Discover Park City’s New Mountain Bike Trail
It starts at the shuttle stop.
Guardsman Pass, early morning, the kind of crisp July air that fools you into thinking you can ride in a t-shirt. The van door slides open and there it is: the northern terminus of what locals have been calling the WOW Trail for over a decade. A sign, a ribbon of dirt, the quiet promise of 12 miles and 2,900 vertical feet of descent to Midway.
It’s familiar. It’s beautiful. And for a certain slice of the mountain bike population, it has been missing something.
Springer Hollow is the reason the van will soon be a little more crowded.
The Mathematics of Descent
The WOW Trail (Wasatch Over Wasatch, for those keeping score) has always been a study in efficiency. Drops about 2,900 feet over 12 miles, which works out to roughly 240 feet per mile, or about what your legs expect from a proper mountain bike descent. The trail cuts through multiple ecosystems, from high-alpine meadows near Guardsman Pass down through pine forests and into the oak brush that signals your approach to the Heber Valley floor.
But efficiency isn’t always what riders want. Sometimes they want friction.
The original WOW Trail, completed in phases between 2014 and 2017, was designed as what trail builders call “intermediate plus.” The WoW trail is fairly smooth through the bottom four miles and very buff for the top four miles, with a middle section that offered just enough challenge to keep things interesting. It was, by most measures, a masterpiece of sustainable trail design. Wide enough for safe passing, graded for minimal erosion, built to handle the traffic that comes with being one of Utah’s signature rides.
The problem, if you can call it that, was success. WOW became the trail that visiting riders expected to ride, the one that locals recommended without reservation, the safe bet. It was the Honda Civic of mountain bike trails: reliable, comfortable, and utterly predictable.
The Appetite for Consequence
Trail networks, like markets, respond to demand. And for years, Park City’s advanced riders had been voting with their wheels, migrating to the lift-served terrain at Deer Valley or Park City Mountain Resort when they wanted consequences attached to their mistakes.
The public trail system, for all its 400-plus miles of singletrack, had a gap. It could challenge your fitness. It could showcase stunning scenery. But it couldn’t reliably threaten your composure.
This wasn’t an oversight. It was intentional. Public trails serve a broader constituency than bike parks. They need to accommodate the weekend warrior who drives up from Salt Lake City, the group of buddies from Wisconsin, the local who’s been riding for thirty years and just wants to spin his legs after work. Build trails too technical, and you limit access. Build them too easy, and you lose the riders who push the sport forward.
But markets find ways to fill gaps. In the case of Park City, that meant the organic emergence of “social trails” or unauthorized routes that peeled off from official trails to offer steeper, rockier, more consequential descents. The most famous of these was Chips Down, a steep, loose connector that branched off the lower sections of WOW like a question mark punctuated with loose rock and exposed roots.
Chips Down was everything WOW wasn’t: narrow, technical, unforgiving. It was also, technically, illegal. The kind of trail that existed in the gray area between what riders wanted and what land managers were comfortable authorizing.
The Politics of Purpose-Built
The Mountain Trails Foundation, Park City’s primary trail advocacy organization, found itself in an interesting position. A non-profit organization dedicated to building, maintaining and protecting trails for non-motorized recreation in the Park City area, they could either continue playing enforcement against unauthorized trails, or acknowledge what the community was telling them.
They chose acknowledgment. Chips Down was eventually adopted into the official trail system, legitimized through proper environmental review and upgraded with sustainable construction techniques. But Chips Down was still a retrofit, a social trail dressed up for public consumption.
The community wanted something built from scratch with a different design philosophy. They wanted a trail that didn’t apologize for being difficult.
Enter Springer Hollow.
The Hand-Built Rebellion
In 2024, the Foundation’s crew began cutting what would become Park City’s first purpose-built advanced descent in over a decade. The route drops off WOW about a mile from the bottom, where the main trail begins its final, gentle run into Wasatch Mountain State Park.
The entrance is marked by a sign and framed by brush, the dirt dropping away immediately in a way that makes you check your brake pads before you check the scenery. The first hundred yards are steep enough to shift your weight permanently rearward, the surface a mix of Wasatch limestone and that particular brand of Utah dirt that alternates between hero and villain depending on moisture content.
