The Murdock Canal Trail, the north valley's spine

Every mile of this trail sits on top of a buried river. The Provo Reservoir Canal, dug in the early 1900s and enlarged in 1951, ran fast, deep and open through what became dense suburbs, and it drowned people, which is the blunt reason it was enclosed. Between 2010 and 2012 the canal became the Provo River Aqueduct: about twenty one and a half miles of mostly 126 inch welded steel pipe, a roughly $150 million federal project, and the lid on top became the trail corridor.

The enclosure also saves water, roughly 8,000 acre feet a year that used to seep and evaporate, and the pipe still works for a living: it carries irrigation water each season, roughly mid April to mid October, and is drained for the winter. The trail is owned and maintained as a county corridor over the top of working water infrastructure run by the Provo River Water Users Association, a fact the interpretive signs wear proudly.

The trail's south terminus at 1100 East 800 North in Orem has one practical quirk: no parking. The move every local knows is to park a few blocks east at the Provo River Parkway trailhead at 1630 East 800 North, which serves both trails at once, because 800 North is where the valley's two great paved trails shake hands. Ride the connector blocks and the Murdock's seventeen miles splice onto the Parkway's fifteen.

That junction is the key to the region's best car free geography: from this corner, the Provo River Parkway runs up Provo Canyon to Vivian Park in one direction and down through Provo to Utah Lake in the other, while the Murdock runs the whole north bench to Lehi. One parking spot, three destinations, no highway shoulder anywhere in the plan.

The middle third runs the old orchard bench through Lindon and Pleasant Grove, and it is the stretch that photographs the season: blossom rows in April, Timpanogos filling the windshield view north, the valley and lake spread west. The Lindon View trailhead at 300 North 780 East and Pleasant Grove's Wade Springs trailhead at 1100 North 600 East both offer the full kit, parking, restrooms and lighting, and the Canyon Road crossing adds a signed access point near the mouth of Battle Creek.

This is also the stretch where the trail earns its commuter keep, running within a mile of both cities' schools, parks and church lots, which is why weekday mornings here are backpacks and gravel bikes in equal measure. If you only ride three Murdock miles in your life, ride these in the last hour of an April evening.

Across Highland, with Cedar Hills and American Fork's bench in the mix, the trail rides its highest ground, and two city parks do trailhead duty. Highland Glen Park, off the Alpine Highway, wraps a fishing pond, pavilions and a swim beach around its trail access, making it the corridor's best staging point. Mitchell Hollow Park at 6450 West 10400 North adds the second lot, playground included.

The reward of the high bench is the sightline: this is where the trail's engineering reads best, a dead flat ribbon pinned to sloping ground, with Lone Peak's wall above and the whole valley below. The canyon mouth of American Fork, with its cave and its fee station, sits just upslope; the Murdock is the free flat cousin running beneath all of it.

The trail ends at the Bull River Road trailhead where the corridor meets Timpanogos Highway in Lehi, and then does the most consequential thing any trail in this county does: it keeps going, by proxy. A roughly one and a half mile connector built by Lehi with the county threads Clubhouse Drive, Garden Drive and Desert Forest Lane, past the Lehi FrontRunner station and the Thanksgiving Point golf course, and delivers riders onto the Jordan River Parkway.

That handshake is the region's quiet masterpiece of trail planning. The Jordan River Parkway runs north through eight Salt Lake County cities, so a rider leaving 800 North in Orem can, with two junctions, ride bench, headwater and river corridor deep into the next county on pavement the whole way, the spine of the Golden Spoke network. The Murdock is the Utah Valley third of a two county system.

The Murdock's safety design is the reason parents trust it: ten lighted box culvert underpasses, most of them nineteen feet wide and ten high, carry the trail beneath every major arterial it meets, and a dedicated bridge crosses Dry Creek. For seventeen miles, the big roads pass overhead like weather. What remains are a handful of signed at grade crossings at smaller streets, each with stop signs facing the trail.

Those stop signs are the trail's one genuine controversy, because riders blow them routinely. The signs face the trail because cross traffic cannot see a fifteen mile per hour cyclist emerging from a bench cut; treat every at grade crossing as blind, because the design assumes you will stop and the drivers assume you have.

The corridor is promoted and maintained as a year round facility by Utah County, and winter users regularly find it cleared, though no agency formally publishes a plowing promise, so the honest winter rule is: usually rideable, verify after a storm. Summer's issue is the opposite of snow: the bench has almost no shade, and July afternoons on seventeen treeless miles are a hydration exam. Locals ride it early, late, or in the shoulder seasons it was born for.

The posted rules are simple: walking, running, riding and skating on the asphalt, horses on their own path, dogs leashed, no motor vehicles, no fires, no camping. On electric bikes the published rulebook goes quiet, with no trail specific class ordinance on record, and illegally motorized traffic is the users' standing complaint; ride electric assist like a guest, because that could change as e-bikes grow more common.