The river Riverton
The eastern boundary this city grew away from
The Jordan River through Riverton, honestly.
Riverton took its name from this river in 1879 and has spent the fifty years since building in the opposite direction, west across the bench to the Mountain View Corridor. The result is a quiet, green, flood plain edge with exactly two published trailheads, a county golf course laid along the bottoms since 1994, and a nature boardwalk almost nobody in the city has walked. Here is Riverton's own stretch and why it stayed empty.
Southern Utah is my home turf. Riverton 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
The city is named for it and almost nobody here goes down to it.
The Jordan River is Riverton's eastern boundary. It is the reason the settlement stopped being called Gardnersville in 1879 and it is the first word in the name of every business, school and street here that starts with River. It is also the least used piece of ground in the city, and the numbers say so plainly: for 33 community parks and more than 540 acres of public open space, this city publishes exactly two trailheads onto the river.
That is not neglect, it is geography plus fifty years of direction. The river sits at the bottom of the eastern edge, below the grid, on low ground the city could not build on. Everything Riverton has added since the 1970s has gone the other way, west across the bench the canals watered, out past Bangerter Highway and finally to the Mountain View Corridor. The newest streets in this city are roughly four miles from the water it is named after, and there is no reason for anybody living on them to drive east.
What that leaves is an unusually quiet stretch of a very busy regional trail. The parkway through here is not the segment anybody writes up, there is no mill village or garden or festival ground on it, and on a weekday morning you can have a good deal of it to yourself. For a resident on the eastern side of the city that is a genuine amenity. For everybody else it is the part of Riverton they have never seen.
Riverton's river edge by the numbers
2
trailheads the city publishes onto the river
33
city parks, and almost all of them face inland
1994
the year the county course opened on the bottoms
4 miles
from the newest streets to the river they are named after
The access
Two ways in, and they are not the same trip.
Choosing between them takes ten seconds if you know the difference and wastes a morning if you do not. One is a full riverside park with restrooms, pavilions and a boardwalk. The other is a trailhead.
| Dr. O. Roi Hardy Park | The Riverbend Trailhead | |
|---|---|---|
| Where | 12400 River Vista Drive | 12765 South 1125 West |
| What it is | A 5.22 acre riverside park established in 2005 that happens to be a trailhead | A trail access point, closer to the flagship park and the arena |
| Facilities | Gated playground, restrooms, drinking fountain, dog waste station, car park, walking path and a nature boardwalk | Trail access and parking |
| Bookings | Two reservable pavilions of six to seven picnic tables each | Nothing to reserve |
| Hours | 7am to 10pm daily | Trail hours |
| Use it for | A morning with children, a picnic, or the boardwalk | Getting onto the trail and riding |
Addresses, acreage and amenities as published by the City of Riverton, checked 7 August 2026. Pavilion reservations at Roi Hardy run through Riverton Parks and Recreation on 801-208-3101 or [email protected]. Municipal park amenities change as cities invest, so confirm anything you are travelling for.
Roi Hardy is the one to choose, and the amenity list explains why. Restrooms and a drinking fountain matter on a summer morning. Two bookable shelters matter if anybody is eating. And the playground is published as a gated one, which is not something a city writes down by accident about ground laid out beside a channel of moving water.
Then there is the boardwalk, which is the piece of this edge nobody photographs. Raised timber, short, running out across the wet ground instead of following the tarmac, and the one spot in Riverton where the Jordan stops being a boundary and starts being habitat: standing water, willow, birds, and the particular smell of a river bottom in August. It is easy to walk straight past from the car park.
The Riverbend Trailhead earns its place by being close to everything else. It sits within a few minutes of Riverton City Park and the rodeo arena, which means a morning that starts on the river and finishes with a walk round 31 acres of municipal park is a single short drive rather than a plan. That is the trailhead a resident uses; Roi Hardy is the one a visitor should.
The bottoms
Eighteen holes on the ground nobody could build on.
The long strip of mown ground between the city grid and the water is a golf course, and it has been since 1994. Eighteen holes, public, a Gene Bates layout, with tees set high enough over the bottoms to give a view of ground that is otherwise invisible from anywhere in Riverton. Its address is 1040 West 12800 South.
The part local listings routinely get wrong is who owns it. This is Salt Lake County's course, not the city's, and every booking, fee, conditions report and complaint goes to the county. City hall has nothing to do with it. That is worth having straight before a telephone call about a Saturday morning, and it is one of only two things inside this boundary that catch residents out that way.
