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The Local

Town Midway, Wasatch County

A Swiss settled valley floor town on a geothermal field, next door to an Olympic venue

Midway, the town built on top of its own hot springs.

About six thousand people at roughly 5,600 feet on the west side of Heber Valley, on a geothermal field that produced both the dome people drive here to swim inside and the pot rock the town hall is made of. Settled in 1859, named for a fort raised halfway between two settlements, and now the neighbour of a venue that will host Olympic Nordic racing again in 2034.

By Scott Buehler, Moving Utah Updated August 2026

Southern Utah is my home turf. Midway 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 Wasatch County partner agent.

Start here


Three miles from the county seat, and a completely different rulebook.

Midway holds the west side of Heber Valley, three miles from Heber City and about eighteen miles from Park City over the rise. Roughly six thousand people live here on the valley floor at about 5,600 feet, in a town that incorporated on 1 June 1891 and got its name a quarter of a century earlier, when two separate settlements agreed in 1866 to build one fort halfway, or midway, between them.

The valley floor is a geothermal field, and that is the fact everything else here hangs off. Water that falls on the Wasatch works down through faults and fractures past five thousand feet, heats, and comes back up carrying dissolved calcium carbonate. At the surface the carbon dioxide escapes, the carbonate drops out as tufa, and the result is several dozen active hot pots across the northwest corner of Wasatch County. Most are mounds three to ten feet high with a crater ten to twenty feet across. One of them is fifty five feet high with more than sixty five feet of water inside it.

The other thing that separates Midway from the town next door is written rather than geological. The city keeps legal nightly rentals inside a Transient Rental Overlay District and out of most residential zones, and it tightened that ordinance again on 2 December 2025. Heber City, three miles east, runs an entirely different system. The two address page puts the pair side by side.

Nightly rental income is the one number never to assume here. Midway concentrates permitted transient rentals in the overlay district and limits them elsewhere, and the December 2025 amendment lengthened the violation probation period from six months to twelve while letting the council pull a business licence for a year after two violations inside twelve months. A parcel two streets from a licensed rental may not be eligible itself. Get the zone and overlay status confirmed in writing by the city before any offer prices in a rental.

Midway at a glance

1859

families settling along Snake Creek

1891

incorporated, on the first of June

55 ft

the height of the tufa dome over the crater

2034

Olympic Nordic racing returns to Soldier Hollow

The thing nobody tells you


The town hall is built out of the same rock the crater is made of.

Settlers called the springs hot pots and the rock they build pot rock, which is the local name for tufa, the pale limestone the water leaves behind as it cools and degasses. One of the two original settlements was called Mound City for exactly that reason. The mounds were the landmark before the town was.

Free stone already sitting in heaps gets used, and Midway used it. The 1941 Recreation Center that everybody still calls the Town Hall stands on walls of it about two feet thick, and older houses around the square are in the same material. A town whose building stone is a by product of its own plumbing is not a common arrangement anywhere.

The same water made the resorts. Simon Schneitter, a Swiss immigrant, opened Schneitter's Hot Pot to travellers in 1886, and that business is the Homestead today. Luke's Hot Pots, from the same decade, became the Mountain Spa. The crater page takes the geology and the 1996 tunnel in order, and the Swiss Days page takes the settlement and the buildings.

A hot spring built the resort, the rock the spring left behind built the town hall, and the mounds named the settlement before anybody incorporated it.

The venue at the edge of town


Soldier Hollow is four miles away, and it is already building for 2034.

Soldier Hollow sits inside Wasatch Mountain State Park on the southwest side of Midway, about four miles from Town Square by road. It was built for the 2002 Winter Games, hosted biathlon and cross country racing there, and has run since as a public Nordic centre under the Utah Olympic Legacy Foundation rather than closing the way one off Olympic venues often do.

For 2034 it is confirmed for biathlon, cross country, Nordic combined, para biathlon and para cross country, and the work has already started. A nineteen thousand square foot addition took the Nordic centre to around thirty thousand square feet. A water pond and pumphouse project began in summer 2025 and a snow storage depot was due to be operational in early 2026. The plan is to grow automated snowmaking from roughly ten kilometres of covered trail toward fifteen to twenty two, which is what lets biathlon and cross country run on genuinely separate networks during the Games.

What that means for the town in the meantime is a working venue rather than a monument: seven tubing lanes, public Nordic trails, a summer trail pass and a biathlon range that anybody can shoot on with an instructor. The alpine skiing is a different subject and belongs to Park City's page. The venue page has the rest.

What the year looks like


Two festival weekends, and a winter that lost one of its attractions.

Swiss Days is the big one, and it is bigger than the town by an order of magnitude. It runs the Friday and Saturday before Labor Day, which in 2026 is 4 and 5 September, with an open air market of more than a hundred and eighty juried artisans around Midway Town Square from eight in the morning until eight at night, a breakfast and a 10K from seven on the Saturday and a parade at ten. It began in 1947 as Harvest Days, started by Joseph B. and Pauline S. Erwin, and only later took the Swiss name it is known by now.

