The garden Salt Lake City
A state arboretum, a summer concert lawn, and a canyon nobody may walk
Red Butte and the foothills.
A hundred acres on the university's foothill of which only about twenty one are formal garden, a concert lawn that holds three thousand against a membership above thirteen thousand, and a five thousand acre canyon directly behind it that has been closed to the public since the 1860s and is now some of the least disturbed ground in the Wasatch. Plus the walk everybody does, and why the trails look half built.
Southern Utah is my home turf. Salt Lake City 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
A hundred acres on the foothill, and only a fifth of it is garden.
Red Butte Garden sits at 300 Wakara Way on the university's foothill, and the number people quote is a hundred acres. The number that actually describes it is twenty one, because that is how much of it is developed display garden. The rest is natural area with over five miles of hiking trails cut through it, which is why an hour here can be a stroll between borders or a genuine climb, depending on which gate you walk out of.
The institution is older than the garden. Walter P. Cottam started evaluating plants for how well they coped with this region back in 1930, and in 1961 the Utah Legislature designated the university's campus landscape as the State Arboretum of Utah. The garden itself moved up into Red Butte Canyon in 1983 and opened to the public in 1985. So the collection has about ninety five years of continuity behind a visitor experience that is only forty.
What is in it now is over three thousand species, roughly 590,000 spring bulbs, and a set of named gardens that read as an argument about what a garden in a high desert should be. That argument is the most useful thing here for anybody who has just moved to Utah and is looking at a dead lawn.
Red Butte in numbers
100+
acres, about 21 of them garden
1961
the State Arboretum designation
3,000
species in the collection
5,370
acres in the canyon nobody may enter
What is planted
A water conservation garden that doubles as a shopping list.
The named gardens run through a courtyard garden, a fragrance garden, a medicinal garden, a herb garden, a four seasons garden, a floral walk, a children's garden, a rose garden and an orangerie. Walked in order they are a pleasant afternoon. Walked with a notebook they are something more useful, because almost everything in them has been chosen to survive a climate that runs to about sixteen inches of precipitation a year with a hard freeze at both ends.
The water conservation garden is the one to spend time in if you have just bought a house here. It is a working demonstration of what actually thrives on this ground without irrigation you will resent paying for, and it is laid out as planting schemes rather than as a plant list, which is the difference between inspiration and a garden centre trip that works. In a valley where the reservoir headlines are permanent, that is the most practical half hour on the whole foothill.
The spring bulb display is the other set piece, at roughly 590,000 bulbs, and it is genuinely a different place in April to what it is in August. The trail network out the back is the third experience: over five miles of it, climbing straight off the top of the formal gardens into native oak and maple, with the whole valley opening up behind you as you go. The bench trail that runs the length of this side of the valley crosses this ground as well, and that route is a county subject with its own page rather than a Red Butte one.
Prices and hours here move with the season, so this page does not quote them. Admission is discounted through the winter months, the garden closes on Thanksgiving and from Christmas Eve until the new year, and opening hours shift several times a year. Take the current figures from redbuttegarden.org rather than from any listing, including this one. Membership is worth arithmetic if you expect to come more than twice, and it is also the only route to a concert presale.
The other half of the year
Three thousand seats against thirteen thousand members.
The Outdoor Concert Series is the reason a large number of people in this valley know the name Red Butte at all, and the ticketing system behind it is the single most misunderstood thing about the venue.
It started in 1987 with four local bands on a lawn and it is now a full summer season running from late May into late September. The 2026 season ran from 31 May to 22 September. It is a fundraiser: the money the concerts raise is what pays for a good deal of what the garden does the rest of the year, which is worth knowing when you are deciding whether the ticket price feels fair.
The arithmetic is the whole story. The amphitheatre holds about three thousand people. The garden has more than thirteen thousand members. Members get a presale, in waves, before anything reaches a public onsale, which means popular shows are gone before the general public has a chance at them and the public onsale for a big name can be a formality. Nobody is doing anything underhand; there are simply four times more members than seats.
If you want to go to a specific show, the move is to join before the presale waves rather than to set an alarm for the public onsale. Higher membership levels also carry a per ticket discount and larger purchase limits. If you are relaxed about which show, the smaller mid week bookings are the ones that stay available, and they are frequently the better evenings anyway.
The lawn rules, which are enforced and which people ignore once each
Seating is general admission on a lawn, and the chair rules are specific: a seat height no more than twelve inches off the ground and a back no more than thirty two inches, which rules out an ordinary camping chair. Blankets are limited to four feet by six per party. Gates open an hour before the show. There is no re-entry once you are in, so whatever you forgot in the car stays in the car.
Two more that catch people out. Shows run in the weather and there are no refunds for it, so a summer thunderstorm is your problem rather than the venue's. And no pets, service animals excepted, which matters because this is a garden and people assume otherwise. Buying at the visitor centre in person avoids the online fees, which on a pair of tickets is a meal.
