Town Kamas, Summit County
A working valley in Summit County where the pavement into the Uintas begins
Kamas, where the mountain road starts.
About 2,100 people at 6,690 feet in the southwest corner of Summit County, on hay ground that has been worked since 1859. State Route 150 leaves the middle of town and climbs 54 miles over the highest paved road in Utah, and for four months of the year it is gated fifteen miles east of Main Street. Sixteen miles west is Park City. This is the honest version of what sits in between.
Southern Utah is my home turf. Kamas 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 Summit County partner agent.
Start here
A ranch town at the bottom of a mountain road.
Kamas is a city of about 2,100 people at roughly 6,690 feet in the southwest corner of Summit County. It was settled in 1859 as Rhoades Valley, took its name from the camas bulb that once carpeted the meadows, and incorporated in the early 1910s. It is the commercial centre of a working hay and cattle valley, and it is the town where the pavement into the Uinta Mountains starts.
That last part is not a figure of speech. State Route 150 begins at the intersection of Main Street and Center Street, in the middle of town, and runs 54.7 miles east and north to the Wyoming line, over the highest paved road in Utah. The office that sells the recreation pass for the whole corridor is at 50 East Center Street, a block from where the road begins.
The other thing that decides life here is 16 miles west. Park City sits over SR-248, and the resort economy has been pushing east for two decades. What that has produced is a town with a genuine main street, a school district headquarters, a hometown fibre company and a hay crop, sitting one commute from some of the most expensive real estate in the state.
Kamas at a glance
1859
settled, as Rhoades Valley
6,690 ft
valley floor at the mouth of the Uintas
54.7 mi
of SR-150, starting at Main and Center
97 in
of snow in an average winter
The shape of the place
Four roads out, and one of them shuts in December.
Kamas is a cross of two state highways with a third leaving eastward from the middle of it. Where you are going decides which one you use, and in winter one of the four stops being a road at all.
| Leaving town | Reaches | Distance | Winter |
|---|---|---|---|
| SR-248 west | Park City, US-40, and on to I-80 | About 16 miles, roughly 22 minutes | Open, and busy on storm mornings |
| SR-32 south | Francis, then Heber City and the wider valley | About 16 miles to Heber, roughly 19 minutes | Open |
| SR-32 north | Oakley, Peoa, Rockport and I-80 at Wanship | About 5 miles to Oakley, 18 to Rockport | Open |
| SR-150 east | Samak, Soapstone, the lakes and Wyoming | 54.7 miles end to end | Gated at mile 14.6 from December to late spring |
Distances and drive times are the city guide's figures, rounded. Confirm current conditions before planning around any of them, because SR-248 carries resort traffic and the I-80 stretch over Parleys moves with the weather.
The recreation pass is not the same thing as the road. Driving SR-150 costs nothing. Parking at a Forest Service trailhead, picnic area or campground along it requires the Mirror Lake Recreation Pass, and the current price from the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest is 10 dollars for three days, 20 dollars for seven and 60 dollars for the year. Several well ranked pages still quote 6, 12 and 45 dollars, which is the old schedule. Buy it at the ranger district office on Center Street and check the current figure there rather than online.
The rhythm
One address, two completely different towns.
From late May to late October, Kamas is the front door of a two million acre national forest. Traffic on Main Street is trailers and roof boxes, the smokehouse two and a half miles up the byway keeps summer hours, and the campgrounds strung along the road fill on Friday afternoons. In 2026 the gate opened on 22 May, in time for Memorial Day.
From December until the snowpack lets go, the same road dead ends fifteen miles east of town and the high country belongs to snowmobiles, skis and snowshoes. The corridor is groomed rather than plowed. The businesses that live off the byway cut their hours, the valley goes back to feeding cattle, and the commuter traffic over SR-248 becomes the thing that moves.
Neither season is the real Kamas and both of them are. It is the single most useful thing to understand before looking at property here, because a lot that is charming in August is a plowing contract in February. The winter page works through what the gate actually does to the map.
The highway does not so much close as change sports.
Not just the town
The valley is the unit, and it is being bought and preserved at once.
Kamas is the main street for a valley rather than an island. Francis is about three miles south, Oakley about five north, and Marion, Peoa, Samak and Woodland fill in around them. All of it feeds one school district, South Summit, whose headquarters and all three schools sit in Kamas. The rodeo grounds in Oakley and the Fiesta Days arena in Kamas are twenty minutes apart and both are full in July.
The ground itself is now the story. On 15 December 2025 Summit County and the Summit Land Conservancy closed on the 834 acre Ure Ranch for 25 million dollars, at the entrance to town on SR-248 and on both sides of the road, at the headwaters of the Weber. Conservation easements ban development, the meadows stay working agricultural land, and about 454 acres south of the road is proposed as a non-motorized recreation area.
At the same time a proposed town called West Hills, roughly 3,600 acres along the same highway between Kamas and Hideout, goes to a vote at the November 2026 general election after the Utah Supreme Court ruled on 2 July 2026 that it belongs on the ballot. Preservation and incorporation are both live on the same sixteen miles of road. The movers page takes both of them seriously.
