Payson Lakes
Twelve miles up, near 8,000 feet · three lakes, a swim beach and a paved shore path
The reason to drive to Payson in July is twelve miles above it. Payson Lakes sits at roughly 8,000 feet on the byway that starts inside the city, and the Forest Service names three waters up there: Big East, McClelland and Box. Big East carries everything a visitor wants, which is a small swim beach, picnic tables, flush toilets, a fishing pier and a paved path that circles the water with interpretive signs on it.
The paved path is the quiet headline. Alpine lakes in this state are almost always reached over roots and rock, and this one has an asphalt walkway right around it, which puts a mountain lake within reach of a pushchair, a wheelchair or a bad knee. It is the single most useful sentence on this page for anybody who has spent years being told a place is accessible and then finding a stile.
Day use runs fifteen dollars a vehicle with a sixty dollar season pass available, and the campground behind the beach is one of the larger ones in this part of the forest. Powerboats are prohibited, which is why the water stays quiet enough to swim in and paddle on, and off highway vehicles are not allowed in the campground at all.
Why it ranks first
Because nothing else in Payson changes the temperature by fifteen degrees and nothing else in the city gives a stranger a reason to drive here rather than past. It is also the entry that pays back the longest visit: a morning swim, an afternoon paddle and a night in a tent are all the same address.
Two things the listing sites get wrong
The Forest Service spells the middle lake McClelland, not McClellan, and the difference matters if you are searching for it. And there are no utility hookups here at all: Recreation.gov's own instruction is to arrive with the water tank filled, because connecting to the spigots is prohibited outright. At least one large camping directory says the opposite. Believe the Forest Service.
The details
Getting there
Follow the brown byway signs up 600 East out of town and stay on the road as it climbs; the signed Payson Lakes turn is on the right at about twelve miles, and the Big East day use lots and beach are the first thing inside it.
Before you go
- Camping is booked through Recreation.gov and must be made at least five days ahead, with a two night minimum at weekends and three on a holiday weekend.
- Loop A is first come first served for the whole season, so a Friday arrival without a booking is not automatically hopeless.
- The full fee card, the loop by loop layout and the closed campground five miles further on are all on the Payson Lakes page.
Grotto Falls
About 8 miles up · the shortest waterfall walk in the county, on log bridges
Four miles below the lakes, the same road serves the easiest waterfall in this part of Utah. The Forest Service puts the Grotto trailhead eight miles south of Payson on the byway, just past the Bennie Creek trailhead, and trail 086 runs up the drainage to a small fall pouring over a lip into a shaded rock alcove. The alcove is the point: it is cool, mossy and enclosed, and it does not look like the sagebrush country you drove out of.
The Forest Service lists the trail at 0.26 miles, which is a segment measurement rather than the walk most people do; field reports consistently put it at about six to seven tenths of a mile there and back with a hundred and something feet of climbing. Either way it is twenty minutes each direction at a strolling pace, and the whole difficulty of it is the stream, which the trail crosses several times on small log bridges the Forest Service maintains.
It is also open to horses and mountain bikes as well as walkers, which is unusual for a trail this short and worth knowing if you are bringing either. There is no fee posted by the Forest Service at the trailhead, and there is no facility there beyond a pullout.
Why it ranks second
Because it asks the least of anyone on this list and returns the most for it. Half a mile of walking on the way home from anywhere higher up the road, and no equipment beyond shoes that can get wet. It ranks under the lakes only because it is a stop rather than a day.
The logs are the whole trail
The Forest Service's own description says the trail crosses the stream several times and that small log bridges are currently in place. That word currently is doing real work: log crossings in a runoff drainage move, wash out and get rebuilt, and the trail is a different proposition in high May melt from what it is in September. Small children manage it fine with a hand. In wet weather the logs are slick.
The details
Getting there
Take the byway out of town and watch for the signed pullout at around eight miles, a short way past the Bennie Creek trailhead. Roadside parking is limited and fills at weekends, so an early start is not a suggestion so much as the difference between walking and queueing.
