Walk up Ferguson Canyon from the park at the bottom
Ferguson Park, 7722 S Prospector Drive · Free · Summer and autumn
This is the one outing on the list that belongs to Cottonwood Heights and to nowhere else. Ferguson Canyon leaves the top of a residential street above Wasatch Boulevard, crosses the creek three times, passes under sheer granite that climbers have been working for decades, and finishes at an overlook that puts the whole Salt Lake Valley on one side of you and Big Cottonwood on the other. It is 3.6 miles round trip and 1,462 feet of climbing, from about 5,245 feet at the bottom to 6,707 at the overlook.
The part that makes it a habit rather than a hike is the dog rule. A leashed dog is welcome here, which is not true of either canyon on the city's eastern edge, and it is why Ferguson carries the local weekday traffic it does. Start at Ferguson Park at the bottom rather than driving to the trailhead, because the streets in between are permit parking. The Ferguson page has the parking rules, the crossings and the crags in full.
Park at the bottom, not at the top
The trailhead itself has 18 stalls and they are gone early on any decent morning. Everything within 0.3 miles of it in all directions is permit parking for residents, enforced under the city's own ordinance, and a vehicle without a permit can be ticketed and towed. Since 2024 the city has directed walkers to Ferguson Park at the bottom and up through the neighbourhood on foot. That adds a few minutes at each end and removes the possibility of coming back to a tow notice.
Three creek crossings, and spring is the one that matters
In summer and autumn the crossings are rock hopping and nothing more. In late spring, with the snow coming off the ground above, the flow can be high enough that you get wet feet or turn back, and the rocks that were easy in August are slick. Nothing about the route changes; only the water does. If you are walking it for the first time, walk it in September and you will understand why people come back in June.
The details
Getting there
Leave I-215 at exit 6, follow 6200 South onto Wasatch Boulevard, continue past the Big Cottonwood gate and turn uphill onto Prospector Drive. Ferguson Park is at 7722 South Prospector Drive; the trailhead is further up at the top of Timberline Drive.
Before you go
- Everything within 0.3 miles of the trailhead is permit parking. Use Ferguson Park instead.
- Leashed dogs are allowed here, unlike Big and Little Cottonwood. Carry out what your dog leaves.
- The three creek crossings are the crux in late spring. Check the flow before you commit.
- Granite crags start about 0.7 miles up. Expect climbers and their gear on the side trails.
- The overlook is the sensible turnaround. Going on toward Storm Mountain is a much bigger day.
Be at Butler Park for Butlerville Days in the middle of July
Butler Park, 7500 S 2700 E · Mostly free · Mid July
Butlerville Days is the city's own festival and its name is the local history refusing to be forgotten: Butlerville was the 1849 settlement on the bench between the two creeks that everything here grew out of. It runs at Butler Park, next to the recreation centre, and it carries a parade, a car show, chalk art, pickleball, stage entertainment and a carnival with inflatables.
The thing to know before you plan around it is that the dates moved. For 2026 the festival ran 16 to 18 July and the city has said it is no longer a Pioneer Day celebration, which is what it had been for years. The parade ran on Saturday 18 July at 5:00 in the afternoon, and instead of fireworks there was a drone show from 10:00 to 11:00 that night. Almost every older description of this event, including a good many current ones, still says late July and fireworks.
The carnival keeps different hours from the festival
For 2026 the carnival and inflatable rides ran Thursday from 4:00 to 10:00, Friday from 4:00 to 11:00, and Saturday from noon to 11:00, which is a different shape from the rest of the programme and is the detail that decides what time you arrive with children. Ride tickets are sold separately from the free parts of the festival. Check the current year's schedule with the city rather than assuming last year's pattern, because this event has just demonstrated that it will change.
Park once, and expect the streets around 7500 South to be full
Butler Park shares its ground with the recreation centre, so the parking that serves both is doing two jobs at once on festival weekend, and the parade route closes streets in the neighbourhood around it. The city publishes the route each year. The sensible approach is the same one that works for a small town parade anywhere: arrive early, park once, walk, and do not plan on driving across the neighbourhood between 5:00 and 7:00 on the Saturday.
The details
Getting there
Butler Park sits on the same block as the recreation centre at 7500 South 2700 East, in the middle of the city rather than up on the bench. The parade route runs through the surrounding neighbourhood and the city publishes it in advance.
