Wasatch County's Record Year at the Parks Isn't the Whole Story
September 3, 2026
September 3, 2026
Utah State Parks released its fiscal year 2026 numbers on August 19, and the headline out of the Heber Valley was hard to miss: Wasatch Mountain State Park logged 910,046 visits between July 2025 and June 2026, making it the fourth-most visited state park in Utah. Jordanelle State Park added another 828,300, good for sixth place. Deer Creek State Park brought in 635,592, landing at seventh. Three parks from one valley, all inside Utah's top ten.
If you live here, none of that will surprise you. You've circled the Hailstone parking lot at Jordanelle on a July Saturday looking for a spot. You've watched the line of cars back up along Warm Springs Road toward the Wasatch Mountain visitor center. The county feels busier, and the state's own turnstile counts confirm it. Wasatch Mountain alone added 131,204 visits over the prior year, the second-largest single-year jump of any park in the state, trailing only Snow Canyon down in Washington County.
But the turnstile only counts what happens at the gate. It says nothing about where those visitors actually go once they're inside, and that's where the more useful story for a resident is hiding. While the visitation numbers were climbing toward a record, the Wasatch Trails Foundation was quietly finishing a season of trail construction that spreads that same traffic across more ground than it's ever had. The crowding you're noticing is concentrated on the routes everyone already knows. The newest miles in the county are still close to empty, if you know where to look.
Ask most locals for a trail recommendation and you'll hear the same name: WOW, short for Wasatch Over Wasatch. It starts at the top of Pine Canyon Road near Guardsman Pass and drops about 11 miles and 2,500 feet of elevation down toward the valley floor, which makes it the obvious answer for a visitor with one afternoon and a rental bike. It's also the trail that's been getting the heaviest use for over a decade, to the point that the Wasatch Trails Foundation recently brought in three machines and a hand-finishing crew to restore sections that had gone more than five years without real maintenance.
That's not a knock on WOW. It's a well-earned reputation. But a trail that famous absorbs a disproportionate share of the county's growing foot and tire traffic, which means the newer routes built to relieve it are still comparatively quiet.
The foundation's board discussed the season's additions on KPCW's Local News Hour back in May, and board member Mike Rossberg laid out a rollout that most park-goers haven't clocked yet. A new trail called Wowza opened June 14, running south from the edge of the Bonanza Flat area and tying in where it "connects onto the top section of the WOW trail." Two more openings landed the same day: the Boulder Dash hiking trail and Tall T South. Tall T North and the Bonanza Loop Trail followed in July.
Here's what opened this season, in order:
Those Bonanza-area trails also carry a seasonal restriction worth knowing if you're planning a fall outing: they close every year from October 1 through July 1 to protect wildlife during calving season, so this month is close to the last window before that stretch of new mileage goes quiet again until next summer.
Southfield Park's new track doesn't sound like it belongs in the same conversation as backcountry singletrack, but it's arguably the more consequential addition for anyone raising kids in the valley or just getting into mountain biking. Before this year, a beginner or a family with young riders had few local options besides driving up to the same trailheads that serious mountain bikers were already competing for parking at. Now there's a dedicated, paved space in town built for exactly that use, which pulls a meaningful slice of everyday recreational traffic away from the backcountry systems and keeps it in Heber City proper.
Not every addition to the county's outdoor infrastructure this year was a trail. In September 2025, Daniel Pepper opened Wasatch Mountain Sauna behind the visitor center parking lot at Wasatch Mountain State Park, a wood-fired, Nordic-style communal sauna with an adjacent cold plunge, open daily from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. by advance reservation. Pepper had been sauna-going for three decades and built the business around what he calls "sauna season," the stretch from fall into winter when a hot room and a cold plunge start to feel less like a novelty and more like a routine. It's a small piece of infrastructure, but it matters for the same reason the pump track does: it gives residents a reason to use the park that has nothing to do with logging miles on a trail that's already busy.
The most ambitious project on the foundation's list isn't finished yet, and its exact shape is still moving. Rossberg described the vision to KPCW as one interconnecting trail that circles the entire Heber Valley, which the foundation has nicknamed the Heber Halo. As of this spring, the first leg under discussion would run from the Wasatch Mountain State Park golf course to the existing trail along Deer Creek Reservoir, with feasibility and engineering work happening through the summer and a finalized route targeted for this fall. Foundation planning materials describe an opening phase in slightly different terms, a roughly 12 to 15 mile backcountry connector linking Snake Creek to Soldier Hollow that would serve as a more direct route in from Midway. Grant applications for construction, in either version, are aimed at 2027.
Whichever alignment survives the engineering study, the intent is the same: a loop that gives residents a reason to ride or hike the perimeter of the valley itself rather than converging on the same handful of trailheads that show up on every visitor's list.
None of this means the record visitation figures are wrong or overstated. Utah's state park system as a whole logged its third-highest visitation year on record in fiscal 2026, its third consecutive year above 12 million visits statewide, and Wasatch County genuinely is absorbing a growing share of that traffic. What the headline number misses is that the county isn't standing still while the crowds arrive. Between Wowza, Boulder Dash, the Tall T trails, the Southfield pump track, and the early groundwork on the Heber Halo, the Wasatch Trails Foundation added more new mileage and capacity in a single season than the turnstile counts at Jordanelle or Wasatch Mountain will ever reflect, because none of that trail construction happens at a park entrance gate.
If you already live here and you've been avoiding the trailheads because the parking lots look full, the practical takeaway is simple: the crowding is real, but it's concentrated. The newest ground in the county is still underused by comparison, at least for another season or two, until word catches up to the trail map.
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