Before you go
- The trail is rated easy by the Forest Service and is open to horses and mountain bikes as well as walkers.
- Water runs highest in late spring, which is when the fall looks best and the log crossings are least pleasant.
- Everything about the road this trailhead sits on, including its length, its overlooks and its winter gate, is on the region's Nebo Loop page.
Golden Onion Days
3 to 7 September 2026 · five days, first held in 1929, and most of it free
Payson's own weekend is the first one in September and it has been running since 1929, when the town launched an Onion Harvest and Homecoming to mark the onion ground around it and to give people who had left a reason to come back. The name softened into Golden Onion Days and the celebration never stopped. Payson City listed the 2026 edition as 3 to 7 September, which puts the Labor Day Monday at the end of it rather than the start.
It opens quietly and gets louder. The published lineup begins with a free concert at the Peteetneet amphitheatre at six on the Thursday evening, then works through a parade, a carnival, a car show, an art show, a flower show, a baby contest, a 5K and a 10K, a park full of vendors, and fireworks. Most of the programme costs nothing to attend.
For anybody in town it is also a traffic fact. The parade closes streets in the middle of the old grid, the carnival takes Memorial Park for the duration, and the whole centre of Payson runs on celebration time for five days. Locals either plan around that or plan to be in it.
Why it ranks third
Because it is the biggest thing this town does and the oldest, and because almost all of it is free. It ranks under the canyon only because it happens on five days a year and the canyon is available on about a hundred and fifty.
Check the dates at the city and nowhere else
Third party listings for this celebration are unusually bad. As of August 2026 one large travel site printed 4 to 7 September and another printed a window running from 28 August, while Payson City's own department page and calendar entry both said 3 to 7 September. There is also a claim in circulation that this is Utah's oldest continuous Labor Day celebration. The city makes no such claim, and the strongest sourced version of it is a hedged line about Utah Valley rather than the state.
The details
Getting there
Memorial Park is on South Main and the Peteetneet grounds are on the hill at the east end of the old grid, so the whole celebration sits inside about a mile. Parking on the grid is the constraint, not the driving.
Before you go
- Read the city's own Golden Onion Days page for the running order. Aggregator listings for this event were wrong in three different directions in August 2026.
- A demolition derby appears in the celebration's history and in old newspaper coverage, but it is not in the city's 2026 lineup.
- The five day programme, the 1929 origin and what the celebration does to the town are covered in full on the Golden Onion Days page.
The Peteetneet Museum
Tue to Fri 10am to 4pm, Sat 10am to 1pm · twelve display areas, free at the door
On the hill at the east end of the old grid stands a three storey stone schoolhouse with a Victorian belfry, built in 1901 to the design of Richard C. Watkins, who put schools up all over central Utah. Its plan is the interesting part: four classrooms arranged pinwheel fashion on each of the two main levels around a Greek cross hallway with an octagonal space at the centre of it. It is on the National Register of Historic Places under reference 90000795.
It stopped being a school at the end of the 1980s and the city intended to knock it down. A group calling itself People Preserving Peteetneet formed to stop that and won, and because the building stands on the scenic byway corridor, the Utah Department of Transportation put more than a hundred thousand dollars toward the restoration. A glass lift was added in 2008 to make the upper floors reachable.
What is in there now is twelve display areas rather than one museum: a historic school room, a Victorian house display, a hundred and fifty years of fashion, a western room, a blacksmith shop, a photograph collection, a freedom room, a historical writing collection and more, alongside a pioneer daughters museum, the Payson Historical Society and an arts council running classes. Admission is listed as free.
Why it ranks fourth
Because it is the only substantial indoor thing to do in Payson, it costs nothing, and it works in February, which is more than can be said for the three entries above it. It ranks below the celebration because a stranger will not drive to Payson for a museum, and it ranks above everything below because once they are here it is the best hour in town.
