The way out Elk Ridge
Two paved ways off the bench, and a third through the town next door
The single access road, and the two that are not it.
Elk Ridge gets called a one road town, and the truth is more useful than the shorthand. Elk Ridge Drive runs north to Salem and carries almost everything. Goosenest Drive drops northwest into east Payson and carries the rest. A third route leaves through Woodland Hills. All of them land in the same corridor, and the General Plan concedes that nothing passes through this city at all.
Southern Utah is my home turf. Elk Ridge 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 Utah County partner agent.
Start here
One main way in, one narrow backup, and nothing passing through.
People describe Elk Ridge as a one road town and that is close enough to be useful and wrong enough to correct. There are two paved ways off this bench under the city's own control, plus a third route that leaves through the town next door, and all of them empty into the same corridor at the bottom of the hill. The distinction that matters is not how many roads exist but how much redundancy they actually buy.
Elk Ridge Drive is the main way. It runs north out of the city and down to Salem, it is the road almost every resident uses every day, and it is the one that connects to the new parkway at the bottom. Goosenest Drive is the other, dropping northwest off the western end of the city past Gladstan Golf Course into east Payson. It is narrower, it is longer for most destinations, and most people who live here have driven it a handful of times.
The third option runs through Woodland Hills on Woodland Hills Drive, which is a neighbouring city's street network rather than an Elk Ridge road. When Elk Ridge Drive closes for construction the city's own notices name exactly two alternates, Goosenest Drive or Woodland Hills Drive, which is a helpfully unambiguous statement of what the complete set is.
The roads in numbers
Two
paved ways off the bench under city control
Four miles
of Loafer Mountain Parkway, from SR-164 south to Elk Ridge Drive
15 Dec 2023
the day the parkway's first phase opened in Salem
30 min
the mean commute reported in the General Plan
The complete set
Three routes, and the city only owns two of them.
Set out side by side, the honest picture is neither the one road of local shorthand nor the comfortable redundancy a three route list implies. Two of these are genuine alternates in daily use. The third belongs to a neighbouring city. All three converge within a couple of miles of each other on the valley floor.
| Elk Ridge Drive | Goosenest Drive | Woodland Hills Drive | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where it goes | North out of the city and down to Salem | Northwest off the western end of the city, past Gladstan, into east Payson | South east out of Elk Ridge through the town of Woodland Hills |
| What it is | The main route, rebuilt at its north end as part of the parkway project | The narrow backup, and the reason the western end of the city is called the Goosenest | A neighbouring city's street network rather than an Elk Ridge road |
| Who uses it daily | Almost everybody, for almost everything | A minority, and mostly for Payson errands or the golf course | Woodland Hills residents; Elk Ridge traffic uses it rarely |
| When it comes into its own | Every ordinary day of the year | When Elk Ridge Drive is closed, and when Payson rather than Salem is the destination | Named alongside Goosenest Drive in the city's own construction notices as the alternate |
| Where it leaves you | Salem, and the corridor toward I-15 | East Payson, and the corridor toward I-15 | The same south valley corridor, by a longer way round |
Routes and alternates as described in Elk Ridge City's own published construction notices and the city's adopted General Plan, checked 14 August 2026. Road works change which of these is the practical choice from month to month, so check the city's current notices before assuming a route is open. Nothing here is a statement about what any given emergency would ask of you.
What redundancy actually means here
Two routes off a bench sounds like a comfortable margin until you notice that both of them deliver you into the same few square miles of valley floor. Redundancy against a closed road is real and it works. Redundancy against something affecting the whole south end of the valley is a different question, and the geography does not provide it.
That is not an alarming fact so much as a planning one, and the city treats it as such. It is also why the September 2018 evacuation is the most informative thing on this page: more than 2,000 homes across two cities cleared on these roads in a matter of hours, which is the only real world test anybody has.
What changed at the north end
A 44 million dollar parkway shortened the commute without adding a way out.
The Loafer Mountain Parkway is the largest thing to happen to this corner of the county's road network in a generation. Funded by Utah County at roughly 44 million dollars and built in three phases, it runs about four miles from State Route 164 near Interstate 15 south to Elk Ridge Drive, and its purpose was to give Payson, Salem and Elk Ridge quicker access to the freeway as the south valley grew.
