one to watch for the crowd as well, and it’s one of my favorite events too.”

All of the athletes are very welcoming and encouraging for spectators to come. 

“We look scary,” Maia said. “I know a lot of the times, like, you look out on the field, and everybody looks scary because everyone there’s a lot of big, jacked people throwing, but everyone’s so nice.”

The sentiment is similar across the Garren family.

“Everyone’s really there just to have a fun time,” Milly said. “There’s not that many athletes, especially, like, in your state, and so you kind of become well acquainted with the people in your state, which is fun, and so I think it’s a lot more fun because like everyone’s just there to have fun.”

Participants are excited to compete at the Cache County Fairgrounds on Oct. 24. Admission is free for spectators.