The address is genuinely unclear, so ring first
Three different street numbers circulate for this building. The address of record on its National Register file is 50 North 500 East, the Utah Division of Arts and Museums directory lists 10 North 600 East, and the city's own page shows the City Center address because of how its website is built. The museum's own domain was not resolving when this page was written. The number that works is 801-465-9427, and it is also how you arrange a visit outside published hours.
The details
Getting there
Head east on Utah Avenue from the Main Street blocks and the ground rises toward the canyon; the schoolhouse is the large stone building on the hill with the belfry on it, and it is the most conspicuous building in Payson after the one on the west side.
Before you go
- Tour hours depend on volunteer cover. Ringing ahead is worth the ninety seconds, especially in winter.
- The outdoor amphitheatre on the grounds is a separate bookable venue and hosts the opening concert of the September celebration.
- The building's architecture, its rescue, the twelve rooms and the man the name honours are all on the Peteetneet Museum page.
The Payson Scottish Festival
10 and 11 July 2026, 9 and 10 July 2027 · free at the gate, and a caber title on the Saturday
For two days in July a municipal park at the south end of Utah Valley fills with clan tents, pipe bands and men throwing tree trunks. The Payson Scottish Festival reached its 42nd edition on 10 and 11 July 2026 at Memorial Park, run entirely by volunteers under the Payson Scottish Festival Association, and admission is free. The association has already posted the 43rd for 9 and 10 July 2027, Friday five until nine and Saturday nine until six.
The athletics are the real article rather than a costume. Friday afternoon runs a strongman and strongwoman competition from four until eight with all classes competing at once across different events, and Saturday runs the Highland Games from eight in the morning until four, with classes rotating through caber toss, hammer throw, weight for height, shot put, sheaf toss and a Payson Stones challenge the festival invented for itself. The caber competition is billed on the association's own athletics page as the Utah Caber Championship, at about three on the Saturday afternoon.
Around the field there is a solo bagpiping competition on the Friday afternoon, a Friday night bandstand with a kilt competition and Irish dancers, a clan and bagpipe parade up Main Street at a quarter to ten on the Saturday with opening ceremonies behind it, piping, drumming and Highland dance competitions running nine until four, and closing ceremonies at five.
Why it ranks fifth
Because a free two day festival with a state level throwing title on it is a genuinely unusual thing to find on a park lawn in a town of twenty one thousand, and because the whole thing is volunteer run. It ranks under Golden Onion Days on age and scale rather than on quality.
One claim worth attributing rather than repeating
The festival's distributed event copy describes it as one of only two Scottish festivals in the western United States with free admission. That line appears across listing sites, the second festival is never named, and it is not on the association's own front page. It is the organisers' claim about their own event, which is a perfectly reasonable thing for them to say and not a fact this page can stand behind.
The details
Getting there
The park sits on South Main and the Saturday morning parade runs up Main Street from a quarter to ten, so arriving before the parade or walking in from a side street is the sane approach on the Saturday.
Before you go
- Check the association's own schedule page rather than a listing site. The 2026 and 2027 dates on it did not match every aggregator.
- The athletics are free to watch and are the part most people underestimate. The caber goes in the middle of Saturday afternoon.
- This is the same park that carries the salmon supper in August and the carnival in September, so the July version is only one of its three characters.
The Payson Salmon Supper
First Friday of August, 4pm to 8pm · a pound of salmon a plate, cooked over fruit wood
On the first Friday of August the town cooks about four and a half thousand pounds of Alaskan salmon over open fires in Memorial Park and serves it to whoever bought a ticket. The 7 August 2026 edition was billed by event listings as the 72nd annual, it ran from four until eight, and it sold out. Tickets had gone on sale at nine in the morning on 1 June through the city's own recreation registration system.
The cooking is the spectacle. Fillets are laid on custom racks covered in chicken wire, basted with butter and salted, and grilled over fires of dried fruit wood, with the racks doubling as the means of carrying the fish over the flames. Each plate carries a full pound of salmon with a baked potato, corn on the cob, salad, a roll and a cookie beside it.
