The state park Midway
Four public eighteens, two campgrounds and a seasonal road to the ridge
Wasatch Mountain State Park, from the Midway side
Utah set this ground aside in 1961 and opened it as a state park in 1968, and it now runs to 21,592 acres beginning immediately northwest of Midway. Inside are four public eighteen hole golf courses, a developed campground and a primitive one high up a dirt road, more than twenty miles of singletrack, two historic farmsteads and a county road that climbs to Guardsman Pass.
By Scott Buehler, Moving Utah
Updated October 2026
Start here
Twenty one thousand acres that start at the end of the street
The short answer
Wasatch Mountain State Park is the big one that starts at the edge of Midway, and it is one of the busiest state parks in Utah. It runs to 21,592 acres at about 5,900 feet, and inside a single boundary it holds four public eighteen hole golf courses, a developed campground, a primitive one high up a dirt road, more than twenty miles of mountain bike singletrack, an Olympic Nordic venue and a county road that climbs to Guardsman Pass. Utah set the ground aside in 1961 and opened it to the public as a state park in 1968. Most state parks do one thing well; this one is closer to a whole recreation department with a mountain attached.
Day use is a per car fee that is separate from a green fee, a campsite or a tubing session, so it is the charge people most often forget when they turn up to ride Dutch Hollow or drive Pine Canyon. The visitor center keeps daytime hours and the park office number is 435-654-1791.
The park at a glance
1961
the year the state set the ground aside
21,592
acres, at about 5,900 feet
4
public eighteen hole golf courses inside it
10 dollars
day use, per car, 5 with a senior driver
The two campgrounds
One with full hookups, one high up a dirt road
Pine Creek and Little Deer Creek are in the same park and have almost nothing in common. Picking the wrong one is the most common camping mistake here, and the difference is a dirt road and every service you might want.
| Pine Creek | Little Deer Creek | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | The main developed campground, in three loops | A primitive tent and trail campground |
| Sites | About 103 sites, per the state park | 16 small sites plus one group site capped at 25 people |
| Hookups | Hookups on the Cottonwood and Mahogany loops. The Oak Hollow loop is tent only | None. No electricity and no showers |
| Season | Check the state park page for current status | Summer and early autumn, weather and road dependent |
| Getting in | Paved, reservable 16 weeks out, 14 nights in any 30 | Dirt road that needs a high clearance vehicle with four wheel drive, and popular with off road users |
| Elevation | Valley floor, near the golf course side of the park | High up, against the national forest boundary |
Pine Creek's three loops are Cottonwood, Mahogany and Oak Hollow. Nightly rates vary by site and by cabin, and reservations run through the state park reservation system rather than the park office.
Little Deer Creek is the one people underestimate
Sixteen sites high on the mountain, shaded in aspen, reached by a dirt road that needs a high clearance vehicle with four wheel drive, with a water spigot, a picnic table, a fire pit and a grill at each one and nothing else. Off highway vehicles can leave straight from the sites onto the roads and trails, which is the main reason it fills. Cascade Springs is close enough to be an easy side trip. It is quiet, cold at night in any month, and completely unsuitable for a large trailer.
Pine Creek is the developed one
Check the state park page for the current status of the main campground before you drive up, especially outside summer. It sits a few minutes from the Nordic trails and the tubing lanes at Soldier Hollow and a few minutes from a tee time in July, on the same pitch. The trade is that it is a developed campground next to a golf course rather than a wilderness experience, and it should be booked with that expectation.
Four public eighteens
Two complexes, one state park, and a resident rate worth having
Wasatch Mountain Golf Course is the older half. It runs the Lake course, laid out on gentler ground among tree lined fairways and a string of ponds, and the Mountain course, which climbs into the terrain behind and effectively requires the cart the rate already includes. Between them that is thirty six holes on the north side of the park.
Soldier Hollow is the newer half, on the ground the Olympic venue sits on. Gold and Silver opened in July 2004 to a Gene Bates design and are named for the medals. Gold is the championship layout, over 7,500 yards from the back tees at par 72, with narrower fairways and trickier greens; Silver plays wider and shorter and is the more forgiving day out.