Before you go
- The dates moved for 2026 and it is no longer tied to Pioneer Day. Confirm the current year.
- Fireworks were replaced by a drone show in 2026. Do not plan an evening around a display.
- Carnival hours differ from festival hours. Check both before you set out with children.
- The parade closes streets around Butler Park. Park once and walk.
- Bywater Park's athletic fields are closed for renovation until 31 August 2026, so overflow is limited.
Drive the first three miles of Big Cottonwood before breakfast
The SR-190 gate at Wasatch Boulevard · Free · Year round
The gate at the east end of Fort Union Boulevard is where the boulevard stops being a boulevard and SR-190 starts climbing. Within the first three miles, milepost one to milepost three, the road serpentines between pink and grey cliff bands under Storm Mountain, passes the Dogwood picnic ground, and delivers most of what people imagine when they imagine a Wasatch canyon. You do not need a resort, a lift ticket or a whole day for any of it.
What makes this a resident habit rather than a tourist drive is the hour. Before about eight in the morning, and again in the last hour of light, the lower canyon is genuinely quiet, the parking pull outs are open, and the whole thing takes under an hour from a driveway on this bench. The doorstep page covers what a full season of this looks like, including the mornings when it is the last thing you should attempt.
The road is a state highway with rules of its own in winter
From late autumn this is not an ordinary drive and the requirements are not optional. Big and Little Cottonwood carry UDOT's strictest traction designation, the law can be switched on a full day before a storm arrives, and there are mornings when the road simply does not open. All of that has its own page: canyon winter access sets out the tyre rules, the parking systems and what a closure actually means. Read it once in November and you will not be caught out.
Leave the dog at home, and take the water bottle seriously
Both Cottonwood canyons are protected drinking watershed for the valley, which produces two rules that catch newcomers: no dogs at all, including a dog that stays in the car, and no swimming or wading in the creeks and lakes. Those are enforced ordinances rather than guidance, and the detail sits on the canyons page. If a dog is part of the walk, Ferguson Canyon on this side of the ridge is the answer.
The details
Getting there
Fort Union Boulevard runs east until it meets Wasatch Boulevard, and the canyon road starts there. The first three miles carry the S curves, Storm Mountain and the Dogwood picnic ground, all of it before the road reaches the mid canyon meadows.
Before you go
- Winter traction requirements apply to every vehicle on the road, sightseer or not.
- No dogs in the canyon, including inside a vehicle. This is a watershed ordinance.
- No swimming or wading in the creek or the lakes, at any point on either canyon road.
- The road is a dead end. Everything you drive up, you drive back down.
- Control work and storms close the road at the gate, which is inside the city.
Swim or skate at the recreation centre on 7500 South
7500 S 2700 E · Admission or membership · Year round
Seven pools and an Olympic size ice sheet under one roof is a lot of building for a city of thirty three thousand, and the explanation is that the site predates the city by more than three decades. The Cottonwood Heights Parks and Recreation Service Area has been running recreation on this ground since 1971, and the facility it operates carries four indoor pools, three outdoor pools, a three tiered dive tank, two water slides, a gymnasium, an indoor walking track, five racquetball courts and six outdoor pickleball courts.
For a visitor this is the wet weather answer and the hot weather answer in the same place. For a resident it is the thing that quietly makes a February here workable, because the alternative to a canyon day in a storm cycle is usually a screen. Public skating, lessons and group reservations all run on the ice sheet; the pools run their own schedules; and both change with the school calendar, so the timetable is the thing to check rather than the address.
It is a separate district, and that shows up on the tax notice
The service area is an independent special taxing district, not a department of the city and not part of Salt Lake County Parks and Recreation. Residents inside its boundary pay a portion of their property tax to it, and that funds roughly half its operating budget, with fees covering the other half. If you are buying here, that is a line to identify on the tax notice rather than a surprise, and it is also why the resident rate at the door is what it is.
The ice sheet is the piece that is hard to replace
An Olympic size sheet is one of the larger pieces of ice in Salt Lake County and it books accordingly, between public sessions, lessons, hockey and figure skating. That means the useful question is not whether the arena is open but whether there is a public session at the hour you want, which is a schedule question and a phone call. Turning up at a rink of this size on a Saturday afternoon without checking is how a family day becomes a drive.