It is a city event rather than a service club one, and it is staffed by the people who run the town: city firefighters and ambulance crew, high school football players and cheerleaders, and a large volunteer roster. If you have read somewhere that a service club runs it, that is wrong.
Why it ranks sixth
Because it is the most Payson thing on this list and the hardest to attend. One evening, one park, a ticket that has to be bought in June, and a meal that is genuinely good rather than merely traditional. It ranks here rather than higher because a sold out supper is not a plan a visitor can make.
How old it actually is
The seventy second annual in 2026 back calculates to a first year in the middle of the 1950s, and 1954 is the year that circulates in event listings and in a magazine feature written for the sixty first supper. No primary city source states the founding year outright. So the honest sentence is that this has been happening on the first Friday of August since the mid 1950s, and 1954 is an attributed figure rather than a settled one.
The details
Getting there
Memorial Park is on South Main and the whole event happens inside it, so the practical problem is parking on the surrounding grid rather than finding the park.
Before you go
- Tickets went on sale on 1 June for the 2026 supper and the event sold out, so June is when to act rather than July.
- The cooking runs roughly from five until eight, which is worth knowing if you want to watch it rather than only eat it.
- The ticket price is not published on the city's own page. Treat any figure you find on a listing site as unconfirmed.
Gladstan Golf Course
Golf season, weather permitting · a city owned eighteen with 48 bunkers and a climbing back nine
Payson owns and operates its own eighteen hole golf course, which is not something most towns this size can say. Gladstan sits at 1 Gladstan Drive in the foothills on the south side, plays to par 72, and stretches to 6,981 yards from the black tees with a rating of 72.7 and a slope of 131. There are five sets of tees down to 5,002 yards, so the same course plays as four quite different rounds.
The ground is what makes it. The layout was drawn by William H. Neff and later renovated by Gene Bates, and it uses the foothill slope hard: rolling fairways, real elevation change, water in play on several holes and forty eight bunkers placed to make you think about it. The back nine climbs, and the reward for the climbing is the view north over Utah Valley and Utah Lake.
The clubhouse carries the Gladstan Grill, open Monday to Thursday from eight and Friday to Sunday from seven, both until six, with the pro shop on 801-465-2549. Tee times, tournaments and the current condition of the course all go through the same place.
Why it ranks seventh
Because it is a genuinely good municipal course on interesting ground, and because a city that owns its own eighteen holes has made a choice most of its neighbours did not. It ranks below the events because it asks for four hours and a set of clubs, which not every visitor has with them.
There was a course here before this one, and the city sold it
Gladys and Stanley Wilson built a nine hole course in Payson in the mid 1960s and gave it to the city, on the condition that if the city ever sold it, it had to build a replacement. In 1986 the city did sell it, to a supermarket company, and put the proceeds plus a bond into a new eighteen hole course in the foothills, which opened in 1988. That is where the name comes from, and the Utah Golf Association honoured the Wilsons posthumously in 2023. Sources disagree on whether the original opened in 1965 or 1966 and on when exactly it was handed over, so this page gives the decade rather than the day.
The details
Getting there
The course is signed off the south side of town and the drive up to it is the first hint of what the back nine is going to do to your legs. Parking is at the clubhouse.
Before you go
- Five tee sets from 5,002 to 6,981 yards means the round you play is a choice rather than a fixed thing. Pick down rather than up on a first visit.
- The back nine carries the elevation and the view. If you only have time for nine, that is the nine.
- Book through the pro shop rather than a third party tee time site, because this is a city operation with its own calendar.
