The creek canyon Centerville
The shaded canyon at the end of 100 South, and the three trailheads people keep confusing
Deuel Creek, and the half mile between its two trailheads.
Centerville City publishes turn by turn directions to three separate access points off one dirt road at the east end of 100 South, and all three start from the same corner. The north lot is small and the trail out of it climbs. The south lot is large and its branch reaches moving water within minutes. Between them runs a 4.4 mile loop from 4,627 feet to 6,095 feet, with a dozen log bridges, a rope swing above the junction and a waterfall roughly thirty minutes past it.
I work Southern Utah, a long drive south of Davis County, so these pages are researched rather than lived. Every figure below was read where it is issued: Centerville City's own code, parks, museum, utility and trails pages and the trail map it publishes; the National Park Service register file and the multiple property nomination written for this town in 1997; the federal historic preservation council; the Utah Geological Survey; and the state transit and tax agencies. Each fact carries the date it was checked. A Davis County partner agent handles the work on the ground.
The live question
Where do you actually park for Deuel Creek, and which of the trailheads is which?
There are three doors and they all hang off one dirt road, which is why so many descriptions of this canyon disagree with each other. Centerville City publishes the turn by turn on its own Trails and Bikeways Map, and every one of the three starts from the same point: 850 East 100 South. From there you go east a tenth of a mile to a fork. Turn left on the dirt road and go another tenth of a mile and you are at the Deuel Creek North trailhead. Turn right instead and stay on the main dirt road for 0.35 miles and you are in what the city calls the Bowl Area; carry on to the fork at that point, turn left and go a tenth of a mile more, and that is the Deuel Creek South trailhead. Read on the city's map on 15 August 2026.
The practical consequence is the sentence that should lead every account of this hike and almost never does. The north and south trailheads are not the same lot and they are not next to each other. They are roughly half a mile apart along a rough dirt road. The classic outing here goes up one branch and down the other, which means that when you come out you are half a mile from where you left the car, on foot, at the end of the day. Plan for it, or park at whichever end you intend to finish at and accept the climb.
The road matters too. The last half mile toward the south trailhead is rough dirt, and a low clearance car is better parked earlier and walked in. Neither lot is paved, neither has a published stall count at any issuer, and both fill on a summer weekend and on any warm weekday evening. The north lot is the small one. The south lot is a large signed pullout. That difference alone decides which end most people should start from on a busy day.
Deuel Creek, in numbers
4.4 mi
the north to south loop, measured end to end
4,627 ft
the low point, and 6,095 ft the high one
0.5 mi
between the two trailheads, on dirt
3 to 4 hr
for the full loop at a walking pace
Three doors
One dirt road, three separate trailheads, and they are not interchangeable.
The city's map treats these as three destinations with three sets of directions, and it is right to. They start at different points, they climb at different rates and they suit completely different amounts of time. Here is what each one actually gets you.
| Deuel Creek North | Deuel Creek South | The Bowl Area | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The city's own directions | From 850 East 100 South, east 0.1 mile to the fork, then left on the dirt road for 0.1 mile | From 850 East 100 South, east 0.1 mile to the fork, right on the dirt road 0.35 mile to a second fork, then left for 0.1 mile | From 850 East 100 South, east 0.1 mile to the fork, then right and 0.35 mile along the main dirt road |
| The lot | Small, signed, up a short dirt spur, and the first one to fill | A large signed pullout, and the easier one to find on a first visit | Roadside on the main dirt road rather than a defined trailhead lot |
| What the walking is like | It climbs. Roughly 0.9 mile of it runs above the creek with valley views before it drops in to join the main line | It stays with the water. A cascade comes up within minutes of leaving the car and the log bridges start almost immediately | Open ground on the bench rather than a canyon walk, and the access point for the shoreline corridor above the town |
| What it is best used for | The harder half of the loop, taken uphill, which is the direction most accounts recommend | A short walk to moving water with no commitment, or the gentler descent at the end of a loop | A short evening circuit on the bench when the canyon itself is icy or the lots are full |
| The catch | Limited parking, and a steep loose section is reported near the trailhead entrance | The last half mile of road in is rough dirt and low clearance vehicles should consider walking it | The city names it and publishes directions to it, and nothing else about it is documented at any issuer |
Directions quoted from Centerville City's own Trails and Bikeways Map, read 15 August 2026; the map's trailhead direction block carries an update date of 2012 and the map sheet itself 2016, so treat the road surface as the thing most likely to have changed. Lot sizes and the reported loose section come from a published trail account rather than from the city, which publishes no parking counts anywhere. Davis County's text trail list is gone from its live site, which is now a map portal, so the county mileages in circulation should be treated as archived rather than current.