The other one is at the other end of the season. The Soldier Hollow Classic sheepdog championship runs over Memorial Day weekend, 22 to 25 May in 2026, with preliminary trials from Friday to Sunday and the championship round on the Monday. More than three hundred Rambouillet sheep get worked across open, unfenced hillside, which is why the trial is hard and why the dogs that win it are worth watching.

The gap in the calendar is winter. Ice Castles, which built at Soldier Hollow for several seasons, announced on 1 October 2025 that it was pausing its Utah location to rework its build process, after a warm winter forced the previous season to close in early February. The company said the pause was not permanent but named no return date, so it is not on the ranked list.

Check the Ice Castles situation before you plan a winter trip around it. Plenty of published guides still list a Midway location as though it runs every year. As of this writing the attraction has not been announced for a return to Soldier Hollow, and the venue's own winter product is the tubing hill and the Nordic trails. Confirm with the operator rather than with a travel page.

The Midway companion


Seven pages, and the neighbours keep what belongs to them.

Everything The Local has written about Midway: the ranked list of what is actually here, the geothermal dome you swim inside, the Olympic venue at the edge of town and what it is building for 2034, the state park that holds four golf courses and a county road up to Guardsman Pass, the Swiss settlement story behind the festival, and the honest version of choosing between two addresses three miles apart.

Quick answers


Midway, answered.

On the west side of Heber Valley in Wasatch County, three miles west of Heber City and about eighteen miles south of Park City. The valley floor sits at roughly 5,600 feet, with the Wasatch rising behind the town toward Park City and Snake Creek running north to south through it. Salt Lake City is about 45 to 60 minutes northwest by way of US-40 and I-80, and Provo is reachable over the mountain through Provo Canyon.

From a fort. Families settled along Snake Creek in 1859 in two separate groups, an Upper Settlement and a Lower Settlement, one of which was called Mound City for the pale limestone mounds nearby. In 1866, with the Black Hawk War under way and Brigham Young encouraging fortification, the two settlements agreed to build a single fort halfway, or midway, between them. The name stuck to the combined town, which incorporated on 1 June 1891.

Pot rock is the local name for tufa, the pale calcium carbonate limestone that Midway's geothermal springs precipitate as their water cools and gives up carbon dioxide. It piled up in mounds around the springs, which is where the name Mound City came from, and it was free building stone sitting in heaps. The Town Hall, dedicated in June 1941 with Works Progress Administration funding, has pot rock walls about two feet thick, and several older houses around the town centre use the same material.

Because Swiss families made up much of the immigration into this valley through the 1860s and 1870s, arriving with names like Gertsch, Huber, Kohler, Probst, Zenger, Durtschi and Abegglen, and they set the architectural and cultural pattern the town still works from. The festival itself began later. It started in 1947 as Harvest Days, established by Joseph B. and Pauline S. Erwin, and grew into the Swiss Days weekend that now fills Town Square the Friday and Saturday before Labor Day.

Midway. The Nordic centre sits inside Wasatch Mountain State Park on the southwest side of Midway, about four miles from Town Square by road, with a mailing address on Soldier Hollow Lane in Midway. Heber City is the larger town three miles east and the two share the valley, the school district and the power utility, which is why the venue often gets described as being in Heber Valley rather than in one town or the other.

Biathlon, cross country skiing, Nordic combined, para biathlon and para cross country skiing. Salt Lake City and Utah were awarded the 2034 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games by the International Olympic Committee on 24 July 2024, and Soldier Hollow, which hosted biathlon and cross country in 2002, keeps those disciplines. Preparation is already visible on site, including a nineteen thousand square foot addition to the Nordic centre and a plan to roughly double automated snowmaking coverage.

Four things, and they are unusually distinct for a town this size. A geothermal dome at the Homestead that people swim and scuba inside. Soldier Hollow, the 2002 Olympic Nordic venue, which is four miles from Town Square and confirmed for the 2034 Games. Swiss Days, a market weekend before Labor Day that draws a crowd many times the size of the town. And a historic core built out of pot rock, the pale limestone the hot springs themselves left behind.

Only if the parcel sits in the right place. Midway concentrates permitted transient rentals in a Transient Rental Overlay District and limits them in residential zones, and the city council amended the ordinance on 2 December 2025 to add an entrance plaque showing the manager's contact details, to require whole unit rental rather than part of a home, to hold the property to the code regardless of who is occupying it, and to lengthen the violation probation period from six months to twelve. Two violations in twelve months can cost the business licence for a year. Confirm any specific address with Midway City in writing.

It is a valley floor address rather than a slopeside one, and that is the trade. Park City and Deer Valley are about eighteen miles north, roughly twenty to thirty minutes, and the Deer Valley East Village expansion has added access from the Jordanelle side of the valley. What Midway has out its own door is Nordic rather than alpine: Soldier Hollow runs public cross country trails, a biathlon range and seven tubing lanes at 1,200 feet. The alpine resorts and the lift served terrain are covered on the Park City companion.

Scott Buehler, Moving Utah

Thinking about Midway? Start with the zone, not the view.

Southern Utah is where I work in person. Midway is not, so what I do here is connect you with a Wasatch County partner agent who knows which streets sit inside the rental overlay, what the water arrangement is on a given acre and how the valley floor behaves in January, and then 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.

Tell me what you are weighing in this valley and I will make the introduction.