8 October 2022: 5.7 miles, 4.37 miles official BST. Trailforks hikelog
Welcome to Davis County! Today we continued north around North Salt Lake along a brand new section of trail high on the ridge between Davis County and City Creek Canyon.
In the first big push to expand the BST in the late 90s, the Lake Bonneville Bench above Bountiful had already been developed with homes and a couple golf courses. So Davis County just designated Bountiful Boulevard (well, its sidewalk) as the route for the BST. In recent years, the County and its cities worked with the US Forest Service to develop a countywide plan for a “Version 2” trail. We’ll probably be revisiting that plan several times over the next few hikes. Here we got to hike the first part of that new trail to be built, completed in 2021.
The trail is very high here to avoid some large blocks of private property and stay in the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest, which means that while the BST itself is relatively level with very reasonable grades on the hills, every access route from a trailhead has to climb at least 200ft to get to the trail. But there were amazing views of the valley and the Great Salt Lake (or at least where the GSL would be if it weren’t so low). It was also a beautiful walk through the fall colors, as these hills were covered with a lot more bright red bigtooth maple than most of foothills.
We’re excited to see what’s ahead!
