Mount Olympus, the wall in the east window

The summit is 9,026 feet. The valley floor below it sits near 4,300 feet, so the face rises the better part of a vertical mile from the last row of houses in Holladay, which is why it reads as a wall rather than a hill from the streets that face it. The peak has two summits with a gully between them, and the trail works up that gully to a saddle just below the higher one.

The Forest Service publishes Trail 455 at 3.32 miles with 4,158 feet of elevation gain. That figure is the trail itself rather than the round trip, which is why walking apps commonly report between six and seven miles for the outing. Either way the gain is the number that matters: well over a thousand feet of climbing per mile once you subtract the flat first stretch, with no water anywhere on the route.

At the Mount Olympus Trailhead, which the Forest Service gives as 5800 South and Wasatch Boulevard on Holladay's eastern edge. The lot is on the east side of the road and the trail leaves from the far end of it and begins climbing almost immediately. The lot is not large and it fills by mid morning on summer weekends. Wasatch Boulevard is a fast road with a shoulder rather than overflow parking, and the streets below are residential.

Yes, for the last few hundred feet. From the saddle below the summit block the route becomes a scramble over rock using hands as well as feet, exposed enough that some fit walkers look at it and choose not to. Stopping at the saddle is a completely legitimate day and gives you effectively the same view. Deciding which of those you are doing before you leave the car is the single most useful call on this hike.

Yes, on a leash. The Forest Service listing for Trail 455 states that leashed pets are permitted, because this drainage is not inside the protected drinking water watershed. That is the opposite of the rule in Big and Little Cottonwood, fifteen minutes south, where dogs are prohibited outright including inside a vehicle. The trail also enters designated wilderness, so read the regulation board at the trailhead before you set off.

On 28 September 1984, under the Utah Wilderness Act. It covers roughly sixteen thousand acres of the Wasatch between Mill Creek Canyon and Big Cottonwood Canyon and is administered by the Salt Lake Ranger District of the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest. Published acreage figures differ slightly between sources. The designation is the reason there is no road, no lift and no development anywhere on the face you can see from Holladay.

The Forest Service names Tolcats Canyon Waterfall alongside the summit as a destination on Trail 455. It sits on the lower part of the route, which makes it a realistic objective on a morning when the full climb is not, and it is the reason the bottom half of this trail is worth walking on its own. Flow is seasonal and strongest with spring snowmelt, so late summer will give you rather less water than the photographs suggest.

Heughs Canyon, a mile or so south along Wasatch Boulevard, runs roughly a mile and a half to a waterfall with just over a thousand feet of gain. The access is the awkward part: park in the dirt pullout on the east side of Wasatch Boulevard near Canyon Cove Drive, then walk the streets to the end of Canyon Winds Drive, where the trail starts across a short private driveway. That approach adds about four tenths of a mile each way.

The lower trail is a boot walk between storms, but the upper mountain is a different proposition. The gully and the bowls above the trail are genuine avalanche terrain and the route holds hard old snow well into late spring, long after the valley below has dried out. Treat any attempt above the snow line as a winter mountaineering objective needing the training and the kit, and judge the day from the gully rather than from the parking lot.