The Davis canyons, mouth by mouth and over the top.

Mueller Park is the one Davis canyon that is a developed Forest Service site rather than a city trailhead: eighteen group picnic sites for sixteen to a hundred people, flush toilets, drinking water, paved paths and a volleyball court at 5,400 feet, with gates that open at 7 am and close at 10 pm, and reservations through Recreation.gov. The trail that leaves it is Mueller Park Trail 141, thirteen miles in total to Rudy's Flat, with Elephant Rock at about three and a half miles the standard turnaround, seven miles round trip, and the flat around six.

Two things about Mueller Park surprise people who know the Salt Lake canyons. First, motorcycles are allowed on the trail, in the Forest Service's own words, alongside hikers, bikes and horses; it is a shared multi-use route, not a footpath. Second, it is a working municipal watershed with dogs allowed on leash: Bountiful draws a share of its culinary water from Mill Creek here and runs a treatment plant on it, and yet there is no Cottonwoods-style animal ban. Pack out everything, and know that the trailhead lot is small, roughly a handful of cars, with overflow along the road.

Holbrook Canyon starts across the road from the Bountiful Temple, at a big brown sign that reads Sessions Mountain and Holbrook Canyon Trail, and it is the canyon locals go to when Mueller Park is full. The county lists it at 4.7 miles, moderate to difficult, and adds a note no other entry gets: it crosses the creek several times and sections are hard to follow. Both are true, the crossings are a real obstacle at high water in May and June and nothing by August, and the trail's first move is downhill about a hundred feet from the lot into the drainage, which means the day ends with a climb.

The trail is described as lying on Bountiful City property rather than national forest for its length, and the city has been building around it: in 2023 Bountiful finished roughly six miles of new shoreline trail between Holbrook and Ward Canyons and hired an outside trail firm to expand the network in Holbrook, Ward, Mueller Park and above the Summerwood neighborhood. That six miles is not signed as official Bonneville Shoreline Trail because access at both ends still crosses private ground, which is the county's trail story in one sentence.

Centerville's canyon comes in two doors from the end of 100 South: a north trailhead up a short dirt road with almost no parking, and a south trailhead half a mile on with a signed pullout. The two branches climb about a mile and a half to a junction and reach a waterfall around two miles in, so either side is roughly four miles round trip, and the recommended loop is up the north and down the south. The south branch is the gentler of the two, staying with the creek over roughly a dozen bridge crossings; the north branch is steeper and gains more.

The county's guide lists Deuel Creek at 1.8 miles and difficult, describing a steep initial climb and creek-side passages where the two branches merge, and again that figure is a map segment rather than the hike. Also called Centerville Canyon Trail, it is the county's easiest introduction to what these canyons are: a creek in a steep V, cottonwood and maple, cool in July, and a destination close enough that people finish it before dinner.

Parrish Canyon is the serious one on the south bench. From a dirt lot at the T where Parrish Lane meets 700 East, and a quarter mile of dirt road south past a small reservoir, the Parrish Creek Trail climbs the ridge between Parrish and Centerville canyons under Centerville Peak at 8,904 feet, gaining about a thousand feet to where it meets Skyline Drive below the crest. That junction is the natural short turnaround. Beyond it the route continues to Bountiful Peak at 9,259 feet, the largest gain of any trail in this set and a full day by any measure.

The county's guide gives 4.9 miles, difficult, names the canyon for Samuel Parrish who settled the creek in 1848, and states plainly that it climbs Bountiful Peak from the west. The Bonneville Shoreline Trail crosses it low down. Numbers beyond those are crowd-sourced and disagree with each other, so treat this as the canyon you take when you want to reach the crest road on foot, and pack for a mountain rather than a park.

Farmington Canyon Road, Forest Service Road 007, is the one road that takes a car from the county into the Wasatch. It leaves 100 East above Farmington Pond, climbs on pavement past the pond trailhead and a smaller dirt trailhead, turns to gravel at a switchback and keeps climbing to Bountiful Peak Campground at 8.1 miles and 7,500 feet, then to the junction with Francis Peak Road and Skyline Drive. The Forest Service describes it as steep, narrow and winding, does not require high clearance, and does not recommend trailers over 24 feet; passenger cars do it, nervous drivers do not enjoy it.