If you walk the loop, you finish half a mile from your car, on a dirt road, at the end of the day. The two Deuel Creek trailheads are separate lots roughly half a mile apart on the same rough dirt road, and the standard outing here goes up one branch and comes down the other. That is a good hike and a bad surprise. Decide before you set off which lot you are coming back to and start from that one, or send somebody for the car, or simply walk the same branch both ways. The related caution is the road itself: the last half mile toward the south trailhead is rough enough that a low clearance vehicle is better left at the wide spot and walked in, and there is a steep loose section right at the entrance. Neither trailhead has a restroom, a water tap or a published number of spaces, and both fill on a summer weekend. None of that is on any listing, in any app, or on the city's own trails page.
The hike
A dozen log bridges, a rope swing, and a waterfall about half an hour past it.
The shape of this hike is simple once the trailheads are sorted. Two branches leave the two lots, climb separately for something between half a mile and a mile depending which one you are on, and meet. Above the junction there is one trail and it stays with the creek. A published account that measured it gives the full north to south loop as 4.4 miles running from 4,627 feet to 6,095 feet, which works out at roughly 1,450 feet of climb, and puts three to four hours on it. Those are the best sourced numbers available for this canyon and they are the ones this page uses.
Where the two branches meet is the one number worth refusing to pin down. One account measures 0.9 mile up the north branch and 0.6 mile up the south branch to the junction; another gives the convergence at about 1.4 miles. They are measuring from different ends and neither the city nor the county publishes a figure at all. So the honest version is that the branches meet somewhere between half a mile and a mile up, depending which one you started on, and that you will know it when the trail stops being two trails.
Above the junction, two landmarks. A rope swing hangs over the creek ten to fifteen minutes above the meeting point, and it is the thing children on this trail are walking toward whether or not anyone has told them so. The waterfall is roughly thirty minutes beyond the swing. That sequencing is the useful part, because it is what lets a family decide at the swing whether there is another hour in everybody, and no map gives it to you.
The crossings are the character of the place. There are many log bridges the length of the hike, and one account puts something like a dozen of them on the south branch alone. Neither the city nor the county publishes a count, so treat the number as a shape rather than a figure: enough that keeping your feet dry is a design feature of the trail rather than an accident. The water itself is filterable the whole length, which is unusual enough to be worth saying, and it is the reason the crossings exist. This trail stays with the creek instead of climbing away from it.
The south branch is the gentle one and it reaches moving water almost immediately, which makes it the better first visit with small children: the walk pays off before anybody gets tired. The north branch climbs harder and gives you the valley on the way up. The direction most published accounts recommend is up the north side and down the south, on the reasoning that the descent is then shadier and closer to the creek. That is a preference rather than a rule, and it is also the version that leaves you half a mile from the car.
The details
Getting there
From I-15 take exit 319, which is Parrish Lane and 400 North, and drive east on 400 North to 400 East. Turn right and go south to 100 South, then left. The street twists before it reaches a T at the foot of the hill, and every one of the three trailheads is reached from there on dirt. Do not confuse this with the Parrish Canyon approach, which leaves the same freeway exit and then stays on 400 North to its dead end instead of turning south. Crossing those two up is the standard error made about Centerville's canyons.
Before you go
- Spring runoff is when the creek is highest and the log bridges are least fun. Late summer and autumn are the easy crossings.
- There is no restroom and no drinking water at any of the three trailheads. Park water in Centerville runs 15 April to 15 October and that is at the parks, not up here.
- The county's archived figure for Deuel Creek Trail was 1.8 miles rated difficult. That is a one way mapped segment, not the length of the hike.
- Dogs are allowed on a leash. The Davis canyons carry no watershed animal ban, and the county page has the rule in full.
What the creek was for
A flour mill, a sawmill, and the reason the cattle came off the slope above you.
This creek is not scenery that happens to be near a town. It is the reason the town is where it is. The multiple property nomination prepared for Centerville in March 1997 records that Anson Call built a flour mill on Deuel Creek around 1852, and that the settlement's first sawmill sat at the mouth of this canyon, owned and operated by Billie Williams. Before either of those, Samuel Parrish had bought two large stones out of the canyon in the winter of 1848 to 1849 and ground wheat with them. Every industrial thing the settlement could do in its first five years, it did with water off this hillside.
