Oak Grove Road, eight and a half miles straight up.

North from the Leeds exit on Forest Road 032, following Leeds Creek for about eight and a half miles. 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 climbs a couple of thousand feet and finishes at about 6,800 feet on the southern boundary of the Pine Valley Mountain Wilderness.

Nine tent sites, one vault toilet, no potable water and a pack it out rule for rubbish. It is deliberately minimal, partly because servicing it means getting a truck up a steep unpaved road. 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 imagined then.

Check before you drive it, because two separate things currently bear on it. Forest Order 0407-26-06, effective 27 May 2026, restricts camping in the Leeds Creek drainage to protect soil, water and vegetation. Separately, third party sources report Oak Grove Road as closed under the wider Pine Valley Ranger District closure order that followed the 2025 Forsyth Fire and the debris flows after it. Ring the Public Lands Information Center on 435-688-3200 and ask about both.

The route from Oak Grove Campground up the south face of the Pine Valley Mountains to intersect the Summit Trail near Signal Peak, the 10,365 foot high point of the range. 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 at 90 West 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 Utah, which makes it possible to look at the office where the work was organised and then drive the project, 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.

There is fishing on Leeds Creek where access is permitted, and the road follows the creek for most of its climb. Note that Forest Order 0407-26-06 restricts camping in the Leeds Creek drainage from 27 May 2026 to protect soil, water and vegetation resources from the effects of recreation use. A camping restriction is not automatically a closure to day use or to fishing, but that is a distinction to confirm with the 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. 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 road itself is the other seasonal question, since an unpaved climb of this kind deteriorates fast in wet conditions.