Downtown Container Park

This guide to Downtown Container Park introduces the fifty-foot fire-breathing praying mantis that guards its entrance, built by aerospace engineer Kirk Jellum in his Salt Lake City driveway as an anniversary gift for his wife. It follows her from a real insect Jellum once caught and studied, through three thousand hours of construction with a twenty-person crew, to her debut at Burning Man in 2010. Watch her joints and plates closely, each one copied from the real thing at roughly a hundred fifty times life size.