The Jordan River through West Jordan

At 7800 South, at about 1000 West, immediately beside Gardner Village and the 1877 flour mill. Historic Gardner station on the Red Line stands across 7800 South at 1127 West with about 130 free park and ride spaces, so this is one of very few access points on the whole corridor that you can reach by light rail. From the platform to the trail is a two minute walk, with the road crossing being the only obstacle between them.

Yes, and it is the defining practical fact about this reach. Historic Gardner station opened on 7 August 2011 at 1127 West 7800 South, sits just west of the river with the mill and the village across the road to the north, and provides trail access directly. That makes a completely car free outing possible: Red Line in, a flat paved ride or walk south, lunch inside a nineteenth century flour mill, and the train home.

About a mile and a half one way from the 7800 South trailhead down toward 9000 South, so roughly three miles out and back, with barely any elevation change across the whole of it. The surface is paved throughout. There are no restrooms at either end of that section, which is the detail most worth planning for, and dogs are allowed on the reach provided they are on a leash.

Because it is the low point of this reach and it floods. On 11 March 2024 the City of West Jordan closed the underpass until further notice after releases out of Utah Lake pushed the river high enough to make it unsafe, and said it would clean up and assess any reconstruction before reopening. High spring water is the trigger, so the risk window is the runoff season rather than the year as a whole.

The city's own published detour routes trail users up into Gardner Village, across 7800 South at street level, and back on to the trail near Historic Gardner Station. It is a short walk rather than a real diversion, and it is a genuinely odd piece of trail geography: when the engineered crossing under the road fails, the fallback is a footpath through a nineteenth century shopping village and a crossing beside a light rail platform.

Yes, and closing it is the most substantial thing this city has to say about its own reach. The gap ran roughly between 8600 South and 9400 South, shared with the city to the east, and the obstacle was 9000 South, a four lane road carrying more than 47,000 vehicles a day. West Jordan wrote a trail action plan with the National Park Service's rivers and trails assistance program and more than seventeen stakeholders, and that plan unlocked over 2.6 million dollars to build about 1.2 miles of trail.

That was the engineering answer to the gap, and 1.1 million dollars of state funding was directed at building it. A surface crossing of a four lane road carrying more than 47,000 vehicles a day was never going to work for people on bicycles, so the trail was designed to go under the road instead. The full 8600 South to 9400 South closure was costed at just over 3 million dollars, with the underpass as the expensive keystone rather than the whole job.

Because moving water was the power supply, and Archibald Gardner was a millwright. He reached Utah in 1847 and built the area's first flour mill on this bank in 1853 out of logs hauled by horse team from a canyon in the Oquirrhs. The larger mill that replaced it in 1877 is still standing, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and has had a restaurant operating inside it since 1990. The city grew around the mill rather than the other way round.

A very old one. The Red Line's Mid Jordan leg runs 10.6 miles on the corridor of a narrow gauge railway built in 1872 between Sandy and a canyon in the Oquirrhs, which was sold to the Denver and Rio Grande Western in 1881 as its Bingham Branch and later became a Union Pacific industrial lead. UTA bought access to the corridor in May 2002 and the roadbed and track in March 2007, started construction in May 2008 and opened the leg in August 2011.