The reservoir Herriman
A seven acre irrigation pond with the county's only sand beach
Blackridge Reservoir, and every rule attached to it.
Blackridge is a secondary irrigation reservoir of about seven acres that ended up carrying the only municipal sand swimming beach in Salt Lake County, at the top of a residential street with the Oquirrhs behind it. It is free to enter and closely managed to reach: a 15 dollar weekend and holiday parking charge, a neighbourhood permit zone from 1 May to 7 September, a car park with no overflow, and a list of prohibitions that catches people out. Here is all of it, checked at the city and the state and dated.
Southern Utah is my home turf. Herriman is not, so these pages are researched rather than lived: checked against city, county and venue sources, and dated so you can see how fresh they are. For the on-the-ground work here I lean on a Salt Lake County partner agent.
Start here
An irrigation pond that accidentally became a beach.
Blackridge was not built for swimming. It is a secondary irrigation reservoir of about seven acres, put in to feed Herriman's secondary water system and to support water pressure in neighbouring Riverton, and the city wrapped a park of roughly ten acres around it. What that produced, more or less by accident, is the only municipal sand swimming beach in Salt Lake County: open water with a beach, a playground, restrooms, four small pavilions and a large one, a paved loop and benches, sitting at the top of a residential street with the Oquirrhs immediately behind.
In a valley of well over a million people, an amenity that unusual does not stay a neighbourhood secret. It has not been one for years. What has grown up around it instead is one of the most closely managed access regimes attached to any free public water in the state: a charged weekend car park, a permit zone covering the surrounding streets for four months of the year, a published fine for parking in it, and a capacity notice the city posts on the days the lot fills.
None of that is unreasonable and all of it is easy to trip over. The point of this page is to put every one of those rules in one place, with the dates, the figures and the telephone numbers attached, so that a first visit is not the visit where you find out. Everything below was checked against the City of Herriman and the Utah Department of Environmental Quality on 7 August 2026.
Blackridge by the numbers
7 acres
of water, in a park of roughly ten
15 dollars
all day parking, weekends and holidays
1 May
when both the charge and the permit zone start
28 Jul 2026
the most recent published water sample
The rules
Everything about a visit here is decided in the car park.
This is the section to read twice. The reservoir itself is free to enter and always has been. What is metered is the space to leave a vehicle, and the city has built two separate systems to do it: a charge on the lot, and a permit scheme on the streets. They run on the same dates and they are not the same thing.
| The rule | What it says | What it costs to get wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Car park charge | 15 dollars for all day parking on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays from 1 May to 7 September, by card only | Nothing, if you brought a card. There is no cash option, so a wallet of notes is not a payment method here |
| Weekdays | No parking charge inside the same window | Nothing at all, which is why a Tuesday morning is the version of this place people describe fondly |
| Neighbourhood permit zone | City ordinance requires a permit for on-street parking in a marked area around the reservoir, 1 May to 7 September | A published fine of 100 to 200 dollars. Fox 13 reported the minimum rose from 25 dollars when the scheme came in |
| Who can hold a permit | Only residents and property owners inside the marked boundary, two residential permits and one guest permit per household | Nothing you can fix from outside. Living a street beyond the line does not qualify anybody |
| Enforcement | Herriman Police, with unpermitted vehicles reported to dispatch on 801-840-4000 | It is enforced by complaint as well as by patrol, which is what makes it effective |
Rules, dates and figures as published by the City of Herriman and checked on 7 August 2026. Herriman's parking line is 801-446-5323 and [email protected]. Permit tags are colour coded, residential grey, guest and day use white, construction yellow, and they are not transferable between people. Confirm the current season before relying on any date here, because a city that revises this scheme has done so before.
The charge exists to thin the crowd, not to raise money, and the city has said so. When the weekend charge was introduced, the city's stated reason was to reduce peak time crowds and spread visitors across the week. That is worth knowing because it tells you what the fee is actually buying: it is a queue management tool, so paying it does not guarantee a space and arriving early matters more than arriving with 15 dollars. The same logic explains the fine rising from 25 dollars to a minimum of 100. A 25 dollar ticket was cheaper than the inconvenience of parking properly.
In the water
A short list of what is allowed and a long one of what is not.
Blackridge is untreated natural water in a shallow warm basin with no lifeguard on duty, and the city's rule list reflects both facts. Read it before you pack the car rather than at the gate, because two of the prohibitions catch people out every single season.
| What the city permits | What the city prohibits | |
|---|---|---|
| Swimming | Swimming and wading from the sand beach, unsupervised, at your own risk | Diving of any kind |
| Craft | Non-motorized craft such as kayaks and paddleboards, after the state's mussel-aware course | Anything motorized |
| Dogs | Nothing. Dogs are not permitted on the beach or in the water | Dogs, outright, which is the rule most visitors do not expect |
| Food and fire | Picnics at the pavilions and tables | Glass, alcohol, open flames, charcoal grills, smoking and vaping |
| Fishing | Nothing. This is not a fishery | Fishing, and it is posted |
| Winter | Walking the paved loop | Going out on the ice, and fireworks and overnight parking at any time of year |
As published by the City of Herriman and checked on 7 August 2026. The dog rule is the one worth repeating to anybody you are travelling with, because a city reservoir at the top of a residential street reads like a city park and this one does not behave like one. The county trail network a few minutes west does permit dogs on a lead.