Historic Main Street and the Huish
Year round, free to walk · a district listed in 2007, a street rebuilt in 2024, a theatre coming back
Payson's old grid is not a preserved facade, it is a working street that was dug up and put back. Historic Main Street reopened in October 2024 after roughly nine months of closure while the city replaced water, sewer and storm drain lines that had not been touched in about eighty years, then rebuilt the roadway and the pavements from 100 North to 100 South. It was paid for with a five million dollar grant from the Utah Legislature and three million appropriated by the City Council, and it reopened with a ribbon cutting, a block party, a parade and a car show.
What the street runs through is a listed district. The Payson Historic District went on the National Register on 3 July 2007 under reference 07000666, covering about three hundred acres with four hundred and twenty nine contributing buildings and a period of significance running from 1857 to 1957. Four individual properties on Main Street carry their own listings: the Christopher F. Dixon Jr. House at 248 North, the John Dixon House at 218 North, the Samuel Douglass House at 215 North, and the Payson Presbyterian Church at 160 South, built in 1882.
The building people ask about is the Huish at 96 West Utah Avenue. It opened in April 1949 with 830 seats, showed its last film on 31 January 2002 after fifty four years, and then spent years as a gymnasium. In 2008 Dr Gordon Taylor bought it to build the performing arts centre his wife Karen had wanted for the south end of the county, and it is now working through a three phase revival.
Why it ranks eighth
Because a rebuilt historic street with a listed district behind it and a theatre being restored on it is a real hour's walking, and because it is free, year round and in the middle of everything else on this list. It ranks here rather than higher because most of what makes it interesting is context rather than spectacle.
Where the Huish has actually got to
Phase one is finished and open. The SideShow is a small live venue of around a hundred seats with a six by twelve foot stage, colour LED lighting and a recording rig, running a comedy club plus open mic and karaoke nights. Phase two, the main auditorium, is under way with a target of 650 seats and the performance stage already built. Phase three, a three storey addition with practice rooms, a recording studio, a costume shop and dressing rooms, is planned and fundraising. Announced is not built, and the current programming night for open mic was reported differently by two of the venue's own sources, so check before you drive.
The details
Getting there
Everything here is walkable from the Main Street blocks. The city's historical walking tour runs to fourteen numbered markers, and marker one sits at the southeast corner of what was Fort Payson, at Utah Avenue and 200 East.
Before you go
- Payson holds Tier 2 status in the Utah Main Street programme, one of ten cities in the state at that level.
- A further phase of the street project covers the parking area behind the Main Street library and two more blocks south, so expect work to reappear.
- The fourteen markers are published as individual pages on the city website rather than as a single printable leaflet.
The Payson Temple grounds
Daylight hours, free · 10.63 acres, a 208 foot spire and about 1,615 precast panels
The building you see from I-15 on the west side of Payson is the reason a lot of people slow down. It stands on 10.63 acres at 1494 South 930 West, runs to 96,630 square feet, and carries a single central spire 208 feet high. The exterior is cream precast concrete, roughly 1,615 individual panels covering about 116,876 square feet, worked to read as stone rather than as slab. It is not granite, whatever the listing sites say.
The landscaped grounds are open to the public and there is no visitors' centre or arrival centre of any kind, which makes this a walk rather than a visit. The planting is unusually heavy: the project put in roughly four times the plant coverage the local ordinance required, and a decorative steel fence runs the 930 West frontage. Parking is shared with the adjoining meetinghouse and adds more than two hundred spaces.
The architecture that people actually come back for is the glass. Holdman Studios designed and made all of it, and the motif is an apple blossom drawn from the orchard ground this valley used to be, worked so that the buds on the lower levels open further on each floor above and reach full bloom at the top. There are roughly six hundred exterior windows and six hundred interior ones.
Why it ranks ninth
Because it is the most visible building in the city and a genuinely interesting piece of construction, and because walking the grounds costs nothing and takes twenty minutes. It ranks here because it is a look rather than an activity, and because the drive past it on the freeway gives you most of the exterior anyway.
