Bonneville Shoreline Trail

The Bonneville Shoreline Trail is a long, mostly single-track path that follows the prehistoric shoreline of Lake Bonneville around the eastern edge of the Salt Lake Valley. Completed sections run for about 90 miles in the Salt Lake metro; the goal is eventually a continuous 280-mile trail from Brigham City to Nephi.

The trail is a few hundred feet above the city and follows the contours of the foothills, offering near-constant views of the valley below. Several access points from the city — at the top of City Creek, behind the University of Utah, above Red Butte Garden, and at the mouth of Emigration Canyon — make it the easiest serious walking/running/biking option from downtown. Mountain bikers love the technical sections; runners stick to the smoother northern reaches.

things to do sight cycling
A story
The trail follows the long beach line of prehistoric Lake Bonneville, the vast Ice Age lake that filled the eastern Great Basin between about 30,000 and 12,000 years ago. At its peak the lake stood about 1,000 feet higher than the current Great Salt Lake. The visible shoreline benches — long horizontal terraces cut into the Wasatch foothills — are the wave-cut platforms of that lake.

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