How A Closed City Creek Canyon Rewrote The Avenues' Summer Morning

For decades, the Avenues ran on an odd-even calendar most of the city never noticed. Bikes up City Creek on odd days, cars on even days, walkers and runners any day at all. Residents planned their Saturdays around it. A neighbor riding out of the canyon at 8 a.m. on an odd Saturday could tell you the date without checking a phone.

That calendar is on pause. The water treatment plant three miles up the canyon is being rebuilt, and the schedule that shaped the neighborhood's summer has been replaced by a narrower, weekend-only version of itself. Understanding the new rules is the difference between a good July morning and a locked gate.

The odd-even calendar is suspended until 2027

The Salt Lake City Department of Public Utilities began weekday closures at the mouth of the canyon in November of 2023, and the shape of that restriction has not loosened since. The City Creek Canyon Water Treatment Plant is presently being completely rebuilt, access is limited due to heavy construction traffic, and no picnic site reservations or private automobiles are allowed for the duration of the construction project.

The duration is the important number. Hunting will not be permitted during the project, which is expected to continue through May 2027. Visit Utah's trail page uses a slightly earlier horizon and notes that access to the canyon will be very limited through January 2027. Either way, the canyon a resident remembers from the summer of 2022 is not the canyon available in the summer of 2026.

The rebuild itself is not cosmetic. Built in 1953, the City Creek Water Treatment Plant has reached the end of its useful life, and a full-scale upgrade is replacing critical infrastructure with state-of-the-art systems designed to handle 16 million gallons per day of water. The upgraded facility is engineered to return to service immediately after a 2,475-year earthquake, a 100-year wind event, or a 500-year flood. Funding sits between two figures depending on which document you read. The project is now estimated to cost about $90 million to complete, and Salt Lake City received $36.7 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency's Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, while the contractor's own project page cites a $140 million budget allocated for the complete project. The gap between those numbers is the scope creep of an accelerated timeline built around a federal grant deadline.

What weekend access actually looks like now

Weekdays are simple. The canyon road is closed to the public. On weekends and holidays, the rules narrow but the door opens.

Private vehicles are not allowed in the canyon during the length of the construction project. City Creek Canyon above Bonneville Boulevard is open to bicycles on Saturdays, Sundays and Holidays during the length of the construction project. The canyon road is closed at Site #16.

Three practical consequences follow. First, no cars, so the reservation-driven picnic ritual that anchored Rotary Park is gone until the plant is finished. Second, weekend cyclists get roughly the first three miles of pavement, and everything beyond site #16 is off limits. Third, the road is not the only surface in play. Bicycles are not allowed on trails in City Creek Canyon, with the exception of the Bonneville Shoreline Trail.

The mid-week experience is different in another way that matters if you live along Bonneville Boulevard. Traffic on Bonneville Blvd. will be two-way for heavy construction vehicles, and flaggers will be there Monday to Friday. That is a road you might have jogged in the shoulder in years past. This summer, it is a work zone with directed traffic during business hours.

A quick side-by-side of what changed:

The Salt Dome Trailhead is the new front door

The good news for Avenues residents is that the city finished a project designed for exactly this moment, whether or not it was framed that way. The Bonneville Boulevard Trailhead is located at the existing salt dome lot above Memory Grove on the east side of Bonneville Blvd. The area hosts a large pavilion utilized in the winter months for road salt storage for SLC's Streets Division, and it serves as a major Foothills Trail System access point for the Avenues neighborhood, the Utah State Capitol, and downtown Salt Lake City to the Bonneville Shoreline Trail, City Creek Canyon, and the Upper Avenues trails.

Capacity is finite and seasonal. Paved parking is provided for 50 designated spaces including 3 ADA spaces from April to October, and 17 year-round spaces including 1 ADA space. Fifty spots is not many for a neighborhood of roughly 9,000 residents, so the walking approaches from H Street, Virginia Street, and 11th Avenue are the more reliable route on a weekend morning. The trailhead was designed as a hub that connects the Avenues into the Bonneville Shoreline Trail without having to cross the construction zone at the mouth of the canyon.

Memory Grove is the other half of the answer. City Creek Canyon is a resource close to downtown Salt Lake and a respite from the summer heat, and a 1.2-mile shared-use path through Memory Grove Park begins at State Street and Second Avenue and extends north to Bonneville Boulevard. That 1.2-mile stretch is entirely inside the park, entirely outside the construction footprint, and open every day. For a resident who used to walk the lower canyon on a Tuesday morning, Memory Grove is the substitute that requires the fewest changes to the routine.

The city, for its part, has been clear that the trail network into and out of the canyon mouth stays intact. There are a lot of trails that come down from the Capitol and from the Avenues into Bonneville Boulevard, and those will all remain open with crossings to make sure people get safely onto or across Bonneville, though there will be trail closures above the plant and above the turnoff for the Bonneville Shoreline Trail, according to Salt Lake Public Utilities Deputy Director Jesse Stewart.

A weekday morning, rerouted

For a resident living between B Street and Virginia Street, the practical sequence looks like this:

1. Enter Memory Grove from the State Street and Second Avenue side rather than trying to reach the gate at the top of Canyon Road.
2. Take the 1.2-mile paved path north to Bonneville Boulevard, watching for construction crossings on weekdays.
3. Bear east across Bonneville to the Salt Dome Trailhead lot.
4. Pick up the Bonneville Shoreline Trail from the trailhead. This is the singletrack option that used to require driving to a different foothill access point.
5. Loop back down through the Avenues on foot or bike.

That routine substitutes about two miles of foothill singletrack for the paved canyon climb residents lost. It is a different kind of morning, quieter on weekdays because the construction traffic keeps casual visitors away, and more scenic in a west-facing way that the canyon never was.

Weekend cyclists who want the paved climb still have it, on Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays only, up to site #16. A tip that residents figure out quickly: the jersey barrier the project team installed to separate recreation from equipment means the corridor is narrower than the pre-construction road. Slower descents are the norm now, and the flat-out downhill run people remember is not what it was.

What this means for the neighborhood this summer

The Avenues has always been defined by two adjacencies. Downtown is one. The foothills are the other. A multi-year construction project at the mouth of the canyon does not remove the second adjacency, but it does change which door the neighborhood uses to get to it. For 2026, that door is the Salt Dome Trailhead and Memory Grove, not the gate at the top of Canyon Road.

A few things follow from that shift. Foot traffic on the interior Avenues sidewalks near H, I, and Virginia Streets is heavier on Saturday mornings than it used to be, because more households are walking to the trailhead instead of driving to canyon parking. Popperton Park has picked up some of the picnic demand that Rotary Park used to absorb. And the Avenues Street Fair, which typically anchors a September Saturday, has moved to Saturday, October 10th to honor Rosh Shashana on Sept 12, so the summer-to-fall handoff for outdoor gatherings looks different this year on both ends.

The plant will reopen. The odd-even calendar will presumably return. Until then, the neighborhood is running on a temporary schedule most residents have already internalized without ever seeing it written down. If you have friends visiting in July and they ask about the canyon walk, the honest answer is that the walk still exists, just from a different starting point and only on the days the city allows it.

If you are thinking about buying, selling, or making the Avenues a longer-term home this year, and you'd like a longer conversation about how the neighborhood actually lives right now, I'd welcome the chat. Jazmin Adamson works across the Avenues, Federal Heights, and the surrounding east-side neighborhoods, and knows the streets, the trailheads, and the rhythms that make each one feel like itself. Let's connect.