Lighten Up

By Angie Johnson-Schmit

Photocredit: Blushing Cactus Photography

A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Valley of Lights

A lot of Prescott Valley, Arizona community members have grown up with a yearly visit to the Valley of Lights. There are young adults today who have never known a Christmas and winter holiday season without the annual drive-through light event. What is less well-known is who is behind setting up, wiring, and maintaining the Valley of Lights displays. For the last thirteen years, that role has been filled by Jeff Schaffer and his crew from Advanced Electrical Contracting.

There’s an awful lot that happens behind the scenes to make the Valley of Lights shine so bright, but Schaffer and his crew are up to the job. They handle just about everything, including mowing the vast meadow at Fain Park, setting up and testing each piece of the displays, repairing damaged wires, and replacing any of the literally millions of light bulbs that illuminate Valley of Lights.

Schaffer doesn’t remember exactly how he first connected with the Prescott Valley Chamber of Commerce about taking over the role, but he has always loved Christmas lights. He had been turning his own home into a beacon of holiday cheer for many years before taking on the Valley of Lights job. “I won several awards for my personal house through the Valley of Lights when they used to do the judging,” he said. His love for lights was infectious and a friendly competition sprang up between Shaffer and his neighbors. “One year they would get a first place and then we would get a first place,” he said. “It’d be back and forth.”

How serious was Schaffer about decorating his house for the holidays? “I drilled a hole through my roof just so I can hang a Christmas tree above my roofline,” he said. He put a 14-foot-tall pole through that hole and strung lights from it in the shape of a tree. “My wife’s family used to call us the Griswolds,” said Schaffer, referring to the infamous National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation movie characters. “That was our house, you know, it was obnoxious.”

While he didn’t usually have much in the way of animation, Schaffer more than made up for it in sheer wattage. He remembers when new neighbors moved in across the street and didn’t have window coverings yet. “It was so bright you could actually read a newspaper in their living room.” The lights from his house in Prescott Valley were so bright they were visible from the water towers near the Prescott Regional Airport. He still laughs about the electric meter. “It was just like the Griswolds, just spinning like that,” he said.

Schaffer brings that same skill and enthusiasm to Valley of Lights. These days he doesn’t go all out with his own home decorations, but he has a much bigger lightbox to play with now. “The whole layout of the park is always me,” he said. “They (the Chamber of Commerce) just say, ‘I want it to work by this day,’ and everything else is my responsibility.”

Keeping the lights shining bright for Valley of Lights visitors is a time-consuming process that can start as early as spring. “If we’re doing a new display, we start in March,” said Schaffer. Some sponsors have their own display design ideas, but often Schaffer will develop the design and have a computer-aided design (CAD) drawing made. Once the Chamber has approved the design, he works with a local company, Superior Industries, to make the steel frame for the display. “They laser it out and they paint it and then I pick it up and run lights on it,” said Schaffer.

One of the fascinating parts of the process lies in the lights themselves. Schaffer waits until the very end of the season to buy new lights at the deepest possible discount. “I bought a truck full one year,” said Schaffer. “Everything they had, I bought.” Because he is an electrician, Schaffer has no problem taking a string of lights and cutting them to any custom size needed and safely add a new plug.

In June or July, Schaffer starts the planning process for the actual event. This means getting the event site mowed, working with the City of Prescott Valley and the Chamber of Commerce, and making sure he has enough employees on hand. Then, in September, Schaffer will bring everything out of storage. Four semi-tractor-trailers are loaded just with displays and the fifth tractor-trailer is filled with equipment, extension cords, stakes, cables, and spare lights. He and his crew immediately unload them and start checking all the displays.

There are 62 displays in this year’s event, with 549 separate lighted parts, all of which must be checked before they are set up. Thirty-two of the displays have motion control for animation.

According to Schaffer, the equipment trailer has “countless items that support or build displays that don’t have lights on them, six 55 gallon drums overflowing with extension cords, thousands of feet of road lights, four 55 gallon drums with anchor stakes to hold the displays in place and probably endless items I can’t remember that make the Valley of Lights possible.”

If the focus for the year is on upgrading existing displays, Schaffer hauls out the trailers as soon as late July. He and his crew will work on site rewiring older displays and swapping out the old bulbs for new LED lights. Some of the displays are over 20 years old and, as Schaffer noted, “The wires just get old and…the UV rays just disintegrate the wire.” Once the update is complete, the display will be better and brighter than ever before.

After all the displays are checked and any repairs are made, it’s time to set them up and double-check that everything is working.

Schaffer likes to change things up every year to keep it fresh, but some displays are so large they need a big, flat area and are moved less often. The largest display currently is the patriotic flag. “It is enormous, and we use a 65-foot boom to put it together,” he said. “Even in the air you don’t think it’s that big until you walk up and realize it’s four stories tall.”

Then, of course, there is the issue of the electricity. Before the event opens Schaffer checks to make sure everything is working properly. “We do what’s called a load test,” he said. “After we have all the extension cords all over the park, we put a tester on each wire at the breaker boxes.” There are multiple breaker boxes on the property, and tests are run to make sure none of circuits are overloaded. This ensures there is no reason to worry about electrical problems when guests are driving through.

Schaffer and his crew work seven days a week during the month prior to opening Valley of Lights. “My stress level gets pretty extreme toward the mid to latter part of November,” he admitted. “But I’ve got great guys and we’ve been doing it for many years.” He is quick to give credit to his crew, who are mainly employees from his electrical contracting business. Schaffer tries to schedule them around his other work, but if he needs to, he will bring in extra crew.

The work is by no means done once Valley of Lights opens to the public. Shaffer’s crew does daily checks to make sure everything is working properly before visitors go through the display. “We’re as careful as possible, but we also have Mother Nature. We have deer and javelina and cows, you name it,” said Schaffer. “They chew through wires and extension cords.” Schaffer and his crew are constantly checking and repairing the displays throughout the Valley of Lights event.

It may be a big undertaking, but Schaffer genuinely seems to get a kick out of his job. He may not be lighting up the end of his neighborhood with his home display these days, but he doesn’t seem to mind. His own children are grown and out of the house, so Schaffer gets to play Griswold for his whole community now. It’s a big job and takes a lot of his time, but he still loves it and that shines through every night during Valley of Lights.