The eighteen hole rate includes a cart, and a Utah resident pays noticeably less than a visitor, with a further reduction for a resident sixty five or over and a season player pass that drops the cost again. Range buckets are a few dollars. If you are moving into the valley, that resident spread is a real line item, so it is worth confirming the current rates and the resident card with the pro shop before you book a tee time.
Four public eighteens inside one park boundary, in a valley whose two towns together hold fewer people than a single Salt Lake suburb.
The trail side
Dutch Hollow, and the connector that leaves the park
Dutch Hollow occupies the oak and maple hills on the northeast corner, reached off River Road at the Dutchman Hollow sign. More than twenty miles of singletrack sit in there, cut into short segments of roughly one and a half to three miles so that riders assemble their own loops rather than following one route. The trailhead is at 5,750 feet and the highest singletrack runs near 6,800. Cottontail, Sage and Aqueduct are the gentle end; Boneyard, 1000 Turns, Enchanted Forest, The Barrel, Prospector and Phosphate fill in from there. The season is early May to mid November.
The Wasatch Over Wasatch trail, always called the WOW, is the connector that takes riders up out of Dutch Hollow toward the higher network. About 10.7 miles of it were complete as of 2016. Follow it far enough and you are on ground that belongs to Park City rather than to Midway, and that is where the park side of the ride ends: the Mid Mountain trail, the Wasatch Crest and the alpine lakes at the top of Guardsman are covered on the Park City mountain biking guide and the Park City hikes guide, from the side they are actually reached from.
Inside the park the surface is the constraint rather than the gradient. Dutch Hollow's dirt is a soft red clay that holds water for a day or more after rain and takes damage when it is ridden wet, and the junction signs name the trail you are heading onto rather than the one under your wheels, which fools almost everyone the first time.
Off highway vehicles, horses and bikes share a lot of this ground. The park allows off highway vehicle and horseback riding as well as biking and hiking, and at Little Deer Creek machines leave directly from the campsites. That is a legitimate use rather than a nuisance, but it means a rider or walker who assumes a quiet singletrack experience everywhere in the park will be wrong somewhere. Know which system you are on, yield to horses and speak so the animal knows you are a person.
The road out of the top
Pine Canyon climbs to Guardsman Pass from underneath
Pine Canyon Road leaves the developed part of the park above Midway and climbs to meet the Guardsman Pass road on the ridge. It is a Wasatch County road rather than a state highway, which matters more than it sounds, because the county decides when it opens each spring, not UDOT. In 2026 that was 11 May, the same day the gates came off Guardsman on the Big Cottonwood side.
It is not plowed and it closes with the snow every autumn. Sections are unpaved with loose surface and drop offs, there is no fuel and no service above the park boundary, and signal is unreliable. The reward is that it is the quiet way onto the top of the Wasatch Back and the best aspen drive from this side of the valley, with color usually peaking from late September into the first days of October.
Winter closes a whole set of these routes together. Pine Canyon, Snake Creek, Tibble Fork, the Alpine Loop and Guardsman Pass all gate for the season, while the Soldier Hollow Loop and the Chalet Loop stay open. That is the practical shape of the park between November and May: the valley floor half of it works, the mountain half of it does not.
Inside the park
The Olympic venue
Nordic trails, a public biathlon range and tubing lanes, on the same park land and four miles from Town Square.
The venue pageIn the ranking
Dutch Hollow and Pine Canyon
Both make the ranked nine, with the fees, the season dates and the two things that catch first time riders.
The ranked listHanded over
The top of the pass
The alpine lakes and ridge walks above Guardsman are reached from Park City and are written up from that side.
Park City on hikingThe two historic sites
Two farmsteads inside the park, and easy to drive straight past
Two preserved sites sit inside the park boundary rather than in town, and neither is signposted from the highway, so both are easy to miss on the way to a tee time or a trailhead. Huber Grove holds the Huber farmhouse and creamery, from one of the Swiss families whose names run through this valley's settlement. The historic Tate Barn is the other. They are quiet stops rather than staffed attractions, and they are worth the short detour if you are already in the park.
The Swiss farming story that these sites came out of is the same one the town leans on every Labor Day weekend at its harvest festival, and it is written up on the Swiss Days page.