The creek also carried the family name that stuck. Thomas Grover arrived in the autumn of 1847 and settled on the stream; Osmyn and William Deuel arrived in 1848 and the settlement took their name; Aaron Cherry then bought out Grover's claim and renamed it Cherry Creek; and by 1849 the surveyors had written down Centreville and the whole argument was over. The creek kept the Deuel name anyway, which is why a canyon, a trail, a historic house on 200 East and an irrigation company that still sends out shareholder letters all carry a surname that lasted about a year as the name of the town.
The hillside above the trailheads used to be grazed, and the record of what that produced is the reason it is not grazed now. Canyon floods in 1923 and 1930 did a great deal of damage in Centerville. Once grazing on the mountainside was determined to be the cause, cattle and sheep were prohibited from the foothills and somebody was appointed to keep strays out. By 1935 a watershed area had been drawn and all grazing on the foothills was abolished. That is the city's own version, in a federal nomination, of a story the county page tells at county scale. The wider account, including the contour terraces cut across the whole face of the range in that decade, belongs to the county and is linked below rather than repeated here.
What that history leaves you with on the ground is a canyon whose bottom is a working watercourse rather than a preserved one, with a debris basin at the mouth of it and an irrigation company drawing on it. The state's geologists put a number on what this creek could carry in a worst case, and the city sized infrastructure against that number. That is a mover's subject rather than a hiker's, and it sits on the moving here page with its dates and its source attached.
Every industrial thing this settlement could manage in its first five years, it managed with water off one hillside. The trail you are walking is the supply line.
Living with it
A canyon at the end of the street is an amenity and a set of questions at the same time.
For a household on the top streets of Centerville, Deuel Creek is a fifteen minute walk rather than a drive, and that changes what it is. It stops being an outing and becomes a Tuesday. That is the genuine case for the bench here, and it is a case about geography rather than about anybody who lives on it. The constraint is not fees or permits, because there are none. The constraint is parking, and the people who live nearest have mostly stopped driving to it, which is the tell.
The other half of the address is the ordinance. Centerville prohibits the discharge of personal fireworks in a mapped east bench area every 1 July to 31 July, and the boundary is written in street names in municipal code 7.07.160, running from Pages Lane and 700 East north and then west across the bench. The canyon mouths sit inside it. That is one of the specific things a bench address buys, and it is set out with the rest of the homework on the moving here page.
What this page does not cover, on purpose, is everything above the canyon. Skyline Drive runs the crest of the range above these trailheads on a seasonal gate the Forest Service controls, and the terraces you can see cut in horizontal lines across the face of the mountain are a 1930s erosion control project. Both of those, and the countywide rule on dogs and the eight canyon inventory this one belongs to, are written once on the Davis canyons page. A Centerville page explaining them would be a second, worse copy of a page that already exists.
One last practical note about the maps. Centerville publishes three of them: an interactive trails map, a hillside trails map and the trails and bikeways map this page quotes. The city also migrated its website, and every legacy address of the numbered and document centre kind that was tested on 15 August 2026 returned a 404. If you have an old bookmark to a Centerville trail document, it is dead, and the live trails page is where the current maps are. The city keeps them here.
The other canyon
Parrish Canyon
Two blocks north and a completely different hillside: dry, south facing, snakes in warm months, and a viewpoint over the lake.
Read the guideThe whole range
The Davis canyons
All eight canyon mouths on this front, the crest road above them and the gate that decides half the year.
Read the guideMoving here
Moving to Centerville
The bench file: the fireworks line in street names, the debris basins, and the two irrigation systems.
The mover pageDown the hill
Historic Centerville
The Deuel name on the National Register, the co-op corner, and a stonemason whose work you can pick out from the street.
Read the guideThe other direction
The lakeside parks
Where the county's ponds and water edges actually are, which is one exit either side of this town rather than inside it.
Read the guideThe practical side
The Centerville city guide
Prices, taxes, providers, drive times and the east wind record, in the money half of the decision.
Open the guideKeep reading
More of Centerville on The Local.
The dry slope
Parrish Canyon
A 0.85 mile walk, a 1.95 mile sunset loop, or a thousand feet up to the crest road.
Read the guideThe old grid
Historic Centerville
Twenty six Register listings, a federal designation, and a stonemason you can read.
Read the guideTwo names
William R. Smith Park
Forty stalls, a century of shade, and a monument that starts its story in 1848.
Read the guideThree days
The Freedom Festival
Three dates, two parade routes, a flyover at 8:38, and a ban running the same month.
Read the guideMoving here
Moving to Centerville
Wood water pipes in 1915, two irrigation systems, and a fire line in street names.
Read the guideThe companion
Centerville, in full
The town named for sitting in the middle, and the water it incorporated itself to go and get.