What makes Springer Hollow notable isn’t just its difficulty, but its construction method. In an era when most “expert” trails are carved by mini-excavators, this route was built almost entirely by hand. Shovels, picks, trail tools, and the kind of precision that only comes from someone standing in the dirt, feeling the grade, adjusting the radius of each corner.
Machine-built trails have their advantages. They’re faster to construct, more consistent in their difficulty, easier to design for specific flow characteristics. But they also tend toward a certain sameness, a digital precision that can feel disconnected from the landscape they traverse.
Hand-built trails, by contrast, are analog. They respond to what the terrain offers rather than imposing a predetermined design. The corners are tight because the slope demands it. The rock features are there because moving rocks is harder than working around them. The result is a trail that feels less like a designed experience and more like a conversation with the mountain.
The Descent Itself
Springer Hollow’s first technical section arrives quickly: a pair of tight switchbacks that demand balance over speed, followed by off-camber turns that lead into natural rock slabs. These aren’t the sculpted features of a bike park, but raw Wasatch geology integrated into the trail’s line.
The middle sections introduce gap jumps, optional features that span thirty to forty feet with landings that look generous if you commit and alarmingly small if you don’t. Ride-arounds are present, acknowledgments that not every rider wants the same conversation with gravity, but the features themselves are unapologetic about their purpose.
Near the bottom, the trail enters a natural gully where the sound of seasonal water marks the approach to the route’s signature moment: a canyon gap that serves as both technical challenge and psychological punctuation mark. It’s the kind of feature that requires judgment, skill, and the willingness to walk away if the conditions aren’t right.
From there, Springer Hollow runs out its energy like a stream rejoining its course, the gradient softening as it spills back onto the familiar territory near the WOW trailhead.
The Economics of Advanced Terrain
Springer Hollow won’t be the busiest trail in Park City. It isn’t supposed to be. Advanced trails serve a different economic function than beginner or intermediate routes. They’re not designed to maximize throughput but to provide challenge for riders whose skills have outgrown the existing system.
From a destination marketing perspective, this matters. Park City competes with other mountain bike destinations not just on the quantity of trails, but on the diversity of experiences available. A trail network that can challenge expert riders while still serving beginners has a broader appeal than one that serves only one demographic well.
For the Heber Valley, Springer Hollow elevates its standing in the regional trail hierarchy. The valley has always been the geographical endpoint for Park City’s major descents, but now it offers more than just a place to catch your breath and load the shuttle. It has become home to terrain that justifies the drive from Salt Lake City on its own merits.
But the real value of advanced terrain isn’t economic. It’s developmental. Trail networks, like ski areas, need terrain that pushes riders forward, routes that require growth rather than just fitness. Without that progression pathway, communities lose the riders who eventually become advocates, trail builders, and mentors to the next generation.
The Proof Point
The addition of Springer Hollow to Park City’s trail system represents something larger than one trail. It’s a proof point that public trail networks can host terrain advanced enough to challenge riders who might otherwise look exclusively to bike parks for technical descents.
This matters because public trails and private bike parks serve different functions in a mountain bike community’s ecosystem. Bike parks excel at concentrated technical features and controlled environments, but they require lift tickets and seasonal operation. Public trails offer year-round access and the kind of wilderness experience that can’t be replicated at a resort.
The challenge for public trail managers has always been balancing access with challenge, building trails that serve the community’s full spectrum of abilities without compromising safety or environmental sustainability. Advanced trails like Springer Hollow suggest it’s possible to serve expert riders within those constraints.
For riders themselves, the trail offers something that’s become increasingly rare in modern mountain biking: the need for judgment. In an era of engineered flow and predictable challenges, Springer Hollow asks riders to read terrain, assess conditions, and make real-time decisions about risk and reward.
Standing at the top of Springer Hollow, looking down the ridge into the wind, you’re confronted with terrain that requires more than fitness or even technical skill. It requires the willingness to be uncomfortable, to accept that not every ride will go perfectly, and to try again when it doesn’t.
That might be what Park City’s trail system was missing all along.
