The 8 best hikes in Park City.

Round Valley is a web of interconnected trails on open rolling ground near Quinn's Junction, low enough that it clears of snow weeks before anything up high and gentle enough that young kids finish it without complaint. You can assemble a walk of twenty minutes or two hours out of the same trailheads.

Its virtue is availability. In late spring and late fall, when the mountain trails are either soft or buried, this is where the whole town goes, and that is exactly why it is worth knowing about.

There is essentially no shade. In midsummer this is a morning or an evening, not a middle of the day.

The Historic Union Pacific Rail Trail runs 28 miles out of Park City toward Echo Reservoir on a rail bed abandoned in 1989 and made a state park in 1992. Walking it, you get the same benefit riders do: a consistent, forgiving grade with no climbs to negotiate.

The first miles out of town are paved and then it turns to gravel, moving out of alpine terrain through Silver Creek Canyon and into open farmland. You do not need a destination. Walk out for as long as you want and walk back.

In winter it becomes a Nordic route, which makes it one of the few things on this list that works twelve months a year.

The best effort-to-payoff ratio in the area. From the Bloods Lake Trailhead high on the Guardsman Pass road, roughly a mile of round trip walking puts you at a genuine alpine lake ringed with trees. Children finish this one.

Two things trip people up, and both matter. The trailhead moved in 2020, so older directions point somewhere useless, and the trail connection between Bloods Lake and Guardsman Pass itself is permanently closed. The old spot at the pass is now a viewpoint and a short-term drop-off, nothing more.

The road over the pass is seasonal, generally open around May through October. For half the year this hike simply does not exist.

Deer Valley runs its chairlifts through the summer, which means you can take the Silver Lake Express up and walk from a starting point that would otherwise cost you an hour of climbing. For anyone still adjusting to the altitude, that is not cheating, it is sensible.

From Silver Lake Village a fan of trails opens up, and the network connects into the Mid-Mountain Trail above. It is the easiest way to get high without earning every foot of it.

Parking at Silver Lake is limited. The free Park City bus runs there, and using it is genuinely the better version of the day.

Armstrong is best known as a bike climb, and it is an excellent walk. It rises steadily from the Park City side through aspen groves, past relics from the silver-mining era, into pine shade and then out onto open ski-run meadows before meeting the Mid-Mountain Trail.

The climbing is honest but never desperate. What makes it worth the effort is how much the landscape changes on the way up, which is unusual for a single ascent.

It is a shared trail with uphill-only bike traffic, which in practice makes it a calmer walk than most climbs of its popularity. Still, listen behind you.

A hiking-only route from Deer Valley's Silver Lake Village that climbs roughly 1,433 feet over about 4.7 miles round trip to open views across the Heber Valley. Because bikes are not on it, it is quieter than the numbers would suggest.

This is the first hike on the list that is genuinely a workout, and the altitude does more of the work than the gradient. Take more water than the distance implies.

The reward is a perspective you do not get from the resort side: looking away from Park City rather than down onto it.

The full Mid-Mountain is a serious day on foot. Roughly 20 miles of singletrack holding close to 8,000 feet from the Deer Valley side across to the Summit Park neighborhood, designated an IMBA Epic and shared with bikes for its whole length.

Because it contours rather than climbs, the difficulty is duration, exposure and altitude rather than steepness. It needs a shuttle or a very committed plan for getting back, and it needs an early start.

Most people walk pieces of it, joining at one of the dozen points where other trails cross, which is the sensible way to use a trail this long. The whole thing is for the day you actually want the whole thing.