Heber Olson Park and Ryan's Place
400 S 600 E Free Year round
If River Heights has a town square, it is Heber Olson Park. The six acre park sits at 400 South 600 East, next to the old elementary school and the city offices, and it holds almost everything the town offers in one place. The centerpiece is Ryan's Place, a wooden playground built in the spring of 2007, with climbing towers, slides, swings and a separate toddler area, plus restrooms and picnic tables under mature trees a few steps away. On a warm evening it is the busiest patch of ground in the city.
Around the playground are the working pieces: tennis courts, open playing fields and a pavilion for public use. The tennis courts carry pickleball lines too, and each August they turn into the courts for the Apple Days tournaments. There is no fee for any of it and no gate; you park, you walk in, you play.
This is the park to point a first time visitor toward, and the one a family will keep coming back to. The other four parks in town are neighborhood green space that supports it rather than competing with it, which is why they come after it here.
The details
Good to know
- Ryan's Place has a fenced toddler area and restrooms nearby, which makes it easy with small children.
- The pavilion is first come for day use; the busiest weekend of the year is Apple Days each August.
- The Apple Days story, the parade and the harvest tie, is on the Apple Days page.
- Logan and its zoo, pool and river trail are two minutes down the hill; the things to do page covers that handoff.
The school fields residents share
Behind River Heights Elementary Free Open outside school hours
The largest stretch of playing surface in River Heights is not, strictly, a city park. In 1997 the city transferred about eight acres near 600 South and 800 East, land it had set aside for a park, to the Cache County School District, which built softball and soccer fields on it behind River Heights Elementary. The trade came with a promise: under an agreement signed that same year, the district lets residents and the public use the fields at any time except during school hours.
So the town counts roughly five and a half acres of ball fields as part of its park system without owning them. On a summer evening or a weekend, when class is out, the diamonds and the soccer pitch are open to anyone who shows up. It is the honest reason River Heights, tiny as it is, has enough field space for youth leagues and a casual game.
The one thing to keep in mind is the school calendar. During the school day and school activities the fields belong to the district, so recreation use is an evenings, weekends and summer arrangement. It has worked that way since 1997.
The details
Good to know
- The public use runs on the school clock: fields are open except during school hours and school activities.
- These are the softball and soccer fields; the tennis and pickleball courts are back at Heber Olson Park.
- School boundaries and enrollment are the Cache County School District's; check them at ccsdut.org and rate the schools yourself at GreatSchools.
Stewart Hill Park
Stewart Hill Drive Free Year round
Stewart Hill Park is the second largest piece of park land the city owns outright, 3.58 acres on Stewart Hill Drive on the north side of town, above the cemetery. It is open hillside green rather than a built out park, the kind of space that reads as room to run, walk a dog, fly a kite or sled a slope in winter, more than a place with a fixed set of equipment.
That plainness is the point. On the bench, where lots are eight to twelve thousand square feet and the town is nearly built out, a few acres of undeveloped green matter. Stewart Hill is the largest such piece, and the city's general plan flags it, along with Heber Olson, as a spot where more park facilities could be added over time.
The details
Saddlerock, Hillside and DUP, the pocket parks
Three neighborhood parks Free Year round
The last three are pocket parks, small on purpose, tucked into the neighborhoods so that most of River Heights has green space within a short walk. Saddlerock Park, 0.29 acres north of 600 South on the east side, sits by the Saddlerock subdivision. Hillside Park, 0.27 acres, is on River Heights Boulevard between 600 East and 700 East. And DUP Park, at 400 East and 450 South, is the smallest of all at 0.13 acres, named for the Daughters of Utah Pioneers.
None of the three is a destination, and it would be dishonest to sell them as one. What they are is the connective tissue of a walkable town: a bench, a bit of lawn, a place to stop. Add the retention ponds at 900 East and 600 South, which the city zones as parks and recreation land, and you have the full picture of open space in River Heights.
The three at a glance
A note on the river, and on trails
River Heights earns its name from the bench it sits on, above the Logan River, not from a riverfront you can walk. Steep, wooded slopes drop from the edge of town down to the river and the Riverdale neighborhood below, so the water is a view, not an amenity you reach on foot. The paved Logan River Trail runs on the Logan side, and The Local covers it on the Logan pages. River Heights' own general plan does call for a future path, starting near 600 East and River Heights Boulevard and connecting toward Temple View Drive and the Denzil Stewart Nature Park in Logan, but as of 2026 that trail is a plan on paper, not a route on the ground. Come for the parks and the courts; do not come expecting a riverwalk.