The course does something for everybody else too, whether they play or not. A golf course is one of the very few uses that can occupy a river flood plain productively, which means a long stretch of Riverton's eastern edge is mown, treed, watered and open rather than backed by fences. The trail user gets a green corridor instead of a service road. That is the quiet bargain of every flood plain in a built out valley: the ground stays open because the water occasionally takes it back.
It also explains why the eastern edge of this city looks the way it does. Between the course and the parkway corridor, the low ground here has been effectively unbuildable since long before anybody wrote a general plan, which is the whole reason a suburb of forty five thousand people still has a soft green edge on one side. What sits on the other side, four miles west, is a completely different proposition and is covered on the west side page.
Spring runoff is the one thing that changes this edge completely. The Jordan drains a large system and the low ground either side of it here is flood plain by definition. In a heavy runoff spring the river runs high, fast and cold, the bottoms look entirely different, and sections of paved trail anywhere along the county line can close for repair or for water. The city and the county post closures rather than leaving trail users to find them, and the county is also the source for course conditions. Check both in March, April and May rather than assuming.
The other trails
The city is building its spine along a canal rather than along the river.
The most interesting thing about Riverton's trail network is where the money is going, and it is not to the river. A city that spent a century and a half named after the Jordan is currently building its main new walking and cycling route about two miles inland, on a canal.
The Welby Jacob Canal Trail is a shared use path being built along the canal of the same name. UDOT named the northern section as one of the first projects funded through the Utah Trail Network, at about 7 million dollars for roughly a mile and a half from 12600 South to 13800 South, with a separated crossing over 13400 South so the trail does not dump users onto an arterial. Total funding including county money has been reported above 9 million. The city put a further phase out to bid in 2025 and construction on the northern section was expected to begin in the summer of 2026.
Two other city trails run inland as well. The Midas Creek Trail has been built in separate sections with connection work still going on, and it has trailheads both east and west of Bangerter Highway, which is a fair description of the challenge: joining a city that a six lane expressway cuts in half. The Rose Creek Trail starts at Monarch Meadows Park and runs south west out of Riverton into Herriman, which makes it one of the few trails here that goes somewhere rather than around something.
Add the Western Springs Trail on the far west side, the Mountain View Trail, the Margaret Park Trail and the paths that ring Canyonview Park, the CR Hamilton complex and Riverton City Park, and the picture is clear. The river is one segment of one county trail on the far eastern edge. The network a Riverton household actually walks is being knitted together inland, out of canal banks, creek corridors and park loops.
The honest version
A quiet segment is a feature and a limitation at once.
Nothing on this reach is a destination. There is no historic mill village on the bank, no garden, no festival ground, no visitor centre and no cafe. If you are choosing one segment of this river to drive across the valley for, it is not this one, and pretending otherwise would waste somebody's Saturday.
What it is instead is genuinely good ordinary trail: flat, paved, shaded in stretches, green because it is flood plain, and quiet because the city that owns the bank has its back to it. On a weekday morning that is exactly what a lot of people want, and it is a completely different proposition from the busiest miles further north.
For anybody weighing an address, the practical version is short. The eastern edge of Riverton is the only part of the city where you can walk out of a neighbourhood and onto a regional trail without crossing an arterial, and the number of streets that qualify is small. Two trailheads across the whole city boundary is the measure of how small. That scarcity is worth knowing about before you decide how much a trail at the end of the street is worth to you.
The rest of the trail, in both directions, belongs to the cities either side and to the region. The system as a whole, the water trail, the connections at either end of the valley and the honest account of an urban river in recovery are all on the county parkway page, which is where that material belongs.
A city called Riverton publishes two ways to reach its river and thirty three parks that face the other way.
How to use it well
Four habits for a trail that is nobody's destination.
Start at Roi Hardy if there are children or a picnic involved, and at Riverbend if the point is to ride. That single choice does more for a morning here than any amount of route planning, because one is a park with a boardwalk and restrooms and the other is a way onto tarmac.
Go early, and go on a weekday if you can. This is the quiet segment and its quietness is the whole product. It is also flood plain, which means it is measurably cooler and greener than the grid above it on a July morning and noticeably colder on a January one.