If you only have one day
One version of a good day out of Kamas.
First thing
Breakfast at the soda fountain
Hi-Mountain Drug at 40 North Main has been family run since 1968, in the original 1918 building, and the grill is inside the drugstore.
The ranked listMid morning
Buy the pass, then drive east
The ranger district office at 50 East Center Street sells the Mirror Lake Recreation Pass, and the road starts a block away at Main and Center.
The byway pageMidday
Walk in to Ruth Lake
Two and a bit miles round trip for about 250 feet of climb at around 10,000 feet, which is the easiest real alpine lake on the whole road.
The lakes pageEvening
Come down the Weber side
Out through Oakley and up the canyon road to Smith and Morehouse, or down SR-32 to Rockport, on water that is nothing like the byway.
The water pageThe Kamas companion
Seven pages, and the highway runs through most of them.
Everything The Local has written about Kamas: the ranked list of what is actually here, the byway that starts at Main and Center and what it costs to stop on it, the day hike lakes at the top of it, what the winter gate does to the map, the two rivers that rise behind the town, and the ZIP code that makes every published Kamas statistic worth checking twice.
Quick answers
Kamas, answered.
Summit County, in its southwest corner. That matters more here than in most Utah towns, because the 84036 ZIP code around Kamas reaches across the county line into Wasatch County, where resort developments including Tuhaye, Victory Ranch, Hideout, SkyRidge and Deer Vista all carry Kamas mailing addresses. Those places are not in the city and not in the county, and their taxes, schools and services are different. Any statistic that sweeps the ZIP code is measuring resort country rather than the town.
At the intersection of Main Street and Center Street in the middle of Kamas. State Route 150 runs 54.7 miles from there to the Wyoming state line south of Evanston, crossing Bald Mountain Pass at 10,715 feet, which is the highest paved road in Utah. The Heber-Kamas Ranger District office that sells the recreation pass for the corridor sits at 50 East Center Street, roughly a block from where the road begins.
In practice from Memorial Day weekend until the first serious autumn snow, although the snowpack decides rather than the diary. A padlocked gate takes the mountain section out of service for the whole of winter, which puts the campgrounds, the trailheads and every lake in the high country beyond reach by car for about a third of the year. The stretch between town and that gate is plowed in every season, so Kamas itself is never on the wrong side of it. The byway page carries the exact mileposts and the most recent dates.
About 16 miles west over State Route 248, roughly 22 minutes outside of resort traffic. Heber City is a similar 16 miles south on SR-32, about 19 minutes. Salt Lake City is around 42 miles and under an hour by way of US-40 and I-80, with the airport nearer 48 miles. High Valley Transit runs a fare free commuter route, Route 102, between the Old Town Transit Center in Park City and the Francis City offices through Kamas.
The town's own calendar is small and specific. Kamas Valley Fiesta Days runs for a week around Pioneer Day in late July with a rodeo, a parade, a car show, a demolition derby and fireworks, and the celebration dates to 1938. Hi-Mountain Drug on Main Street runs an old fashioned soda fountain and grill inside the drugstore. Samak Smoke House sits two and a half miles up the byway. Everything else is outdoors and most of it is up SR-150.
Inside city limits, plan on no. Kamas adopted an ordinance on 11 March 2025 that stopped any new nightly rentals, with a warning and then a 500 dollar fine for violations. Owners already operating had until 10 April 2025 to document continuous use and take out a business licence, and only those operators were grandfathered. The city adopted a 1 percent transient room tax at the same time. Confirm the current ordinance with Kamas City before you write an offer.
It closed. The DeJoria Center, the State Road Tavern and the Country Store and Cafe all shut in December 2024, and a group called High Star Ventures bought the property on 16 July 2025. The new owners have proposed a hotel, underground parking and additional homes, and after Kamas City declined to create a special tax district they went to the municipal bond market in February 2026 for roughly 104.5 million dollars. Treat all of it as proposed until ground moves.
It is 834 acres at the entrance to town on SR-248, on both sides of the road, at the headwaters of the Weber River, which Summit County and the Summit Land Conservancy bought for 25 million dollars and closed on 15 December 2025. Conservation easements bar development, the meadows stay working agricultural ground, and about 454 acres south of the road is proposed for non-motorized recreation. The Ure family homesteaded the place in the late 1800s and chose conservation over development.
It is the base, in the literal sense that the road in starts on its Main Street and the ranger district that manages the corridor keeps its office in town. Ruth Lake, the Lofty Lake loop, the Crystal Lake trailhead cluster and the summit trail up Bald Mountain are all day hikes from a Kamas breakfast. The limit is the calendar rather than the distance: for about four months a year the gate at mile 14.6 puts every one of them behind a snowmobile ride.
Thinking about Kamas? Start with which side of the line you are on.
The county, the tax area, the school district, the water and sewer provider and the nightly rental rules all change across the 84036 ZIP code, and none of it is visible from a listing photograph. Tell me what you are weighing and I will put you with a Summit County partner agent who works this valley, and stay on the file for the homework and 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.