Workaway: Utah professionals mix city business with rural lifestyle.

• Author: Spendlove, Gretta
• Position: Focus

The first time I thought that living in Peoa and working in Salt Lake could really work was the day my partner called saying that there had been a bad accident with one of our clients' companies--a helicopter had gone down," says attorney Larry Stevens. "I spent the day on the phone with insurers, inspectors and potential witnesses. At 6 p.m. I realized I was still wearing my T-shirt and boxers. Nobody new it!"

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Stevens is one of an ever-increasing group of Utahns who live in rural areas but manage regional and even international businesses with the help of technology.

From River Bottom to Big City

"It's drop-dead gorgeous," Stevens says of Peoa, which is 15 miles east of Park City. "We live on 30 acres of ground along the Weber River, right on the river bottom, with horses and all kinds of wildlife." Rural beauty and quiet was what drew Stevens to Peoa and what keeps him there. He is a trial lawyer with Parsons Behle & Latimer (PB&L), a Salt Lake City firm, but works in the PB&L Salt Lake office only two or three times a week. "I draft and review documents and participate in conference calls in Peoa all the time," Stevens says. PB&L technology converts voicemail messages to e-mail, which Stevens can view on his Blackberry or laptop wherever he is.

"Sometimes, Peoa can seem almost too remote," Stevens says. He and his wife keep a condo in Salt Lake, so they can eat dinner with city friends on Friday nights and then stay over.

Stevens recently completed a different sort of high tech commuting as general counsel for Resolution Copper Company, a related entity to Rio Tinto, which is a PB&L client. Rio Tinto wanted a PB&L lawyer to supervise legal matters in Superior, Arizona, an old mining town 60 miles east of Phoenix. For a year, Stevens worked three weeks per month in Superior on two separate computers and two separate Blackberries. Sometimes he was in Salt Lake doing work for the Arizona mine; sometimes he was in Arizona taking an email or phone call for a Utah client.

Llamas and Benefits

For three years, Salt Lakers Shirley Weathers and Bill Walsh spent their weekends in Fruitland, in the western part of Duchesne County. In 1996 they decided to move there permanently. They were working with Utah Issues, a private non-profit, but realized they couldn't keep their Salt Lake jobs or find jobs in Duchesne with their current skill sets.

Weathers and Walsh set up a consulting business, similar to Utah Issues. They now...