Two standing orders govern it. From April 1 through October 31 no fire of any kind is allowed within 200 yards of the road from its start to the old Sunset Campground pullout, and from November 1 through April 1 no camping is allowed on or within half a mile of the road between that pullout and the gates at the top of the canyon. Sunset Campground itself was decommissioned in 2018 and survives only as a name on the road; Bountiful Peak Campground, 29 sites, one group site, vault toilets and no potable water at all, is the county's only real campground, seasonal, reservable through Recreation.gov, and in 2025 it opened on June 27, which is a better guide to when the canyon is drivable than any date on any blog.

Above the campground the road forks: Francis Peak Road climbs to the two white radar domes that the whole valley can see, built in 1959 and run by the FAA and the Air National Guard on a summit that was leveled for them, which is why Francis Peak's elevation is printed three different ways and the honest answer is a little over 9,500 feet. Skyline Drive runs the crest south from the junction past Bountiful Peak at 9,259 feet and descends by Ward Canyon to Bountiful, where 1300 East becomes paved Skyline Drive at the bottom. Farmington to Bountiful over the top is roughly 25 miles of gravel, and no agency publishes the exact figure.

This is where the county's calendar lives. The crest roads are gated for winter and open in stages, the lower canyon first and the ridge later, and the Forest Service publishes only live open-or-closed status and the earliest possible dates on its motor vehicle use map. The date that circulates, June 1, traces to a single 2013 news story about that one spring; in 2025 the campground did not open until June 27. The Forest Service's road-conditions page listed Skyline Drive, Farmington Flats Loop, Francis Peak Road, Farmington Canyon Road, the Davis County Firebreak Road and both Ward Canyon roads as open on its July 16, 2026 update, with the standing caveat that weather and safety change that at any time.

Bair Canyon is spelled two ways, and both are in current official use. The federal names list and the Forest Service, which manages the route as Bair Creek Trail 613, spell it Bair; the City of Fruit Heights on its own history page, a USGS streamgage named Baer Creek near Kaysville, and the trailhead sign at the top of a steep driveway in a Fruit Heights cul-de-sac spell it Baer, so the sign a hiker reads and the map a hiker carries disagree and neither is a misprint. No issuing body publishes who the canyon is named for. The Forest Service lists the trail at 3.9 miles and 4,200 feet of gain, managed as a primitive route that is hard to follow in places as it climbs the ridge; the county's guide has carried 4.3 miles. From the small lot the route follows the creek through three crossings, usually only the second one wet in early summer, and after about two and a half miles begins a steep climb out of the canyon on the north side toward a jeep road below Francis Peak.

The parking is the tightest in this set, a handful of spaces reached by a residential driveway, and it is the reason the city keeps this canyon quiet. Below it, the Gailey Trail at Nicholls Park follows the lower creek on the flat between homes and a golf course, short and shaded, and is the honest easy option in the same drainage. Bair Canyon is also the county's principal remaining Bonneville Shoreline Trail gap, and in September 2025 a bill was introduced in Congress to convey about 296 acres of national forest above Fruit Heights to the city with a reserved trail easement to close it; as of August 2026 it has had a hearing and has not passed.

Adams Canyon is the busiest trail in the county and the one with the most Forest Service paperwork: Trail 614 on the Salt Lake Ranger District, following the North Fork of Holmes Creek about a mile and three quarters to a roughly forty foot waterfall, with the Forest Service calling the gain a little over a thousand feet while the crowd-sourced apps say fourteen or fifteen hundred. Publish both and believe the agency. The maintained trail ends at the falls: beyond them the Forest Service describes a primitive route that is difficult to follow and climbs through a series of cliff areas toward the ridge, and it publishes no prohibition on going up, only that description; the rescues concentrate there. Leashed dogs are allowed; the trail crosses the Bonneville Shoreline Trail early and names the Great Western Trail as a far destination.

The trailhead is the newest facility in this set. Layton City cut the ribbon on April 26, 2024 on a rebuilt trailhead off North Eastside Drive: a paved lot, four flush restrooms, water filling stations, a bike repair stand and racks, an information kiosk and a small rotunda with the canyon's history, funded by a $150,000 state grant, about $385,000 from the county's Proposition 1 transportation tax, land donated by neighbors and private money for the benches. Before it, the gravel lot held about twenty cars and, at the worst point during the US-89 rebuild, nearly a hundred were counted parked along a road with no sidewalk. The new lot's capacity is unpublished, and on a summer Saturday it still fills by early morning.