The 5 best things to do in West Bountiful.

West Bountiful has exactly one community park and this is it: 14.5 acres on the freeway side of town, at 550 West Pages Lane. Note the address, because it is the fact the whole city trips over. The park is not next to City Hall; City Hall is at 550 North 800 West, three quarters of a mile east, and the two share nothing but a number. What the park holds is generous for its size: a large bowery and four smaller ones, two playgrounds, a basketball court with six hoops, two sand volleyball courts, three ball fields, a historic cabin and a loop path of about eight tenths of a mile.

It ranks second because it is the everyday heart of the city and the place West Bountiful gathers. The Fourth of July celebration lands here, with a carnival and concert on the third and fireworks over the park at ten, then a flag raising and parade the next morning. One planning fact is genuinely useful for a resident: bowery reservations open online on the second Monday in January for a West Bountiful address and not until the second Monday in March for everyone else, a two month head start on the only large covered pavilion in town.

The full inventory, the story of the unexplained cabin and the honest note that the city has less park land per person than any of its neighbours are all on the West Bountiful City Park page. This entry is the short version of why it earns second.

The third thing to do here is simply to walk 800 West on foot, because the street has a second name and a national listing that the city does not advertise. The homes along the corridor were placed on the National Register of Historic Places as the West Bountiful Historic District in 2004, and the same street is the one the city has an adopted policy to re-sign with its original name: Onion Street. West Bountiful was onion country, the crop named the street, and the street later named a canal trail and a Christmas event, so the name threads through the whole town.

It ranks third because it is free, it is available in any season, and it is the most distinctive short walk in the city, but it asks a little of the visitor. There is no visitor center and no marked trail; it is a residential street you read as you go, best in the leaf-off months of early spring or late fall when the old houses stand clear of the trees. City Hall and West Bountiful Elementary both sit inside the corridor, which the city calls the heart of the city, so the walk doubles as the civic tour.

The list of houses, the two overlapping preservation designations and the onion history that ties it together are on the Onion Street page. Use this entry to decide whether to lace up.

The fourth thing to do is walk, ride or run the west edge of town, where West Bountiful stitched together three regional trails that add up to about 3.9 miles. The Legacy Parkway Trail is the paved spine on the far west side; the Onion Parkway Trail runs east to west along the DSB canal; and the Prospector Trail follows an abandoned Denver and Rio Grande railroad grade, so a flat, straight walk here is a walk on a hundred-year-old rail bed. Together they are the only way to cross this city without a car, and a separate equestrian path runs alongside the paved Legacy trail.

The most useful door onto the system is the Birnam Woods trailhead, off 830 West north of Porter Lane, and the reason it exists is a small piece of local history: when the Legacy Parkway was built it cut several West Bountiful streets into cul-de-sacs, and the trailheads are the compensation, one where each street used to continue. Across the fence sits the Legacy Nature Preserve, 2,225 acres of wetland that UDOT owns as mitigation for the parkway and keeps closed to the public, so you view it from the trail rather than walk into it.

The trailhead, the four access points and what is on the other side of the fence are covered on the Birnam Woods page. This entry ranks the trails as an activity rather than mapping them.

The fifth pick is the simplest and, for a lot of residents, the most used: four public pickleball courts on the civic block on 800 West, a short walk south of City Hall and inside the historic corridor. They are lit for evening play, they cost nothing, and they take no reservation, running first come first served from six in the morning to ten at night. That last half hour matters, because it is shorter than the parks, which stay open until half past ten.

It ranks fifth not because it is small but because it is the one stop here that needs nothing planned around it. A paddle and a spare hour is the whole trip. On a summer evening the courts are the busiest free recreation in town, which is worth knowing if you arrive expecting an empty court, and the lights mean a game does not have to end when the sun does.

The courts sit outside the city's counted park acreage, which is one small example of a town that holds more recreation ground than its own arithmetic captures. If they are full, the practice green at Lakeside and the loop at City Park are both a few minutes away.