The details
Getting there
The centre sits on the same block as Butler Park in the middle of the city, a few minutes south of Fort Union Boulevard and well below the bench, so it is reachable without going anywhere near the canyon roads.
Before you go
- Check the current public skating and open swim schedule before you set out.
- The recreation service area is a separate district from the city. Rates differ inside and outside it.
- Outdoor pools run a summer season; the indoor pools and the ice sheet run year round.
- The site is shared with Butler Park, so festival weekend in July is a different proposition.
- Six outdoor pickleball courts are on the site, which is the busiest thing here on a summer evening.
Look at the Old Mill while it is still standing
6851 S Big Cottonwood Canyon Road · Free from the road · Year round
A four storey granite shell sits beside Big Cottonwood Creek just inside the canyon gate, and it is the most photographed object in Cottonwood Heights. It was built in 1883 for the Deseret News under Henry Grow, the engineer whose name is on the Salt Lake Tabernacle roof, to grind canyon logs into pulp and make paper. It was sold to the Granite Paper Mills Company in 1892, and on 1 April 1893 a fire that started in the stored paper destroyed the interior and left the walls.
Everything since has been improvisation. It reopened in 1927 as the Old Mill Club, an open air dance hall, and over the following decades served as a rock venue, a haunted house and a craft boutique before the city condemned it in 2005 on seismic grounds. It was named a Daughters of Utah Pioneers historic site in 1966 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971. It has been fenced and empty for years.
There is a live application to demolish it
WDOM Properties LLC applied for a conditional use permit to take the structure down, arguing that it is an attractive nuisance, an imminent danger and structurally unsalvageable. The Cottonwood Heights Planning Commission heard the application on 21 January 2026 in a meeting that needed an overflow room, with more than sixteen written objections filed in the four days beforehand. Because an application of this kind must be pending for at least a year, nothing final can happen before 21 January 2027.
Look from the road, and do not climb the fence
This is private property, it is fenced, and the city condemned the building two decades ago because of what an earthquake would do to it. The view that is worth having is from Big Cottonwood Canyon Road anyway, where the scale of the walls against the creek and the canyon mouth reads properly. Photographs of the interior circulate widely and every one of them was taken somewhere the photographer was not entitled to be.
The details
Getting there
The mill sits on the north side of the road a few hundred yards inside the Big Cottonwood gate, with the Old Mill golf course threading the same corner along the creek. There is no visitor parking on the site itself.
Before you go
- The site is private, fenced and condemned. View it from the public road.
- A demolition application is pending and cannot be decided before 21 January 2027.
- Check the city's planning agendas for the current status before you rely on anything here.
- Low winter light on the granite is the reason photographers come in January rather than July.
- The canyon gate is a few hundred yards further on, so this pairs naturally with a lower canyon drive.
Spend an evening on Fort Union Boulevard
Fort Union Boulevard · Free to walk · Year round
Fort Union Boulevard is 7000 South, and it is the reason this city works as a place to live rather than only as a place to leave for the mountains. Cottonwood Heights deliberately kept its commercial development on the lower ground north of the ridge, which concentrated the restaurants, the groceries and the services along one road and left the bench above it residential. The result is a spine you can do an evening on, four minutes from the canyon gate at one end.
The county library branch at 2197 East Fort Union Boulevard is the anchor most visitors miss and most residents use weekly. Canyon Centre at 7200 South Wasatch Boulevard sits at the top of the corridor with a hotel on it. And the name is not decoration: a militia fort called Union was built out here in 1853 and the boulevard runs through what is left of that settlement. The Fort Union page takes the fort, the corridor and the three cities it now crosses.
One road, three cities, and a numbering system that helps
Fort Union Boulevard runs west from Wasatch Boulevard through Cottonwood Heights, into Midvale, and toward State Street, and the historic Union district it crosses is now split between Midvale, Cottonwood Heights and Sandy. That matters when something goes wrong or a permit is needed, because the answer depends on which city hall the address falls in. The street number is the quickest guide: the higher the east number, the further up the bench and the more likely you are in Cottonwood Heights.
The retail changed character when the freeway arrived
Most of what is on this corridor today came after I-215 opened, which brought big box retail, office space and the density that a bench road never had before. That is why the boulevard reads like a 1990s commercial strip in places and like an old settlement road in others, sometimes within the same block. Neither half is an accident; both are the record of a farming district that got a freeway interchange.