The canyon you cannot enter
Five thousand acres shut to the public since the 1860s.
Directly behind the garden, Red Butte Canyon runs up into the Wasatch, and you are not allowed in it. It is the Red Butte Canyon Research Natural Area: about 5,370 acres running from roughly 5,200 feet to 8,000, acquired by the Forest Service in 1969 and formally designated in 1971, and closed to public entry. That is not a seasonal closure or a permit system. It is closed.
The reason is a hundred and thirty years of accident. Fort Douglas took its water from this canyon, and the army acquired the ground through a series of federal purchases between 1888 and 1909 specifically to protect that supply. It stayed a military watershed until 1991. The first reservoir, built in 1897, held seven hundred thousand gallons; the 1930 replacement holds a hundred and twenty four million, eight hundred thousand.
What a century of armed exclusion produced is a canyon that was never grazed, logged, built on or walked through, in the middle of a metropolitan area of well over a million people. The Forest Service describes it as nearly pristine, and it is now used for long term climate monitoring, tree physiology and water research precisely because there is no other Wasatch canyon with that history. It is the most valuable piece of ground on this foothill and the one place on it you will never stand.
You can see into the mouth of it from the garden's upper trails. That is as close as anybody gets who is not carrying a research permit, and the closure is worth respecting rather than testing.
A canyon nobody has been allowed to walk in since the 1860s, in the middle of a metro of over a million people.
The walk everybody does
Two and a half miles to a set of stone furniture.
The Living Room is the foothill's most walked trail and it is named for what is at the top of it: chairs and couches built out of flat sandstone slabs by hikers over the years, arranged facing the valley. Somebody adds a piece every season. It is entirely informal, it is genuinely comfortable, and at sunset it is the best free seat in Salt Lake City.
The route is about 2.4 miles round trip with roughly nine hundred and fifty to a thousand feet of gain, climbing from about 5,017 feet to 5,977. The trailhead is off Colorow Road in Research Park, reached through Georges Hollow, which is also the reason a great many people find it: the university's research campus is the last piece of built ground before the hill.
It is a harder walk than the distance suggests. The tread is rocky and rutted into V shaped grooves in places from years of use and runoff, the gradient is relentless rather than stepped, and there is effectively no shade anywhere on it. That last point is the one that catches visitors. This is an ancient lakebed shoreline and lakes do not grow trees on their beaches, so a July afternoon on this trail is a genuinely bad idea and a September evening is close to perfect.
The rules that apply on every foot of this foothill
Dogs must be on a lead at all times in the city's foothill natural area. That is not a trail by trail thing and it does not relax at quiet hours. The foothills carry ground nesting birds, mule deer that winter down here, and enough runners and cyclists that an off lead dog on a narrow contour is a collision waiting to happen.
Fireworks are illegal in every Salt Lake City park and natural area, without exception and regardless of the date. Two Foothill Natural Area Rangers patrol daily. The foothill is bone dry from June onward and it sits directly above houses, which is the whole argument in one sentence.
Why the trails look half finished
A plan, a pause, an audit, and a restart.
If you walk these foothills and get the impression that some of the tread is brand new, some of it is abandoned and some of it goes nowhere in particular, you are reading the ground correctly. Here is what happened, with dates.
| When | What happened | What it left on the ground |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | The Foothills Trail System Plan was adopted | A plan for the whole foothill rather than trail by trail decisions |
| 2020 to 2021 | Phase I built in lower City Creek, above the Avenues and at Popperton Park | New machine cut tread, some of it well liked and some of it not |
| Late 2021 | Construction paused at about 85 percent of Phase I | Unfinished alignments and a public argument |
| February 2024 | An independent evaluation reported | Praise for user specific routing, criticism of build quality and purposeless segments |
| 28 August 2024 | The council funded a restart on planning | Two zones now in planning rather than a citywide build |
| 2025 and 2026 | Welcome stations, signs and trailhead money | Over 30 welcome stations, 100 new markers, 1.3 million dollars toward five trailheads |
The short version: the city built fast, the public objected, an outside review agreed in part, and the work restarted zone by zone instead of all at once. The two zones now in planning are East City Creek with the upper Avenues, and Twin Peaks with Dry Creek.
The independent evaluation is worth reading fairly rather than as a verdict for either side. It credited the plan with routing different users onto appropriate alignments and with closing eroding fall line segments that should never have existed. It also found some construction quality poor and some new segments built without a well defined purpose, and it recommended planning zone by zone with the people who use each zone. The council funded that approach on 28 August 2024 and two zones are working through it now.
What has definitely improved is the everyday infrastructure. More than thirty Foothills Welcome Stations went in during 2025, carrying dog waste dispensers and check in signage. Wayfinding was replaced across 2024 and 2025 along with about a hundred new markers, and 1.3 million dollars has been committed toward five major trailheads, matched by state outdoor recreation grants. If you last walked these hills five years ago, the signage is the change you will notice first.
