The Legacy Parkway Trail, end to end

A mile and a half up, Foxboro North Regional Park at 1120 West 1100 North is the first stop that behaves like a park rather than a parking lot: restrooms, drinking water, a playground and a seasonal splash pad, on the west side of the Foxboro neighborhood that grew up around this end of the parkway after 2008. Some maps label the same access 2425 South, the Woods Cross grid name for the lane, and horse-trailer parking is reported here.

It is the natural start for a family loop rather than a through ride: south to Center Street and back is a flat three miles with a splash pad at the end, north to Mountain View Park and back is two. The rule of the corridor is set here and never changes: no motors, dogs on leash, and pavement wide enough that a stroller and two bikes pass without a word.

A mile north of Foxboro, Mountain View Park in the Woods Cross area is the corridor's other trailhead with the full set, restrooms, water and a playground, and between them the two parks make the south end the easiest part of the trail to use with children. From here the corridor is at its most suburban: houses to the east, the parkway to the west, and the Wasatch behind everything, which is where the park got its name.

This is also the stretch where the trail's real function shows on a weekday morning. Woods Cross station is a short ride east, the parkway carries the cars, and the trail carries the people who would rather not be in them, north to Farmington or south into the Salt Lake system without a single stoplight. The next water after this is at Farmington Station, roughly ten miles up, so fill your bottles before you leave.

Two miles north of Mountain View, the Mill Creek trailhead near 1100 West and 1200 North in West Bountiful is the first of the bare-bones lots: parking, no water, no restroom, and the corridor starting to open toward the wetlands. It is also where a spur peels off under the parkway to Bountiful Pond, less than a mile round trip and a well-known birding spot, for gulls, terns, waterfowl and the songbirds and owls in the trees around it. Despite the name the pond sits in Woods Cross on 1600 North, not in Bountiful.

The pond is worth the detour for the birds, and in the warm months it carries a harmful algal bloom advisory: when algae mats are present, dogs and children stay out of the water, while walking, fishing and paddling the edge are fine. Check the state's water quality advisory page before you plan to wade or bring a dog. The ponds are the subject of the lakeside parks guide; this trail only lends them a spur.

Pages Lane dead-ends west into a small trailhead half a mile past Mill Creek, in Centerville, and a mile past that the Birnam Woods trailhead in West Bountiful sits behind its subdivision off 830 West north of Porter Lane, with a small playground in the park behind the houses. Neither has water or a restroom, both have parking, and both are the quiet trailheads locals use. This is also the stretch where the trail briefly shares its alignment with the Denver and Rio Grande Western Rail Trail in Centerville, the one place the two corridors overlap.

North of Birnam Woods the trail crosses under the parkway to the west side and the character changes for good: fields, wetland, the preserve opening to the west, and four and a half miles with no trailhead, no water and no restroom until Farmington. It is the best riding on the corridor and the least forgiving, so treat Birnam Woods as the last door for a long way.

The Legacy Nature Preserve is the reason the corridor exists in the form it does. When the parkway was litigated to a halt in the early 2000s, the 2005 settlement that let it be built required a trail system, banned billboards, held the speed limit to 55 and kept semi trucks off, and UDOT set aside 2,225 acres west of the highway, plus twenty acres of wetland along its length, as mitigation, managed on an adaptive plan that mimics natural flood and drawdown cycles across playas and grassland ponds.

It is not open to the public. You see it from the trail and from a designated viewing area near 2100 West 500 South in Woods Cross, and what you see is mudflat, wet meadow, emergent marsh and open channels that hold Pacific Flyway migrants in spring and fall. It is not a wildlife management area and it is not run by the wildlife division; that is Farmington Bay next door, a separate property with its own rulebook and its own page here.

The long stretch ends at Farmington's trailheads: a dirt lot with nothing on it, then Farmington City's two Glovers Lane accesses, one at 925 South just north of the overpass and a Bus Park trailhead with parking at 425 West Glovers Lane. Glovers Lane is also where the West Davis Highway begins, at I-15, running north and west to West Point since all its lanes opened on January 8, 2024, with nearly ten miles of new trail built alongside it that ties into this one. That is the corridor's real northern handoff.

Glovers Lane is also the road to Farmington Bay: the wildlife management area's front gate is a mile and a half west of the overpass, and the Eccles Wildlife Education Center is a little past it. A ride to the bay from the trail is a plausible morning, with the permit rules that page explains; the trail itself carries no permit at all.

The trail's north trailhead sits in the northeast corner of the Farmington FrontRunner station lot at 450 North 850 West, and the pavement runs about a third of a mile beyond it and stops. Station Park, a large shopping and dining center, sits on the same station, so the corridor that started at a river underpass ends at a train platform with a fountain show behind it, about as complete a car-free commuting statement as a suburb makes.

That puts the whole route at about thirteen miles, the county's own figure being 13.2. Across the street to the west, the Western Sports Park (long known as the Legacy Events Center) at 25 North Sports Park Way is the county's sports and events campus, and the D&RGW Rail Trail's Farmington trailhead at 950 North 1875 West is a short ride away for anyone continuing north; the two trails do not touch here, but they are neighbors.