The 7 best things to do in Centerville.

Two blocks south of Deuel is the opposite kind of hike. Parrish Canyon is dry, open and south facing, and the views start almost at once because there is no canopy in the way. Four hundred North runs east from freeway exit 319 for 1.2 miles and simply ends at a T at 700 East, and everything above it gets called Parrish Canyon. What is actually published is a 0.85 mile walk to a rock art panel, a 1.95 mile loop to a viewpoint one account calls Sunset Point, and a full day beyond that up the ridge toward Bountiful Peak.

The Sunset Point loop is the one to aim for on a first visit: about six hundred feet above your car, looking out at the Great Salt Lake, Antelope Island and the length of the Wasatch Front, in two to three hours. The whole picture, including why accounts of this trail disagree so violently and why the most repeated numbers are not supported by anything, is on the Parrish Canyon page.

Two cautions belong on the summary. There is a rock art panel on the lower trail; it is fragile and protected by federal and state law, so look and photograph from a distance and do not touch it. And the lower canyon carries a downhill mountain bike line, so if you are walking down it, expect bikes moving fast and do not assume you will hear one first.

Centerville's Independence celebration is the one weekend of the year when the whole town is the event rather than the backdrop, and it is unusually well documented because the city organises it and publishes the schedule itself. It runs across three separate dates around the Fourth of July in two different parks, and the city lists no admission on any element except the Rotary run. The signature detail is a flyover scheduled to the minute, twenty two minutes ahead of the morning parade, which is the kind of fact that exists in a city document and nowhere else.

There are two parades on consecutive days. A children's parade of decorated bikes and wagons goes on the evening of the third and finishes at Founders Park, where the Family Fun Night is already setting up. The big parade the next morning runs about two miles of Main Street, State Route 106, the full length of the historic grid, and then everything moves west to Community Park for a day that ends with fireworks. The whole programme, block by block, with the parade routes and the seating rule, is on the Freedom Festival page.

The local knowledge worth carrying: chairs and blankets may be placed on the parade route after four in the afternoon on the third, and not before, so by that evening there is furniture down the length of Main. Every time and act resets each spring, so take the current year's schedule from the city rather than from a listing.

For a town of under seventeen thousand people, Centerville carries an extraordinary amount of history on a small, walkable grid. Twenty six properties are individually listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and fourteen of them went on in a single day in 1997 under one thematic nomination, which is the signature of a town that surveyed itself carefully. The oldest survivor is the 1866 Wells Fargo stagecoach building at 186 East Center Street, one of the oldest commercial buildings in Davis County, and it is a private residence today.

The walk is free, self guided and available whenever you like, and the reward is a street you can read. The federal nomination splits the town into three eras, each of which left a different building material behind, from pioneer log and adobe through rock and brick railroad houses to the bungalows and service station of the early twentieth century. The full account, including the mason whose trademark corner stones give him away, is on the Historic Centerville page.

The one thing to hold in mind is that this is a pavement exercise. The city's walking tour passes twenty five homes and every one of them is private property, so the correct behaviour is to read the markers from the street and keep moving. There is no district, no visitor centre and nothing open to go inside.

Two blocks from City Hall, on the original 1849 survey grid, is a small, old, shaded municipal block that the city lists under both of its names at once: William R. Smith (Founders) Park. It is named for the first president of the town's 1869 co-operative store, which stood on the corner of Main and Center a five minute walk away. On the block today there is a pavilion, barbecue grills, drinking fountains, a playground and, as the city puts it, plenty of trees with plenty of shade.

Standing on the lawn is a Sons of Utah Pioneers monument, number 66, titled Memorial to Centerville Pioneers, which opens its account of the town in 1848 even though the city dates settlement to 1847. That small disagreement, and who William R. Smith actually was, is worked out on the William R. Smith Park page. It is the park the Friday evening of the Freedom Festival runs in, and the block that most rewards twenty quiet minutes on the old grid.

Up on the north bench is the city park most guides to Centerville miss, and it is the one with the most to do. Freedom Hills Park, at 2150 North 150 East, has a free nine hole disc golf course that most players finish in about an hour, laid out across a hillside that gives the round some genuine elevation. It is an easy course and a good first one, and there is nothing to pay and nothing to book.

The rest of the park earns the visit on its own. There is a covered pavilion, a playground, paved jogging paths, a war veterans memorial, and two trailheads onto the foothill, one for walkers and one for horses, feeding a gravel switchback trail of roughly two miles up toward the shoreline bench. This is also the park with the truck and trailer parking, which is a clue to how it is used: it is the working trailhead end of town as much as it is a neighbourhood park.

If the canyons are the east side of Centerville, the flat is the west, and the flat is a very good paved trail. The Legacy Parkway Trail runs the length of Davis County's western edge on the valley floor, fully paved, with no street crossings, as part of the Golden Spoke network that connects trail after trail from Ogden to Provo. It is the one pick here for a road bike, a stroller or a run where you do not want to think about traffic or elevation.

Centerville's own way onto it is the Pages Lane Trailhead, where Pages Lane dead ends to the west and simply meets the path, with parking but no water or restrooms. Just north of there the trail briefly shares its alignment with an old Denver and Rio Grande Western rail line, which is a nice piece of history to notice at speed. The full corridor, its trailheads end to end and where it links to the rest of the county's trails, is on the Davis County Legacy Parkway Trail page.