What this page covers and what it does not
Architecture and grounds. The materials, the dimensions, the glass, the landscaping, the car park and the dates. This page does not describe who uses the building, does not treat it as a description of the town or of anyone buying a house in it, and does not deal with interior access beyond the historical fact that a public open house ran for a month in 2015 before the building was dedicated.
The details
Getting there
Take Main Street or 800 South west toward the freeway and the building is the tallest thing on that side of town; the car park is off 930 West and is shared with the meetinghouse next to it.
Before you go
- There is no visitors' centre here, so there is nothing to go into and nobody to ask. It is a grounds walk.
- The exterior reads best in low light, when the precast picks up colour and the glass is lit from behind.
- The full construction timeline, the project team and the way the apple blossom motif climbs the building are on the Payson Temple page.
Payson City Pool
23 May to 7 September 2026, closed Sundays · slides, a shallow pool and a lazy river
Payson runs its own outdoor pool at 655 South Main Street, and it is more than a rectangle of water. Reporting on the facility describes a lap pool, a shallow pool for small children, small and large slides and a lazy river, which is a bigger menu than most towns this size put in a municipal pool.
The 2026 season ran from Saturday 23 May to Labor Day on Monday 7 September. Ordinary open swim hours were one until half past nine on Mondays and Thursdays, which the city bills as family nights, one until seven on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays, eleven until seven on Saturdays, and closed on Sundays. Holiday hours of one until seven applied on 25 May, 19 June, 4 July, 24 July and 7 September.
The end of the season is the part that catches people. From 18 August the pool dropped to Friday afternoons four until seven and Saturdays eleven until seven, closed Sunday through Thursday, right through to the Labor Day finish. General admission is half price on Monday and Thursday evenings from seven until half past nine.
Why it ranks tenth
Because it is a proper municipal pool with a lazy river in it and a half price evening twice a week, which is a genuinely good answer to a hot afternoon in a town without much else indoors. It ranks here because it runs for about fifteen weeks a year and closes on the day most visitors have off.
There is no splash pad in Payson, Utah
This needs saying because the internet is full of the opposite. Directory sites list a Payson splash pad and there is a fundraising campaign for one, and both of those belong to Payson, Arizona, whose splash pad is in Green Valley Park. No Payson City facility page, park listing or Utah news source shows a municipal splash pad here. The city's water recreation is this pool.
The details
Getting there
The pool is on South Main with its own parking, which puts it about half a mile from Memorial Park and inside the same short drive as everything else on the old grid.
Before you go
- Closed on Sundays through the whole season, which is the single most common wasted trip here.
- From mid August the schedule collapses to Fridays and Saturdays only until Labor Day.
- Admission prices are published by the city as a separate document rather than on the pool page, so confirm before you turn up with exact change.
Kiwanis Park disc golf, up the canyon
Free, canyon season · eighteen baskets among the fire pits, in since 2012
Payson Canyon Kiwanis Park is a city park inside the canyon rather than inside the town, and it carries an eighteen basket disc golf course that went in during 2012. It sits alongside the picnic benches, fire pits and barbecue grills that are the park's older purpose, with drinking water, a vault toilet and parking on site.
Playing a course threaded through a canyon picnic ground is a different game from playing one on a municipal lawn. The trees are real trees, the ground moves, and the baskets share space with people cooking lunch, which asks for a certain amount of restraint on the tee. It costs nothing.
It is also one of only three Payson parks the city takes reservations for, alongside Memorial Park and McMullin, which means the picnic side of it can be booked out from under a round. Everything else in the city park system is first come, first served.
Why it ranks eleventh
Because eighteen free baskets in a canyon is a genuine amenity rather than a token, and because it gives the canyon road a purpose that does not involve driving twelve miles. It ranks here because it is seasonal, it is easy to miss, and it needs a bag of discs to be worth the turn off.
The canyon road decides the season
This park sits up Payson Canyon, so it lives and dies by the same road as the lakes and the waterfall. When the byway is gated for winter the calculation changes completely, and the Forest Service rather than the city is the body with the answer. The two Forest Service campgrounds nearer the mouth, Maple Bench at about three miles and Maple Lake at about five, ran 8 May to 20 September in 2026 and give a fair indication of the shoulder either side.