The first phase, two and a half miles through Salem connecting SR-164 to Elk Ridge Drive, opened on 15 December 2023. The second phase finished during 2024. The final phase moved inside Elk Ridge itself, rebuilding Elk Ridge Drive from 11200 South to Sky Hawk Way and adding a formal intersection at 11200 South; the Daily Herald reported on 8 April 2025 that the work had begun with completion expected around the middle of that June. Confirm the current position with Salem City or Elk Ridge City rather than with this page.
What it did for daily life is real. A drive to the interstate that used to work its way through town centres now runs on a purpose built road, and the difference shows up every weekday morning on a bench where the mean commute is close to thirty minutes and roughly seven in ten workers drive alone.
What it did not do is give Elk Ridge a second exit. The parkway feeds Elk Ridge Drive; it does not bypass it, replace it or create an independent route down off the bench. That distinction is easy to lose in the language of a ribbon cutting and it is worth holding on to, because it is exactly the sort of thing people assume has been solved. The wildland interface page covers what the city does and does not publish about the harder version of that question.
The Loafer Mountain Parkway is a commute improvement and not a second way off this bench. It connects the bottom of Elk Ridge Drive to the freeway corridor more directly than the old route through town did, which is genuinely useful on a Tuesday morning. It does not add a new exit from the city, because everything on it still arrives by way of the same Elk Ridge Drive. Anybody weighing an address here on the basis that a new road has changed the access question should look at the map again: the improvement is downhill of the constraint, not around it.
The city's own position
No regional route through it, and a plan that says so out loud.
One line in the General Plan does more explanatory work than any map of the street network. The city describes itself as sitting without an existing regional transportation route through it, which is a plain statement that nothing passes through Elk Ridge on its way to anywhere else. Every road here exists to serve the people who live on it.
That is the source of a great deal of what people like about the place. There is no through traffic, no arterial noise, no commercial corridor pulling strangers up the hill. It is also the source of the constraint, and the plan does not pretend otherwise: it carries policy language requiring attention to multiple ingress and egress requirements in case of wildland fires, earthquakes, or other natural events.
Notice what that language is and is not. It is a planning commitment about how future roads and subdivisions get laid out, applied when the city approves development. It is not an evacuation plan, it is not a map, and it does not tell a resident what to do on a particular night. The city publishes no formal evacuation route plan as of August 2026, and this page will not invent one on its behalf.
The practical advice that follows is unglamorous and short. Know both ways down before you need either. Register for Utah County emergency alerts. Treat the city and the county as the authority when something starts, rather than a route you memorised from a website.
Nothing passes through Elk Ridge on the way to somewhere else, which is most of the appeal and all of the constraint.
The daily version
Every errand begins with a descent and ends with a climb.
Strip out the emergency planning and what is left is an ordinary transport question that shapes ordinary life here. There is nothing to walk to. Everything is downhill on the way out and uphill on the way back, in every season, including the ones with ice on the road.
The errand map
Living above the valley
Where the groceries, the fuel, the schools and the hospital actually are, and how long each of them takes.
The mover pageThe west end
The Goosenest
Why the narrow backup road carries that name, and what was on this ground before any of it was paved.
Read the guideUp the other way
Loafer Mountain
The mountain these roads run beneath, and why its trailhead sits in a different town's canyon.
Read the guideThe seasonal road
The Nebo Loop
The other road that shapes a year down here, and the gate that decides when it is a road at all.
Read the guideThe commute north
BYU and UVU
Two campuses treated as venues, and the semester calendar that changes what the freeway does.
Read the guideWeighing two towns
The comparison index
Where a straight two town argument belongs on this site, rather than inside a page about one of them.
Open the indexKeep reading
The rest of the Elk Ridge companion.
The risk
The wildland interface
A city that calls itself a fire risk in writing, and what the state now asks of it.
Read the guideThe mountain
Loafer Mountain
Two summits two feet apart, and the signed trail goes up the lower one.
Read the guideHow it began
The Goosenest
A 1,726 acre cattle ranch, a 1968 sale, and a town that changed its name in 1978.
