Samak Smoke House: Cherry-Smoked Jerky and Country-Store Charm at the Gate to the Uintas

The Mirror Lake Scenic Byway runs east out of Kamas, climbs through aspen and lodgepole pine, tops the Bald Mountain Pass at over 10,700 feet, and drops down toward Evanston on the Wyoming side. Pretty much every weekend from Memorial Day through October, that road carries a steady current of trucks pulling boats, families heading to Trial Lake or Washington Lake, fly fishermen working the Provo headwaters, mountain bikers heading up to the Notch Mountain ride, and Salt Lake commuters going the long way to anywhere. Two and a half miles east of Kamas, just past the town's last stoplight and before the highway starts climbing in earnest, there's a low log-and-stone storefront with a green roof, a hand-painted trout on the sign, and the words Samak Smoke House & Country Store.

You're supposed to stop. That's the whole point of the place. Locals know it. Park City weekenders learn it within their first summer. The store has been there since 1972, run by current owners Jen Hisey and Dave Witham since 2004, and the rhythm of the operation has barely changed in five decades — open seven days a week, jerky in the case, espresso behind the counter, snowshoe rentals in winter, canoe rentals in summer, fish stories on tap year-round.

"Best beef jerky we've ever had — and we've tried a lot," reads one of the threads that runs through the Google reviews. The Google rating sits at 4.7 stars across 136 reviews, which is the kind of average a roadside store holds when the product is genuinely better than the chain stuff at the gas station up the road. The Yelp listing (17 reviews, 12 photos) corroborates. The Restaurant Guru aggregate sits at 4.1. The pattern across every review platform is the same — people stop in expecting a touristy roadside curio and walk out with three vacuum-sealed bags of peppered beef and a Samak Stickie they didn't know they needed.

What "Smoked the Old-Fashioned Way" Actually Means at Samak

The smokehouse program is the heart of the operation, and the technique is older than most of the people working the counter. Hand-cut beef and turkey, marinated in a house recipe Jen and Dave have been refining for more than 25 years, smoked over fresh cherry wood chips shipped from Wisconsin. No liquid smoke. No preservatives. The marinade hits the meat, the cherry wood does the work, the jerky comes out the other side with a chew that holds and a flavor that doesn't dissolve into salt.

Cherry wood matters. Most commercial jerky is smoked over hickory or mesquite if it sees real smoke at all, and most of what's sold as "smoked" is actually liquid-smoke-flavored beef rendered in a dehydrator. Cherry burns sweeter and finer than hickory, and at lower temperatures it pulls a clean, almost confectionary smoke into the meat instead of the heavier, more aggressive flavor that hickory delivers. The result at Samak is a jerky that's recognizably smoked without tasting like a campfire — closer to what a Wisconsin charcuterie operation would put out than what you'd find in a roadside bag from a Texas truck stop.

The peppered beef jerky is the lead, and reviewers consistently flag it as the order. Behind it: teriyaki beef, plain beef, turkey jerky, smoked trout, smoked salmon, and smoked cheeses — the cheddar in particular shows up in dishes at the Notch Pub a quarter mile up the road, which Dave Witham also runs and which uses Samak smoked cheese on its menu. The trout and salmon are vacuum-sealed and shelf-stable for travel, which makes them the obligatory backcountry-trip protein for anyone heading into the Uintas with more days than ice.

Then there are the Samak Stickies — house-made granola bars built on peanut butter and local honey, dense enough to fuel a long hike but sweet enough that the kid in your party will eat one and ask for two more. The Stickies don't make sense on paper alongside the jerky and the trout, but they make perfect sense in a country store at the trailhead of the Uinta Mountains, where everyone who walks in is either heading toward a long day outside or just back from one.

The Country Store Around the Smokehouse

Reducing Samak to "the jerky place" misses what the store is doing. The smokehouse is the headline product, but the store wraps a full Mirror Lake Highway resupply operation around it — and the resupply piece is what makes the place a fixture rather than a tourist stop.

Walk in on a July Saturday and the front of the store is moving in two directions. Out: vacuum-sealed jerky bags, cheese plates, sandwiches built behind the counter on the day's bread, hot espresso drinks if the morning's still cool, cold sodas if it isn't. In: locals dropping off forest service paperwork, fishermen asking what's hatching on Mill Hollow, campers paying for the canoe rental on the back lot, snowshoers (in winter) asking which loop hasn't been broken in yet. The shelves carry fishing licenses and recreation passes, Uinta-specific guidebooks and topo maps, firewood, ice, sundries, gift baskets, the small assortment of touristy souvenirs that no Mirror Lake gift shop can be without.

