Oak Grove Road, eight and a half miles straight up

As of 2026, no. A Forest Service fire-danger order has closed Oak Grove Road to vehicles since June 24, 2026, and it runs through January 1, 2027. The Forsyth Fire restoration closure is a separate order that covers the Pine Valley Recreation Area, not this road. Check the current Dixie National Forest alerts, or call the Public Lands Information Center in St. George on 435-688-3200, before you plan anything up here.

When it is open, you drive northwest from the Leeds freeway exit on Forest Road 032 and follow Leeds Creek about eight and a half miles up the mountain. The road is unpaved, steep and narrow, and the Forest Service limits its practical use to smaller vehicles, tents and truck campers, advising large recreational vehicles and travel trailers not to attempt it. It gains a couple of thousand feet and ends near 6,800 feet on the southern boundary of the Pine Valley Mountain Wilderness.

A handful of tent sites, sources put it at eight or nine, one vault toilet, no drinking water, and a pack it out rule for rubbish. It is minimal by design, partly because getting a service truck up that road is hard. When the Civilian Conservation Corps crews built it in the 1930s it opened with a tennis court, a wading pool and a playground, none of which survives, which says a good deal about how public campgrounds were once imagined.

The route from Oak Grove Campground up the south face of the Pine Valley Mountains, linking into the trail system that runs the crest toward Signal Peak, the highest point in the range and in Washington County. It is the steepest of the three town approaches to this crest, because the south face drops abruptly toward the St. George bench rather than tapering into a valley. It is a wilderness trail, so no bikes and no motors.

Civilian Conservation Corps crews from the camp on Mulberry Lane in Leeds, during the 1930s. The same crews built the campground at the top of it and a swimming pool for the town. Four stone buildings from that camp still stand and are the only CCC camp buildings left in the state of Utah, so you can look at the office where the work was organized and then drive the road the crews built, ninety years later.

No, and this one is worth taking seriously. The Forest Service describes the road as steep and narrow and advises that large recreational vehicles and travel trailers should not attempt it, limiting practical use to smaller vehicles, tents and truck campers. There is nowhere convenient to turn a large rig round partway up, so a mistake here is not a minor inconvenience. Take a vehicle you would happily take up a rough forest road.

Leeds Creek runs beside the road for most of its climb, with fishing where access is allowed. Note that camping along the Leeds Creek road is limited to designated sites under the district's water source and heritage restrictions, and Leeds Creek has a separate camping restriction through 2031 to protect soil and water, which is not a fire closure. A camping limit is not automatically a closure to day use or fishing, but that is a distinction to confirm with the ranger district rather than to assume.

It is the other side of the range and a steeper start. Leeds sits at the bottom of the south face and its trailhead is at about 6,800 feet after eight and a half miles of unpaved road, while Pine Valley village sits on the north and west with the Whipple and Browns Point trailheads inside its recreation area. New Harmony has the east. All three reach the same Summit Trail along the crest, and each companion covers only its own approach.

Roughly late spring to autumn, with the usual mountain provisos, and only when the road is open, since the fire-danger closure runs through January 1, 2027. Snow lingers on the high ground into June in a normal year and returns in October, and afternoon thunderstorms build over this crest through late summer, so an early start and being off the top by early afternoon is the working plan. The unpaved road is the other seasonal question, since a climb of this kind deteriorates fast in wet conditions.