Read the pageQuick answers
Deuel Creek, answered.
There are three of them and the city routes all three from 850 East 100 South. From that point go east a tenth of a mile to a fork. Turning left onto the dirt road and going another tenth of a mile reaches the Deuel Creek North trailhead. Turning right and staying on the main dirt road for 0.35 miles reaches what the city calls the Bowl Area, and carrying on to the fork there, turning left and going a tenth of a mile more, reaches the Deuel Creek South trailhead. Those directions are quoted from Centerville City's own Trails and Bikeways Map, checked in August 2026.
The full north to south loop is 4.4 miles, running from 4,627 feet to 6,095 feet, which is roughly 1,450 feet of climb, and it takes most people three to four hours. Shorter versions are perfectly reasonable: the south branch reaches a cascade within minutes of the trailhead, and the waterfall above the junction is a two to three hour round trip. Davis County's archived figure of 1.8 miles rated difficult is a one way mapped segment rather than the length of the hike, and should not be quoted as the latter.
Yes, above the point where the two branches meet. The useful sequencing, which almost no map gives you, is that a rope swing hangs over the creek ten to fifteen minutes above the junction, and the waterfall is roughly thirty minutes beyond the swing. That lets a group make one decision at the swing rather than guessing at the trailhead. Lower down, the south branch reaches a cascade within a few minutes of leaving the car, so there is moving water on this trail almost immediately whether or not anyone gets as far as the falls.
Yes, and it matters for searching. The trail is also called the Centerville Canyon Trail, and the north fork in particular carries that name. Two accounts of what sound like different hikes are frequently accounts of the same one. The spelling is a second trap: it is Deuel, with three vowels in a row, and the National Register settles it, because the Osmyn and Emily Deuel House at 271 South 200 East is listed under that spelling. There is no Duel Creek in Centerville.
Enough that staying dry is a design feature of the trail. Published accounts describe many log bridge crossings the length of the hike, and one gives something like a dozen on the south branch alone. Neither Centerville City nor Davis County publishes a count, so treat the number as a shape rather than a figure. The reason the bridges exist is that the trail stays beside the water rather than climbing away from it, which is also why the water is described as filterable the whole length.
Most of the year, with two caveats rather than a season. The canyon bottom sits at about 4,627 feet, which is low enough that the trail generally goes whenever there is not much snow on the ground, so the limiting factor is ice on the log crossings after a storm rather than a closed month. Spring runoff is when the creek is at its highest and the bridges are least enjoyable. Late summer and autumn give the easiest crossings and the best shade on the south branch.
Yes, on a leash. No Davis County canyon carries the watershed animal ban that closes some Salt Lake County canyons to dogs, and Davis County states generally that dogs are allowed on most trails but must stay leashed. That is the whole answer as far as this page goes; the countywide rule, and the canyon by canyon detail behind it, belong to the Davis canyons page for the county rather than being written out again on each city's own trail page.
The last half mile toward the south trailhead is rough dirt, and a low clearance vehicle is better parked earlier and walked in. A published account also reports a steep loose section right at the south trailhead entrance. Neither lot is paved, neither has a published number of spaces at any issuer, and both fill on summer weekends and on warm weekday evenings. The city's map carries an update date of 2012 on its trailhead directions, so the road surface is the detail most likely to have changed since.
No. There is no restroom, no drinking tap and no rubbish collection at any of the three trailheads, and no fee, permit or gate either. Centerville's restrooms and water services run from 15 April to 15 October and that applies to the city's seven parks, not to the canyon. Carry water in, carry rubbish out, and note that although the creek is described as filterable the whole length, that means filterable rather than drinkable straight.
A canyon at the end of the street changes what an address is for.
The difference between driving to a trailhead and walking to one is the difference between an outing and an ordinary evening, and on the top streets of Centerville that difference is about fifteen minutes on foot. It also comes attached to a specific set of questions: which side of the July fireworks boundary a parcel falls on, what the debris basin at the mouth of the canyon above it was sized for, and which of the town's two secondary irrigation systems reaches the garden. Those are parcel level answers rather than city level ones. Tell me what you are weighing and I will put you with a Davis County partner agent who works this bench, and stay on the file for the financing side.
Referral disclosure. Outside Southern Utah, I connect home sellers and buyers with partner agents I trust in their area. If you choose to work with an agent I refer, that agent's brokerage pays my brokerage (Real Broker, LLC) a referral fee. The fee comes out of the agent's compensation; it is not an added cost to you. You are always free to choose any agent you wish, and using a referred agent is never required.