In winter the front rotates. The fishing supplies thin, the canoe rentals stack against the back wall, snowshoe rentals come forward, the espresso bar runs harder, and a fire is generally going somewhere on the property. The road conditions update on the chalkboard. Holiday gift packs of jerky migrate into the front display.

That dual identity — jerky destination and full-service Mirror Lake resupply — is what gives the store its 50-plus-year staying power. The summer business is the trail traffic. The winter business is the locals and the espresso run. The shoulder seasons are the hunters. The store doesn't close for a season because there's always a reason for somebody on UT-150 to pull over.

SAMAK = KAMAS Backwards (and Other Local Lore)

The name is a small linguistic joke that almost everyone misses on first pass. SAMAK is KAMAS spelled backwards — a mirror flip, fitting for a store on the Mirror Lake Highway. The hamlet the store sits in is technically called Samak, not Kamas, though it functions as Kamas's eastern extension and shares the 84036 ZIP code. The name predates the store by decades.

Kamas itself sits in Summit County, in a high valley between the western Uintas and the Wasatch Back. The trappers called it Kamas Prairie. Today it's the southern gateway to the Uinta Mountains and a town that has spent the past decade walking the line between rural ranching identity and Park City overflow. The Pioneer Day parade in July is still the biggest event on the calendar — the same parade Jen and Dave's store has watched roll past for two decades.

The husband-and-wife operation extends a quarter mile east of the smokehouse to The Notch Pub, where Dave Witham runs a log-cabin roadhouse with a curved bar, three pool tables, a fireplace, and a kitchen that pulls Samak's house-smoked cheddar onto its menu. The two operations function as a pair — Jen at the store and the smoker, Dave at the pub. Stop at Samak for the sandwich and a bag of jerky for the road. Stop at the Notch for the burger and the beer. The pub isn't on the same property, but it's close enough that you can walk between them without getting in the car, and the smoked-cheese throughline makes the connection clearer.

The Mirror Lake Scenic Byway Context

The Mirror Lake Highway (officially UT-150) runs 78 miles from Kamas north to Evanston, Wyoming, climbing through some of the most exposed alpine country in Utah. The byway's status was earned — at the top of the pass you're at over 10,000 feet, surrounded by glacial lakes and bare granite, looking out over the High Uintas Wilderness, the largest contiguous wilderness in Utah. Trial Lake. Washington Lake. Provo River Falls. The Bald Mountain trailhead. The Crystal Lake trailhead, gateway to the Notch and Cuberant Lake. All of it sits north of Kamas on UT-150, and all of it is downstream of Samak Smoke House in the supply-chain sense — if you forgot the firewood, the bug spray, the fishing license, the granola, the sandwich, or the bag of jerky for the drive home, Samak is your last reasonable chance to fix that before you're out of cell service.

That positioning is the operational moat. The next reliable resupply on UT-150 going north is at Mirror Lake itself, 30 winding mountain miles up the road, and that's seasonal. The closest grocery is back in Kamas. Anything between Samak and Evanston is high country, and high country is where you wish you'd already stopped at Samak.

Planning Your Stop

The address is 1937 East Mirror Lake Highway (UT-150), Kamas, UT 84036. The phone is (435) 783-4880. The website is samaksmokehouse.com and they ship jerky, smoked fish, and gift packs nationally. The Instagram is @thesamaksmokehouse. Hours run 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., seven days a week — confirm winter hours before a December run, since high-country weather sometimes shifts the schedule.

What to order on a first visit: the peppered beef jerky is the obligation — buy more than you think you need, it does not survive the drive home. Add a bag of the smoked trout if you're heading into the Uintas with overnight plans. Order a sandwich at the counter for lunch on the trail and ask what's freshest from the smoker that morning. Throw a couple of Samak Stickies in the bag for the kids or the second hike. If you're stopping on a winter run, the espresso is the move and the smoked cheddar is the pickup for the cheese plate at home.

This is why we live here. Utah's outdoor-recreation map is dense — Wasatch and Uinta and Bear River and Bonneville and the Great Salt Lake all in one drive — and the country stores that anchor those routes are some of the most quietly important food businesses in the state. Samak Smoke House has been one of those anchors for fifty-three years. Cherry wood from Wisconsin. Hand-cut beef. A husband-and-wife operation. A sister pub a quarter mile up the road. Jerky worth the detour.