Scott Buehler
Moving Utah About Scott
Keep reading
More of Midway on The Local
Things to do
The top 9, ranked
Nine picks, ranked, starting with a hot spring inside a limestone dome.
Read the guideThe crater
Homestead Crater
Fifty five feet of tufa, sixty five feet of water, and a tunnel blasted in 1996.
Read the guideThe Olympic venue
Soldier Hollow
A 2002 Olympic venue that never closed, now assigned to the 2034 Winter Games.
Read the guideThe heritage
Swiss Days
A harvest festival from 1947, and a town hall built out of pot rock.
Read the guideMoving here
Midway or Heber City
Three miles apart, one school district, and two very different rulebooks.
Read the guideThe companion
Midway, in one place
The crater, the Olympic venue, the park, the festival and two addresses.
Read the pageQuick answers
The park, answered
Wasatch Mountain State Park runs to 21,592 acres at about 5,900 feet, one of the larger and busiest state parks in Utah. It begins immediately northwest of Midway in Wasatch County and extends up into the mountains behind the town. Utah set the ground aside in 1961 and opened it to the public as a state park in 1968, and the park office number is 435-654-1791.
Day use has run ten dollars a car for up to eight people, and five dollars a car where the driver is sixty five or over. That fee is separate from a green fee, a campsite or a tubing session, so it is the charge people most often forget when they turn up to ride Dutch Hollow or drive Pine Canyon. Self pay envelopes at the trailheads want exact cash and something to write with.
Four eighteen hole courses across two complexes. Wasatch Mountain Golf Course runs the Lake course, on gentler ground among ponds and tree lined fairways, and the Mountain course, which climbs into the terrain behind it. Soldier Hollow runs Gold and Silver, opened in July 2004 to a Gene Bates design and named for the medals, with Gold playing over 7,500 yards from the back tees at par 72.
Almost everything. Pine Creek is the developed campground, with about 103 sites across the Cottonwood, Mahogany and Oak Hollow loops, many with hookups. Little Deer Creek is primitive: sixteen small tent and trail sites plus one group site capped at twenty five people, high up against the national forest boundary, reached by a dirt road that needs a high clearance vehicle with four wheel drive, with no electricity and no showers.
Pine Creek is the one to ask about. The state park page shows whether it is open, so check it before you go. It sits a few minutes from the Nordic trails and the tubing lanes at Soldier Hollow, in a valley that takes about 75 inches of snow in a season, with more in the park above. Little Deer Creek is a summer and early autumn proposition only, because it sits high up and is reached by an unpaved road that is not maintained for winter use.
Off River Road on the northeast side of Midway, at the Dutchman Hollow sign. The trailhead sits at 5,750 feet with the highest singletrack running near 6,800, and the system holds more than twenty miles of interconnected trail in segments of roughly one and a half to three miles. Named runs include Cottontail, Sage, Aqueduct, Boneyard, 1000 Turns, Enchanted Forest, The Barrel, Prospector and Phosphate, and the season runs early May to mid November.
It depends on the month and on Wasatch County, not on UDOT. Pine Canyon is a county road that climbs from the park above Midway to meet the Guardsman Pass road on the ridge, it is not plowed, and it closes with the snow every autumn. In 2026 the county opened it on 11 May. Because it is a county road rather than a state highway, the county and the park are the ones to ask before you count on it.
The valley floor half of it. The Soldier Hollow Loop and the Chalet Loop stay open, and Soldier Hollow itself runs Nordic trails and tubing all season. Pine Canyon, Snake Creek, Tibble Fork, the Alpine Loop and Guardsman Pass all gate for the winter. That split is the practical shape of the park between November and May and it catches visitors who arrive with a summer map.
Two. Huber Grove holds the Huber farmhouse and creamery, from one of the Swiss families whose names run through this valley's settlement, and the historic Tate Barn is the other. Both sit inside the park boundary rather than in town, neither is signposted from the highway, and both are easy to drive straight past on the way to a tee time or a trailhead.
A state park that starts at the end of the street
Living against a park boundary is a genuinely different proposition from living near one: access out the door, snow load and winter road maintenance, what the seasonal closures do to a commute, and how a golf course or a trailhead across the fence affects a specific lot. None of that reads off a listing.
Give me the parcel and a local agent can go and stand on it before you fly out.
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