The details
Getting there
Follow the canyon road out of town and the park appears on the way up, well below the lakes. Parking is on site and the course starts from the picnic ground rather than from a separate tee area.
Before you go
- Check whether the picnic side has been reserved before planning a weekend round, since the two share the same ground.
- There is a vault toilet and drinking water here, which is more than the trailheads further up the road offer.
- The city takes reservations for this park, Memorial Park and McMullin. Every other Payson park is first come, first served.
Memorial Park
Dawn to dusk, free · the courts, the band stand, and the ground three celebrations stand on
Memorial Park is the town's central green space and the city's facility page lists it at 200 South Main. What is on it is a basketball court, tennis courts, pickleball courts, picnic tables, restrooms, parking and a band stand, plus three separately bookable pavilions at the north end, the south end and beside the pond.
The pickleball is the part that draws people from other towns. Third party court databases put six dedicated outdoor courts here with permanent lines and nets, free to play, which is a serious amount of court for a park in a town of this size. The band stand is a bookable facility in its own right with a listed capacity of 220.
For most of the year that is all it is, and then three times a summer it becomes the venue for everything Payson does: the Scottish festival in July, the salmon supper in August and the carnival and fireworks at the start of September. Knowing which of those weeks you are looking at is the difference between a quiet park and a closed street.
Why it ranks twelfth
Because it is free, central, open dawn to dusk and genuinely useful, and because the courts on it are the best public sports facility in the city. It ranks last because on an ordinary Tuesday it is a good park rather than a destination, and on the three days it is a destination it is really the event you came for.
The rest of the city park system, briefly
Payson runs a lot of small parks and the city does not publish a reliable total, so this page will not print one. The named ones with their own facility pages include Dry Creek Trail Park at 1250 South Main, Dry Mountain Park at 1400 South 200 West, East Hills Park at 450 West 1650 South, Hidden Cove Park at 1450 South 400 West with a bridge and trails and dawn to dusk hours, McMullin Park, and the Gene Hillman Recreation Complex, which is 43.8 acres carrying ten softball and baseball fields and two soccer fields. Only three of the whole system take bookings.
The details
Getting there
The park fronts South Main a few blocks below the commercial blocks, with its own parking, and it is within a five minute walk of most of the old grid.
Before you go
- The city's own pages print three different street numbers for this park across the facility page, the salmon supper page and the Scottish festival's listing. They are all the same block.
- The courts are free and unbooked, so early mornings and weekday middays are when you will actually get one.
- Check the city calendar before planning anything here in July, on the first Friday of August, or in the first week of September.
Three celebrations, one park
The same lawn does three jobs and only one of them can be walked into free without a plan.
Entries three, five and six all happen at Memorial Park within eight weeks of each other, they get lumped together as Payson's summer, and turning up at the wrong one for the wrong reason wastes a drive. Here is what separates them in the terms that decide which one you should actually put in a diary.
| The Scottish Festival | The Salmon Supper | Golden Onion Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| When | Two days in July; 10 and 11 July 2026, 9 and 10 July 2027 | One evening, the first Friday of August, four until eight | Five days at the start of September; 3 to 7 September 2026 |
| How old | 42nd edition in 2026, so first held in the mid 1980s | 72nd annual in 2026 by event listings, so first held in the mid 1950s | First held in 1929 as the Onion Harvest and Homecoming |
| Who runs it | The Payson Scottish Festival Association, an all volunteer board | Payson City, staffed by city fire and ambulance crew, high school athletes and volunteers | Payson City, across several departments and a long list of committees |
| What it costs | Free at the gate | Ticketed, sold in advance and sold out in 2026 | Free to attend; the carnival and some entries are paid |
| Can you just turn up | Yes, on both days | No. Tickets went on sale on 1 June for the August supper | Yes, for almost all of it |
| What it takes over | The park and Main Street for the Saturday morning parade | The park for one evening | The park, the Peteetneet grounds and streets across the old grid for five days |
Dates, admission positions and organising bodies as published by Payson City and the Payson Scottish Festival Association, checked 14 August 2026. What the table cannot show is how differently they feel: one is a competition, one is a meal, and one is a town's whole year compressed into five days. The dates repeat each year in the same slots; the individual times do not.