The water quality question deserves a straight answer rather than a reassurance. Utah's Department of Environmental Quality runs recreational monitoring at Blackridge through the Division of Water Quality, sampling for harmful algal blooms and for waterborne pathogens, and it publishes each result along with any advisory in force. Through the 2026 season the posted samples on 3 June, 6 July and 28 July all came back with E. coli below the recreational threshold and no visible sign of a bloom, and there was no health advisory on the water body when this page was checked on 7 August 2026.
That is a good record and it is not a promise about next weekend. A shallow, warm, nutrient rich basin at the top of a residential bench is exactly the kind of water body where conditions change quickly, and the state says so in as many words. The useful habit is to look at the DEQ page the morning you go rather than to rely on a listing site or a review from last July. Blooms can be reported on 801-536-4123, and Utah Poison Control is on 800-222-1222.
The other honest note is about swimmer's itch, which visitors report here from time to time and which is a normal feature of warm natural water rather than a sign of anything going wrong. It is not what the state monitors for and it is not an advisory matter. Rinsing and towelling off promptly after swimming is the ordinary precaution, and it is the same one you would take at any lake in the state.
Timing it
The gate opens at seven, and the car park is the real gate.
Published hours are 7am to 10pm, with the gate locked at ten. Restrooms are open from April through October, which is a slightly longer window than the water season and worth knowing if you are walking the loop in the shoulder months. Those are the only two published times that matter, because nothing here is ticketed, timed or reserved.
What is not published, because it cannot be, is the hour at which the car park fills on any given day. The pattern people describe is consistent: a summer weekday morning is quiet, a summer weekend after about the middle of the morning is not, and on the worst afternoons the city posts a notice that the reservoir has reached capacity and asks visitors to come back later. There is no overflow lot, no second entrance and no shuttle, so a full car park is the end of the plan rather than an inconvenience within it.
The practical version, then, is that this is a morning destination and specifically a weekday morning destination. Arriving before nine on a Tuesday in July gets you free parking, an empty beach and the Oquirrhs with the sun still behind them. Arriving at two on a Saturday gets you a 15 dollar charge if there is a space and a drive home if there is not. Those two visits are so different that people who have made only one of them argue about what this place is like.
If the car park has gone, the sensible fallback is uphill rather than back down. The county trail network at the western edge of the city is free, open, never full and permits dogs, which Blackridge does not. The ranked list covers what is up there and who runs it.
One car park, no overflow and no shuttle. On a July Saturday that single sentence is the whole of the planning problem.
The honest bit
Why a city meters its own free amenity.
It is worth being straightforward about how this arrangement came about, because it is the sort of thing that reads as unwelcoming if you do not know the story. Blackridge sits at the top of a residential street rather than at the end of a canyon road, with houses on the approach and driveways along it. When a regional draw appears in that setting, the pressure does not land on a car park. It lands on the pavement outside somebody's front door.
That is exactly what happened here, and it went on for years. The complaints that led to the permit zone were about cars across driveways, litter and damage rather than about swimming, and the reason the fine for parking without a permit rose to a minimum of 100 dollars is that the previous 25 dollar figure was small enough to be treated as a parking charge. The scheme was built to make the streets unattractive to park on, which is a blunt instrument and appears to have worked.
None of that makes the reservoir less worth visiting. It does mean the visit works best when you treat the neighbourhood as somebody's street rather than as an overflow lot, which is also the cheapest possible way to handle it. Park in the lot or come on a weekday, and the whole apparatus becomes invisible.
The wider point, for anybody weighing an address here, is that this is what a young city does when it builds something genuinely good and the rest of the valley notices. It is the same story as the trail network above the city and the corridor beside it: demand arriving faster than the infrastructure that serves it. The movers page takes that pattern properly.
How to use it well
Five habits that separate a resident from a first visit.
Go on a weekday and go early. That single decision removes the parking charge, the capacity risk and most of the crowd in one move, and it is available to anybody whose week has any flexibility in it at all. The beach faces a range that keeps the early sun off it, so a July morning here is genuinely pleasant rather than merely tolerable.
Bring a card, not cash, and check the state's water page before you leave rather than after you arrive. Both are thirty second habits. The card matters because there is no cash option on the weekend charge, and the water page matters because it is the only source that updates, and it publishes each sample and any advisory in force rather than a general reassurance.
And plan a second option for the days it does not work, because there will be some. The county trail network at the western edge of the city is free, open, never at capacity and takes dogs on a lead, which is the exact combination Blackridge cannot offer. Between the two, an afternoon on this side of the valley is not dependent on one car park. The canyon page covers the other end of that ground, including why it is currently shut.