The details
Getting there
Take I-215 to the 6200 South or Union Park interchanges and head east. Whitmore Library sits at 2197 East, the recreation centre is a few blocks south on 2700 East, and Canyon Centre and the Big Cottonwood gate are at the eastern end.
Before you go
- The corridor crosses three city boundaries, so check which city an address is in before you call one.
- Whitmore Library is a Salt Lake County branch and keeps county library hours, not city hours.
- The eastern end of the boulevard is the canyon gate, so storm traffic uses it as an approach.
- Parking is off street and free along almost all of it, which is not true of the canyon trailheads.
- The 1853 fort site itself is west of here, near North Union Avenue and 1000 East, in Midvale today.
Honest about scale
What the city owns, and what merely starts at its edge.
This is a small city with an enormous amenity next door, and the two get blurred constantly in copy written about it. The left column is what Cottonwood Heights itself provides and maintains. The right column is what an address here puts within reach but does not belong to the city at all.
| The city's own | Reached from here, owned elsewhere | |
|---|---|---|
| Trails | Ferguson Canyon, with a city park and a permit parking programme around it | Every trailhead up both Cottonwood canyons, on national forest and watershed ground |
| Water | Seven pools and a dive tank at the recreation centre | Creeks and alpine lakes that are closed to swimming and wading |
| Winter | A park and ride, a bus route and the streets the queue uses | Four resorts, two state highways and the rules that govern them |
| Events | Butlerville Days in July, and the city calendar around it | Resort summer seasons and festivals on their own calendars |
| Indoor days | An Olympic size ice sheet and a county library branch on the boulevard | The valley's museums and venues, twenty minutes down the freeway |
| History | The Old Mill, the Union fort site and the Butlerville name | The wider Wasatch mining and canyon history, up both roads |
Neither column is a complaint. The point of this address is the combination, and the price of the bench reflects it. What it should not do is leave anybody thinking the canyons come with the house, because they come with a set of rules, a set of seasons and a set of mornings when the road does not open.
Before you go
Three lists, because three different bodies set the rules here.
Nothing on this page is hard to arrange, but the answers live in three places: the city for parking and events, an independent district for the recreation centre, and the canyon authorities for anything east of the gates.
Ask the city
- This year's festival dates and parade route, on 801-944-7100, because they have just changed
- Where the permit parking boundary around the Ferguson trailhead actually runs
- Whether Bywater Park's fields have come back from renovation yet
- Where the Old Mill demolition application currently stands on the planning agenda
Ask the recreation district
- Public skating sessions, which are the constraint rather than the arena's opening hours
- Open swim times, which run to a school calendar rather than a clock
- Whether the outdoor pools are in season on the day you want them
- The difference between the resident and non resident rate at the door
Turn up and it is fine
- Ferguson Park at the bottom of the canyon, which is free and open
- The lower canyon drive, outside winter conditions
- The Old Mill from the public road
- Fort Union Boulevard, where the parking is free and off street
Two of these six changed in the past twelve months. The festival moved off Pioneer Day and dropped its fireworks for a drone show, and the mill acquired a live demolition application that a planning commission has already heard. That is a high rate of change for a list this short, and it is a good reason to treat any lifestyle page about this city, including this one, as a starting point that gets checked at the source. Every claim here is dated 7 August 2026.
What this list leaves out, and why
- The four ski resorts. They sit up two canyons that belong to the whole county rather than to one city, and they have their own regional pages on The Local along with the road rules that govern getting to them.
- Bells Canyon. Every one of its trailheads is inside Sandy, on the far side of Little Cottonwood Creek, and Sandy publishes the preservation trailhead on its own city site. It is a fine walk and it is not this city's.
- The Bonneville Shoreline Trail. The bench route runs through six cities and is written as one continuous subject on its own regional page, because the useful thing about it is where it connects and where it does not.
- Guardsman Pass and the mid canyon lakes. Those are up the canyon rather than at its gate, on a seasonal road, and they belong to the canyons page rather than to a city list.
- The Old Mill golf course. It threads the same corner along Big Cottonwood Creek, but a round of golf is a booking rather than an outing and the course keeps its own calendar.