Read the guideMoving here
Living above the valley
Culinary water on the garden, a deputy on contract, and every errand downhill.
Read the guideThe companion
Elk Ridge, in full
The mountain, the fire risk, the roads off the bench and the ranch that came before all three.
Read the pageQuick answers
The roads, answered.
Not literally, though the shorthand is close to the daily experience. Elk Ridge Drive is the main route, running north out of the city and down to Salem, and it is what almost everybody uses for almost everything. Goosenest Drive is the second, dropping northwest off the western end of the city into east Payson, and it is narrower and longer for most destinations. A third route leaves south east through the neighbouring town of Woodland Hills. Both city routes deliver you into the same stretch of valley floor.
It is the narrow road that drops northwest off the western end of Elk Ridge, past Gladstan Golf Course, and into east Payson. The name comes from the western part of the city, still called the Goosenest, which in turn carries the name of the cattle ranch that occupied this ground before any of it was subdivided. In practice it serves two purposes: it is the shorter way to Payson from the west side of the city, and it is the alternate the city names whenever Elk Ridge Drive is closed.
A Utah County funded road of roughly four miles, costing in the region of 44 million dollars and built in three phases, running from State Route 164 near Interstate 15 south to Elk Ridge Drive. Its purpose was to give Payson, Salem and Elk Ridge faster access to the freeway as the south end of the valley grew. The first phase, two and a half miles through Salem, opened on 15 December 2023, the second finished during 2024, and the final phase rebuilt Elk Ridge Drive from 11200 South to Sky Hawk Way.
No, and it is worth being precise about this because the assumption is common. The parkway connects the bottom of Elk Ridge Drive more directly to the freeway corridor, which shortens an everyday commute. It does not create an independent route off the bench, because everything using it still reaches it by way of the same Elk Ridge Drive. The improvement sits downhill of the constraint rather than around it, and the number of ways out of the city is unchanged by it.
The city's own construction notices name the alternates, and they name exactly two: Goosenest Drive or Woodland Hills Drive. That is a useful statement because it settles what the complete practical set is rather than leaving it to guesswork. Goosenest Drive takes you northwest into east Payson and Woodland Hills Drive takes you out through the neighbouring city. Both are slower than the road they replace, and closures of this kind have happened as recently as the final phase of the parkway project.
Around half an hour in ordinary conditions, which lines up with what the city's own General Plan reports: a mean commute of close to thirty minutes, about a third longer than the Provo and Orem metropolitan average, with roughly seven in ten workers driving alone and working from home the second most common arrangement. Every one of those journeys starts with a descent off the bench into Salem or Payson before reaching the interstate, which is why the figure runs higher than the map distance suggests.
Elk Ridge is off the main transit corridors and there is no confirmed fixed route service inside the city itself, with the nearest options down in the valley along the Payson, Spanish Fork and Provo corridor. Transit coverage in south Utah County has changed more than once in recent years, so anyone for whom this is decisive should confirm current routes and stops with the Utah Transit Authority directly rather than relying on any third party summary, including this one.
On these roads, in a matter of hours, on the evening of Thursday 13 September 2018 after fire crested Santaquin Peak. The mandatory order covered more than 2,000 homes and roughly 6,000 people across the two cities, and residents were allowed back at nine on the morning of Saturday 22 September. It remains the only real world test of what this road network can do under pressure, which is why the city's plan language about multiple ways in and out is more than a formality.
No, and the city says so in its own General Plan, which describes Elk Ridge as sitting without an existing regional transportation route through it. Nothing passes through on the way to anywhere else, so there is no through traffic, no arterial noise and no commercial corridor drawing strangers up the hill. That is a substantial part of the appeal of living here, and it is the same fact that produces the access constraint the rest of this page is about.
Two ways down the hill, and both of them matter more than the map suggests.
Which street a house sits on changes the answer to this page more than people expect: how far the school run runs before it reaches a main road, whether Goosenest Drive is a genuine alternative or a detour, what the grade outside the driveway does in February, and how the final phase of the parkway has left the north end of Elk Ridge Drive. Send me the addresses you are weighing and I will put you with a Utah County partner agent who drives these roads, and stay on the file for 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.