Highland Doesn't Have One Trail System. It Has Four.

Say "let's hit the trail" to three different people in Highland and you will end up in three different places, on three different kinds of ground, doing three different things. One person pictures a paved loop around a pond with a stroller in tow. Another grabs a mountain bike and heads for singletrack with names like Dry Creek and Lizard Skins. A third assumes you mean the quiet system on the far side of town that almost nobody mentions by name. All three are right. That is the part worth understanding if you actually live here: Highland's outdoor life doesn't run on one trail network, it runs on four, and they were never meant to overlap.

The confusion starts with a name that does double duty.

The Pond Everyone Calls "the Trail"

When someone in Highland says "the trail," they almost always mean Highland Glen Park, the roughly 37-acre park built around a pond just off Alpine Highway, close enough to Lone Peak High School that half the city uses it as a landmark. The park's paved paths loop the water and tie into the wider Highland Trail System, the network of connector paths that link the park to surrounding neighborhoods and regional routes. It is the version of Highland outdoor life that shows up in family photos: fishing docks, a stocked pond holding rainbow trout and channel catfish, shaded pavilions available for reservation, a playground, and enough flat paved surface that it works for a jogging stroller as easily as it does for a leashed dog. This is the trail that requires no gear, no skill level, and no explanation. It is also only one of four things Highland residents mean when they use the word.

A Second "Glen" With a Different Job

Here is the part that trips people up even after they have lived here for years. Trail databases that track Highland's riding areas list a separate feature called Highland Glen Bike Park, distinct from Highland Glen Park itself. Same first two words, entirely different terrain and entirely different crowd. Where the park is paved and built for walking, the bike park is singletrack, built for mountain bikes, and not a place you would push a stroller. Two features sharing half a name is exactly the kind of detail that only becomes obvious once someone tells you, and it explains why a plan to "meet at Highland Glen" sometimes ends with one group waiting at a pond and another circling a trailhead a few minutes away.

Two More Systems Locals Rarely Name

The naming overlap would be forgivable if Highland Glen Bike Park were the only singletrack in town. It isn't. Current trail data for Highland lists three distinct mountain biking areas altogether: Highland Hollow, Highland Glen Bike Park, and Windsor Meadows, each with its own character and its own regulars.

Highland Hollow, sometimes called Highland Hollows Trail Park, is the busiest of the three and the one that connects to the most named trails. Riders and hikers reach the Dry Creek Trail and the Lizard Skins Trail from this trailhead, along with the Lone Peak Loop, a 1.2-mile route with a modest 150 feet of elevation gain that takes an average of 31 minutes to complete. It is rated moderate rather than easy, with enough rock and root to keep it interesting without requiring technical skill. For anyone who wants to turn a short loop into a longer outing, the Lone Peak Wilderness Trail extends the same general area into a 3.8-mile out and back, an easy grade popular with trail runners, best hiked between May and October.

The current crop of trails at Highland Hollow also carries a rougher, still-settling feel in places, the kind of tread that hasn't been smoothed by years of traffic the way Dry Creek has. Riders looking for a more finished, higher-rated experience tend to gravitate toward trails like Shotgun, also listed as B-Line, and Deb's Ravine, both of which post some of the strongest current ratings in the Highland trail database. Adrenaline and Knight Rider round out the more established options, each with its own following among the riders who know to ask for it by name rather than just saying "the bike trails."

Windsor Meadows is the quiet third option, a separate riding area that gets far less foot and tire traffic than the other two. It doesn't come with a long list of named singletrack the way Highland Hollow does, but that relative emptiness is exactly why some riders prefer it. It's the answer for anyone who has ridden Highland Hollow enough times to want something less crowded, even if it means less variety.

Here's the rough map, if you're trying to keep the four straight:

The Program That Turns the Pond Into a Classroom

The pond at Highland Glen Park does more than sit there looking scenic. The city runs a recurring youth program called Hooked on Fishing, aimed at kids between 6 and 13, built around teaching fishing basics and aquatic resource awareness right at the water's edge. The going rate for the full six-week series has been $30, a detail that matters less for the price itself than for what it tells you about how the city treats this particular stretch of water: not just a backdrop, but a place with programming, instructors, and a season. It is one more reason the pond loop functions as its own separate community from the singletrack crowd a few minutes away. Families who show up for Hooked on Fishing are rarely the same families lapping Dry Creek on a Saturday morning, and neither group tends to think much about the other's version of "the trail."

How to Actually Read the Rotation

None of this is really about trail difficulty ratings or acreage counts. It's about matching the right name to the right plan before you leave the house. If the goal is a dog walk, a stroller loop, or an evening by the water, that's Highland Glen Park, full stop, and it has nothing to do with the bike park that happens to share its name. If the goal is technical singletrack with options to string together a longer ride, Highland Hollow is where most of the named trails live, with Dry Creek and Lizard Skins as the anchors and the Lone Peak Loop as the easy warm-up. If the goal is riding without running into half the neighborhood, Windsor Meadows is the answer nobody advertises. And if the goal is teaching a kid to fish, the city has already built that into the calendar at the Glen Park pond.

Highland residents tend to pick one of these early, often by accident, and then default to it for years without realizing the other three exist under slightly different names a few minutes away. Once you can tell Highland Glen Park from Highland Glen Bike Park, and Highland Hollow from Windsor Meadows, the next group text about hitting the trail gets a lot easier to answer correctly the first time.

If you're weighing what it actually means to live near this stretch of the Wasatch Front, from the pace of the seasons to the character of individual streets, Jenny Mecham at Echelon Luxury Homes has spent her career reading Highland and the surrounding Wasatch communities at exactly this level of detail. Reach out to schedule a private consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics about the area, on or off the trail.