Check before you drive in the spring. High runoff on this river changes the low ground entirely and can close sections of paved trail anywhere along the county line, and the county rather than the city is the source for the golf course. And treat the ride as a segment rather than a journey: the trail continues into the cities either side, and the region page is the one that reads the whole line.
Keep reading
More of Riverton on The Local.
Things to do
The top 7, ranked
A park with a rodeo arena in it, a river on the far edge, and a pond open at weekends.
Read the guideThe park
Riverton City Park and the Dome
Thirty one acres, a domed hall rebuilt in 2015, a skate park, a splash pad and an arena.
Read the guideTown Days
Riverton Town Days, in order
A rodeo in June, an evening parade on 3 July, fireworks on the fourth, three separate sites.
Read the guideThe west side
Western Springs Park
Twenty acres the county handed over in 2017, with a splash pad and a sledding hill.
Read the guideMoving here
A southwest valley address
Two expressways, no railway platform, and what fifty years of building west did.
Read the guideThe companion
Riverton, the whole picture
The park, the festival, the river edge, the west side and the address, in one place.
Read the pageQuick answers
The edge, answered.
At two published trailheads and no others. Dr. O. Roi Hardy Park at 12400 River Vista Drive is a 5.22 acre riverside park established in 2005 with a gated playground, restrooms, a drinking fountain, a car park, a walking path, a nature boardwalk and two reservable pavilions. The Riverbend Trailhead at 12765 South 1125 West is a trail access point closer to Riverton City Park and the rodeo arena.
Dr. O. Roi Hardy Park, and the deciding detail is that the city publishes a gated playground among its amenities, in a park sitting on the bank of a river. It also has restrooms, a drinking fountain, a car park and two reservable pavilions of six to seven picnic tables each. The nature boardwalk there takes you off the paved trail and out over the low ground at the water's edge, which is a better ten minutes than any distance on the tarmac.
No, it is operated by Salt Lake County, despite sitting at 1040 West 12800 South well inside the Riverton city boundary. It opened in 1994 to a Gene Bates design and plays as an eighteen hole public course with elevated tees over the river bottoms. Tee times, green fees, conditions and every operational question go to the county rather than to city hall, which is the single most commonly mis stated fact about this edge of the city.
Because it is the Jordan River's flood plain, and cities do not put houses on flood plains. That is the bargain behind every soft green edge in a built out valley: the corridor stays open because the water occasionally takes it back. A golf course is one of the very few uses that can occupy that ground productively, which is why a long stretch of this edge is mown and treed rather than backed by fences.
Less than almost anywhere else on the line. There is no mill village, garden, festival ground or visitor centre on this reach, so it is not the segment anybody drives across the valley for, and on a weekday morning a good deal of it is empty. That is a feature if you live nearby and a reason to go elsewhere if you want a destination ride. The county page covers which segments have something attached to them.
A shared use path being built along the canal of the same name, about two miles inland from the river. UDOT named the northern section among the first projects funded through the Utah Trail Network, at roughly 7 million dollars for about a mile and a half from 12600 South to 13800 South, with a separated crossing over 13400 South. Reported total funding including county money runs above 9 million, and construction on that section was expected to start in the summer of 2026.
Several, and most of them are inland rather than on the river. The Midas Creek Trail has been built in separate sections with trailheads on both sides of Bangerter Highway and connection work still going on. The Rose Creek Trail runs from Monarch Meadows Park south west into Herriman. The Western Springs Trail links parks on the far west side. Add the Mountain View Trail, the Margaret Park Trail and paths ringing three separate parks, and the network is genuinely useful.
It can, because this is flood plain. In a heavy runoff spring the river runs high, fast and cold, the low ground either side looks entirely different, and sections of paved trail anywhere along the county line can close for water or repair. Both the city and the county post closures rather than leaving trail users to discover them, and the county is separately the source for golf course conditions. Check in March, April and May rather than assuming.
It is the only part of the city where you can walk out of a neighbourhood onto a regional trail without crossing an arterial, and the number of streets that qualify is genuinely small. Two published trailheads across an entire city boundary is the measure of how small. Whether that scarcity is worth paying for depends on how much you would actually use it, which is worth testing on foot at the hour you would really go.
A quiet green edge on the side of the city nobody built towards.
Very few Riverton addresses can reach this trail without crossing a main road, and which ones can is not something a portal listing records. Send me the streets you are circling and I will put you with a Salt Lake County partner agent who knows which blocks on this side actually get to the water, while I take 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.