The walk itself, a lit path through Elk Ridge Park
Elk Ridge Park Free Mid to late October
What you actually do is simple. You park, you join a slow river of people, and you walk a paved loop through Elk Ridge Park past one lit scene after another. The displays are built out of real pumpkins, gourds and squash, painted and carved and arranged into tableaus, and they follow a theme that changes every year, so a family that comes back season after season never sees the same walk twice. Volunteers light the path with hundreds of carved jack o lanterns, which is why the whole thing reads best after sundown.
The scale is bigger than the word walk suggests. In a normal year the park holds more than three dozen handcrafted scenes and roughly 600 carved pumpkins, and the crowd runs into the tens of thousands across the run, more than 25,000 by most counts, coming from Utah, Idaho and Wyoming. It is free, it is outdoors, and it is genuinely a community build rather than a commercial haunt, which is the reason it has lasted more than forty years.
How it started
The walk began in 1983, when Ida Beutler, a retired schoolteacher, set up a handful of pumpkin scenes on the family farm on 1600 East to give the neighborhood a gentler, friendlier kind of Halloween. It caught on, it outgrew the farm, and North Logan stepped in, sponsoring the event beginning in 1989 and moving it to Elk Ridge Park in 1992, where it has run ever since. The origin story is the reason the tone is warm rather than scary: it was built for children first.
The details
Before you go
- Come after dark for the lit pumpkins, but expect that to be the busiest window; late afternoon is calmer and still worth it.
- Dress warm. A late October evening on the Cache Valley floor turns cold fast once the sun drops behind the Wellsville Mountains.
- The route is a flat, paved loop, so strollers and wagons handle it well.
- Elk Ridge Park itself, and North Logan's other parks and trails, are covered on the North Logan parks and recreation page.
Pumpkin Days, the wider week around the walk
Elk Ridge Park and Green Canyon High Mixed free and ticketed The same October week
The walk is the anchor, but North Logan wraps a full slate of participatory events around it and calls the whole thing Pumpkin Days. These are the parts you do rather than watch, and unlike the walk, several of them carry a small fee or a sign up. If you are bringing kids or want to make a morning of it rather than just an evening stroll, this is where to look.
The Pumpkin Run and the pickleball
The Pumpkin Run is a costume friendly one mile and 5K that meets in the morning; in recent years the entry has run about 25 dollars with a long sleeve shirt, and children have been free. There is also a costume encouraged pickleball tournament for anyone who would rather compete than run. Both are the kind of thing you register for ahead, so check the current Pumpkin Days listing before the week.
The pumpkin toss and the carnival
The pumpkin toss is exactly what it sounds like: pumpkins launched from catapults at Elk Ridge Park, usually late morning, and it is a favorite with kids. The carnival of games runs in the Green Canyon High School gyms, an indoor backup that does not care about the weather, and there is typically a kids pumpkin parade and a pumpkin coloring contest folded into the week as well. The exact lineup and times shift year to year.
The details
Before you go
- The run and the pickleball tournament take registration, so sign up ahead rather than the day of.
- The carnival in the Green Canyon High School gyms is the indoor option if the weather turns.
- Prices and start times move year to year; treat the figures here as recent examples, not this year's schedule.
- For everything else that happens in town across the year, see things to do in North Logan.