Keep reading
More of Herriman on The Local.
Things to do
The top 8, ranked
A sand beach on an irrigation pond, a shut canyon road, and an ice ribbon in December.
Read the guideThe canyon
Butterfield Canyon
A seasonal road to a 9,000 foot overlook, washed out 5.5 miles up on 22 July 2026.
Read the guideThe corridor
The Mountain View Corridor
Seven miles of half built freeway through one city, and the phase that finishes it.
Read the guideThe park
J. Lynn Crane Park
A splash pad from Memorial Day, an ice ribbon from 1 December, and two addresses.
Read the guideMoving here
Living in a city that tripled
What a street built in 2006 has that a street built in 2022 does not, and when.
Read the guideThe companion
Herriman, the whole picture
The reservoir, the canyon road, the corridor, the park and the growth, in one place.
Read the pageQuick answers
The reservoir, answered.
Fifteen dollars for all day parking on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays between 1 May and 7 September, and it is paid by card because the city does not take cash for it. Weekdays inside that window carry no parking charge at all. The reservoir itself is free to enter in every case; what the city meters is the space to leave a vehicle. Juneteenth, observed on 15 June in 2026, counts as a holiday for the purposes of the charge.
Only with a city permit, and permits are issued only to residents and property owners inside a marked boundary around the reservoir. City ordinance puts the surrounding streets under permit parking from 1 May to 7 September, each qualifying household may hold two residential permits and one guest permit, and the published fine for parking there without one is 100 to 200 dollars. Herriman Police enforce it and unpermitted vehicles are reported to dispatch on 801-840-4000.
The published hours are 7am to 10pm, with the gate locked at ten. Restrooms are open from April through October, which is a slightly wider window than the swimming season. Nothing here is timed, ticketed or reserved, so the practical constraint is not the hours but the car park: there is one lot, no overflow, no second entrance and no shuttle, and on busy days the city posts a notice that the reservoir has reached capacity and asks visitors to return later.
Utah's Department of Environmental Quality runs recreational monitoring here through its Division of Water Quality, testing for harmful algal blooms and for waterborne pathogens including E. coli, and publishing each result. The samples posted on 3 June, 6 July and 28 July 2026 all showed E. coli below the recreational threshold with no visible bloom, and there was no advisory in force on 7 August 2026. It is untreated natural water with no lifeguard, and conditions can change quickly, so check the state page before you go.
No. Dogs are not permitted on the beach or in the water, which surprises a lot of visitors because a city reservoir at the top of a residential street reads like an ordinary city park. The county trail network at the western edge of Herriman, including Butterfield Trailhead Regional Park and the Yellow Fork and Rose canyon trails, does permit dogs on a lead, and it is free, open and never at capacity, so that is the walk to take them on instead.
Yes, non-motorized craft are permitted, and Utah's mussel-aware requirements apply before launching, as they do on any water body in the state. Motorized watercraft are prohibited outright, which follows from the size of the thing: this is a seven acre irrigation pond rather than a lake. Diving and fishing are also prohibited and both are posted. Bear in mind that everything you bring has to come from the same single car park as everybody else's beach kit.
The city's stated reason was to reduce peak time crowds and spread visitors across the week rather than to raise revenue. The context is that Blackridge sits at the top of a residential street rather than at the end of a canyon road, and years of complaints from the surrounding neighbourhood about cars parked across driveways, litter and damage led to the permit zone alongside the charge. The minimum fine for parking on those streets without a permit was raised from 25 dollars, because 25 dollars was cheap enough to be treated as a parking fee.
A weekday morning, and it is not close. A weekday inside the season carries no parking charge, the car park is very unlikely to be full, the beach is quiet, and the Oquirrhs directly behind keep the early sun off the water. A summer Saturday afternoon is the opposite of all four. The gate opens at seven, so anybody willing to be there before nine on a working day gets a genuinely different reservoir from the one that shows up in complaints and news coverage.
No. It is a constructed secondary irrigation reservoir of about seven acres, built to serve Herriman's secondary water system and to support water pressure in neighbouring Riverton, with a city park of roughly ten acres built around it. That origin explains most of what is unusual about it, from the fact that a suburb has a sand beach at all to the reason the water is untreated and the reason the site was never laid out to absorb a regional crowd.
A beach at the top of somebody's residential street.
Blackridge is the amenity that comes up in every conversation about this part of the valley, and how close a property sits to it cuts both ways: a five minute walk to open water, and four months a year of permit parking outside the front door. Tell me which streets are on your list and a Salt Lake County partner agent who works the south west corner takes the ground work, while I stay on the homework and the financing side.
Referral disclosure. Outside Southern Utah, I connect home sellers and buyers with partner agents I trust in their area. If you choose to work with an agent I refer, that agent's brokerage pays my brokerage (Real Broker, LLC) a referral fee. The fee comes out of the agent's compensation; it is not an added cost to you. You are always free to choose any agent you wish, and using a referred agent is never required.