Before you go
What to settle first, because half of this list runs on somebody else's calendar.
Four things go wrong in Payson and each takes about two minutes to avoid: driving up a gated canyon road, arriving at the pool on a Sunday, planning a supper you needed a June ticket for, and trusting an aggregator's dates for the September celebration.
Sort before you drive
- The canyon road's status with the Forest Service, because UDOT does not maintain it and cannot tell you
- A campsite at the lakes, which has to be booked at least five days out and carries a two night weekend minimum
- A salmon supper ticket, which goes on sale in June for an August evening and sold out in 2026
- The city's own dates for the September celebration, because three separate listing sites had them wrong
- A tee time at the municipal course through the pro shop rather than a third party booking site
Check on the day
- Which day of the week it is, since the pool is closed every Sunday of its season
- Whether it is past mid August, because the pool drops to Fridays and Saturdays only from the 18th
- How much water is in the creek, because the log crossings on the waterfall trail are the whole difficulty
- Whether the museum has volunteer cover, which is what its published tour hours actually depend on
- Parking around the central park in July, on the first Friday of August and in the first week of September
Turn up and it is fine
- The waterfall walk and the lakeshore path, whenever the road above town is open
- The temple grounds on the west side, which are a daylight walk with nothing to book
- The historic blocks and the fourteen markers, which are free and available in any month
- The courts at the central park, which are free, unbooked and best early
- Eighteen disc golf baskets in the canyon, which cost nothing and need only a bag
Two of the top three entries sit behind a gate for roughly half the year, and the body that opens it is not the one people ring. The Nebo Loop is not a state maintained road. UDOT's seasonal roads opening release of 22 May 2026 named it specifically and directed enquirers to the USDA Forest Service, which is the agency that gates and ungates it. It typically closes with the first heavy storms in late October or early November, and because it climbs above 9,000 feet it often does not reopen fully until June or early July. Separately, the Blackhawk campground about five miles beyond the lakes is closed under Forest Order 04-19-25-682, which runs from 22 May 2025 to 31 October 2026 and shuts the campground, its roads, its trailhead parking and its interior trails to every use. The Forest Service says reconstruction begins in 2026 and publishes no reopening date, so do not plan a 2027 trip around one.
What this list leaves out, and why
- The Nebo Loop as a drive. Payson holds its front door and this list ranks two destinations on it, but the byway runs across two counties and belongs to no single town. Its length, its overlooks, Devil's Kitchen, the summit of Mount Nebo and the fall colour month are on the Nebo Loop page, which also carries the gate question in full.
- Loafer Mountain. Its trailhead at trail 098 sits about twelve miles up Payson's canyon road near the lakes, which is why it is named here at all, and the mountain above it looks down on two other towns that each hold their own side of it. This companion names the door and writes none of the route.
- The Blackhawk campground. It is roughly five miles beyond Payson Lakes on the same road and it is shut, under a Forest Service closure order that runs to 31 October 2026 and covers the campground, its roads, its trailhead parking and its trails. Nothing that is closed for two consecutive seasons belongs on a list of things to do.
- Utah Lake. Payson sits back from it rather than on it, and the water, its advisory system, its restoration programme and the five developed access points around it are on the Utah Lake page. The nearest developed doors onto it belong to other towns.
- The valley's ticketed attractions. Payson has no museum campus, no aquarium and no indoor play barn, so the honest answer to a wet Saturday here is a drive north. Those options are priced and dated against each other on the family weekends page.