Keep reading
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Read the guideThe founding block
Temple Square
Forty years to build, shut since 2019, and a 2027 open house you can already diary.
Read the guideThe high ground
The Avenues and the east bench
A grid that breaks the city's grid, a 250 acre cemetery, and a canyon on odd days.
Read the guideThe spine
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A creek daylighted through a mall, a roof that opens, and an 1864 shop front.
Read the guideThe warehouses
The Granary District
Grain silos, a brewery that took back an 1884 name, and the block with the murals.
Read the guideThe south side
Liberty Park and Sugar House
Eighty acres round an 1852 mill, and a park where the state prison used to stand.
Read the guideThe New SLC
The airport
The first new hub airport this century, four miles out, and that walk to A West.
Read the guideAfter dark
Nightlife and the liquor rules
What the state sells, what the shop sells, and the pour limit written into code.
Read the guideMoving here
Living with the inversion
What the bench buys you in January, and what it costs you in the driveway.
Read the guideThe companion
Salt Lake City, in full
The founding block, the bench, the spine, the warehouses and the season, in one place.
Read the pageQuick answers
Red Butte, answered.
Over a hundred acres at 300 Wakara Way, of which about twenty one are developed display garden and the rest is natural area with over five miles of hiking trails through it. The collection holds more than three thousand species and roughly 590,000 spring bulbs. So an hour here is either a stroll between borders or a real climb into native oak and maple, depending entirely on which gate you walk out of.
The State Arboretum of Utah designation was made by the Utah Legislature in 1961 and applies to the university's campus landscape, of which Red Butte Garden is the public face. The plant evaluation work behind it began in 1930 under Walter P. Cottam, who was assessing how species coped with this region's conditions. The garden moved up into Red Butte Canyon in 1983 and opened to the public in 1985.
Because the amphitheatre holds about three thousand people and the garden has more than thirteen thousand members. Members get presale access in waves before anything reaches a public onsale, so popular shows are frequently gone before the general public has a chance at them. Nothing underhand is happening; there are simply about four times more members than seats. Joining before the presale waves is the practical route to a specific show.
Seating is general admission on a lawn. Chairs are limited to a seat height of twelve inches and a back of thirty two, which rules out an ordinary camping chair, and blankets to four feet by six per party. Gates open an hour before, there is no re-entry once you are inside, shows run in the weather with no refunds for it, and no pets are permitted other than service animals. Buying in person at the visitor centre avoids the online fees.
No. Red Butte Canyon is a Research Natural Area of about 5,370 acres, running from roughly 5,200 feet to 8,000, acquired by the Forest Service in 1969, designated in 1971, and closed to public entry. It is not a permit system or a seasonal closure. It was Fort Douglas's protected water supply from federal acquisitions between 1888 and 1909 until 1991, and that century of exclusion is why it is now described as nearly pristine and used for long term research.
About 2.4 miles round trip with roughly nine hundred and fifty to a thousand feet of gain, climbing from about 5,017 feet to 5,977, from a trailhead off Colorow Road in Research Park via Georges Hollow. It is harder than the distance suggests: rocky, rutted into V shaped grooves in places, relentless rather than stepped, and with effectively no shade anywhere on it. A July afternoon is a bad idea and a September evening is close to perfect.
Chairs and couches built out of flat sandstone slabs by hikers over many years, arranged facing out over the valley, with somebody adding a piece most seasons. It is entirely informal, it is genuinely comfortable to sit in, and at sunset it is the best free seat in Salt Lake City. It is also the reason the trail is busy, so an early start or a weekday evening buys you a great deal more of it to yourself.
Yes, on a lead at all times, and that applies across the whole foothill natural area rather than trail by trail. The ground carries nesting birds and wintering mule deer, and the contours are narrow enough that an off lead dog and a descending cyclist is a genuine collision risk. Fireworks are illegal in every city park and natural area regardless of the date, and two Foothill Natural Area Rangers patrol daily through the dry season.
Because the build was stopped part way through. The Foothills Trail System Plan was adopted in 2020, Phase I was built through 2020 and 2021 in lower City Creek, above the Avenues and at Popperton Park, and construction was paused in late 2021 at about 85 percent after public objection. An independent evaluation reported in February 2024, praising the user specific routing and the closure of eroding segments while criticising some build quality, and the council funded a zone by zone restart on 28 August 2024.
The foothill is the reason people pay more for the bench.
A garden, a closed canyon, a stone couch at five and a half thousand feet and a trail network still being argued about. What that access is worth depends on how far up the hill you are willing to go, and the answer changes the price, the winter and the drive. Tell me what you are weighing and I will put you with a Salt Lake County partner agent who works this side of the valley.
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.