The ridge road itself, and how long it runs
Forest Road 150 Free Roughly July to September
The thing people call Skyline Drive is a single dirt ridge road, signed as Forest Road 150, that follows the crest of the Wasatch Plateau. Its length gets quoted a few different ways, from about ninety miles to a hundred, because it runs from the plateau's north end down past the Fishlake National Forest boundary and the exact endpoints depend on who is counting. What is not in dispute is the altitude. The road stays high for its whole length, largely above ten thousand feet, and its high point reaches 10,897 feet on the stretch between the Manti and Ferron canyon junctions.
The surface changes as you go. The northern half, off State Route 31, is generally a graded gravel road that an ordinary vehicle can manage with care in dry weather. The southern half is rough, and the Forest Service is plain that it wants high-clearance four-wheel drive. Skyline is also the backbone of the Arapeen OHV trail system and part of the Great Western Trail, so on a summer weekend you share it with side-by-sides and dirt bikes as much as with cars.
This is the road that ties the whole plateau together, which is why The Local writes it once, here, as a region page rather than pinning it to any one town. Fairview, Mount Pleasant, Ephraim, and Manti each climb their own canyon to meet it, and those approaches belong to the towns. The ridge belongs to the region.
The details
Before you go
- The season shifts every year with the snowpack; some high south sections do not clear until late July or August.
- Call the Sanpete Ranger District at 435-636-3300 for current road status before you commit to the dirt.
- The north end off SR-31 is the easy sampler; the south end is a serious backcountry drive.
- The east side of the plateau, above Huntington, is covered on the sibling Energy Loop page.
SR-31 and Fairview Canyon, the paved way up
State Route 31 Paved Open all year
If you want to get onto the plateau in a normal car, this is the answer. State Route 31 leaves US-89 at Fairview, climbs Fairview Canyon, tops out on the plateau, and drops down Huntington Canyon to the town of Huntington on the far side, a run of about forty-eight miles. It is paved the whole way and it is plowed through the winter, which makes it the only reliable year-round route across the Wasatch Plateau. The dirt Skyline Drive crosses SR-31 near the top of Fairview Canyon, so the pavement is how most people reach the ridge road in the first place.
SR-31 is also the heart of a signed scenic loop, the Energy Loop, that it forms with State Routes 264 and 96 across the top of the plateau. Along the way the highway runs right past Electric Lake and within reach of the other high reservoirs, so a paved afternoon drive can take in most of the water without any dirt at all. That is the honest recommendation for a first visit or a low-clearance vehicle: drive SR-31, see the lakes and the ridge from the pavement, and save the dirt for a trip you have planned around it.
The Sanpete canyon roads out of Ephraim, Manti, and Mount Pleasant also climb to Skyline, but those are unpaved and seasonal, which is the whole point of the comparison further down this page. Fairview Canyon on the west and Huntington Canyon on the east are the two paved doors. Everything else is a dirt shortcut for the months the snow allows it.
The details
Electric Lake, the big reservoir
On Huntington Creek Along SR-31 Free
Electric Lake is the largest body of water on the plateau, and the odd name is honest about its job. It was built in 1974, when an earth-fill dam was thrown across Huntington Creek high on the east slope of the plateau, and it stores water for irrigation and to cool a power plant down in Huntington Canyon. It sits at about 8,579 feet, and SR-31 runs along its south shore near the dam, roughly twenty-one miles east of Fairview, so you drive right up to it on pavement.
For a visitor it reads as a long, cold, high mountain lake with a boat ramp and a coldwater fishery, quiet on a weekday and busier on a summer Saturday. State Route 264, the branch of the Energy Loop that peels off toward Scofield, follows the north shore, so you can see the lake from two sides without much dirt. It is the natural anchor for a paved plateau drive.
The details
Cleveland and Huntington Reservoirs
Off SR-31 Campgrounds Trout fishing
Between Fairview and Electric Lake, SR-31 threads past two smaller high reservoirs that are the everyday fishing and camping stops on this side of the plateau. Cleveland Reservoir sits about eighteen miles east of Fairview, right along the Energy Loop, with a Forest Service campground on its shore and rainbow trout that the state stocks through the season. Huntington Reservoir, higher and closer to the top, holds tiger and cutthroat trout and is the kind of small alpine water that rewards an early morning.
Huntington Reservoir also carries one of the plateau's genuine surprises. On August 8, 1988, a dozer operator working on the dam turned up a bone, and it proved to be a Columbian mammoth, about ninety percent complete, that had died at the edge of a receding ice-age lake around eleven thousand years ago. At close to nine thousand feet it was, at the time, the highest-elevation mammoth ever found. The great bull is remembered down in Fairview, where a full-size cast stands as the town's best-known landmark. It is the sort of fact that changes how a quiet reservoir feels once you know it.
The details
Gooseberry Reservoir and the north end
Off North Skyline Drive Campground Free day use
Toward the northern end of the plateau, a spur off North Skyline Drive drops to Gooseberry Reservoir, a seventy-nine acre lake with its own Forest Service campground and stocked rainbow trout. It sits about two and a half miles off the main ridge road, near the SR-264 and Scofield side of the loop, and it is the northern bookend to the string of water that Electric Lake anchors in the middle.
The north end is also where Skyline feels least remote, because it is closest to the paved highways and to the Scofield country beyond. It is the sensible place to start if you want a first taste of the ridge without committing to the rough southern miles, and it connects the plateau to the Carbon County side around US-6 and Tucker.
The details
The high point, the views, the wildflowers
Above 10,000 feet Free Mid to late summer
The reason to be up here is the top of the plateau itself. For roughly thirty miles south of SR-31 the road holds a fairly steady ten thousand five hundred to ten thousand eight hundred feet, and from that ridge you look west over the whole Sanpete Valley to the San Pitch Mountains and Mount Nebo, and east down into Castle Valley and toward the San Rafael Swell. On a clear day it is one of the widest views in Utah, and you reach it by car rather than on foot, which is rare.
The other reward is timing. The Forest Service points to vivid wildflower displays in mid to late summer, when the high meadows go to color for a few short weeks between the last snow and the first. That window is narrow, and it is the same window that opens the road, so a wildflower trip and a Skyline trip are the same trip. Come too early and the drifts still block the ridge; come too late and it is over.
This is high, exposed country, and the weather makes its own rules up here, which is the subject of the caution below. But on the right afternoon in August, the combination of the altitude, the flowers, and the two-valley view is the whole case for the drive.
