On a weekday evening in September, the paved loop around Highland Glen Pond fills with the after-work crowd. A father teaches his daughter to cast a line off the pier. Two neighbors walk a dog past the sand volleyball court while a group of kids claims the fire pit near the playground before anyone else gets to it. Fifty yards uphill, past the tree line, a mountain biker grinds up a dirt climb aimed at the ridge above the neighborhood, not at anything inside the park at all.
Everyone in that scene is standing in the same six or so acres. Almost none of them are headed to the same place.
The Park Doesn't Keep People. It Moves Them.
Highland Glen Park reads like a self-contained neighborhood amenity, and on paper it is one. There's a playground, a covered picnic pavilion, a fire pit, benches along the water, and a pond stocked well enough that fishing is one of its most consistent uses. Kayaking and paddleboarding are common too, though swimming is discouraged because of water quality concerns.
What that description misses is the park's actual structural role. Highland Glen Park sits directly on the Murdock Canal Trail, a paved route that follows the line of the enclosed Murdock Canal for 17 miles from the mouth of Provo Canyon to Thanksgiving Point, threading through Orem, Lindon, Pleasant Grove, American Fork, Highland, and Lehi along the way. Walk the loop around the pond and you are, for a stretch, walking a segment of a trail that also passes through five other cities. On the opposite side of the park, a paved climb leaves the water behind, cuts past Lone Peak High School, and comes out near the golf course, functioning less like a scenic park path and more like an on-ramp to whichever route a resident actually wants that day.
The park is not really the destination. It's the place where several different trips happen to start.
Two Trails, One Parking Lot, Different Clocks
The two systems that meet at Glen Park don't just differ in surface. They run on entirely different calendars, and by September that difference starts to matter.
| Murdock Canal Trail | Highland's Dry Creek Trail | |
|---|---|---|
| Surface | Paved | Dirt singletrack, upper-intermediate with some expert sections |
| Posted riding season | Year-round, as snow allows | Late May through November |
| Distance and route | 17 miles, from the mouth of Provo Canyon to Thanksgiving Point | Climbs from the edge of Highland into the foothills toward American Fork Canyon |
| What it connects | Orem, Lindon, Pleasant Grove, American Fork, Highland, and Lehi | Highland's own network, including the Lower Hog Hollow Creek Trail and the Angel's Gate Trailhead |
If you use Glen Park purely as a trailhead for the paved canal trail, the season doesn't really end. Snow will slow it down eventually, but it holds through most of the winter for anyone willing to bundle up. If you use that same parking lot to reach the dirt side, the calendar is less forgiving. Highland's Dry Creek network posts a riding window that closes in November, which puts this stretch of fall, roughly ten weeks out from today, on the short end of the season rather than the middle of it.
The dirt side has its own dedicated stop, too. A short way along the Dry Creek Trail corridor sits a disc golf course of its own, listed locally as Dry Creek Trail Park Disc Golf Course, a separate destination from the one back at the pond.
Same trailhead, same gravel lot, two different countdowns.
The Slope Behind the Golf Course
One route out of the park skips both systems entirely. A paved connector climbs hard out of Glen Park, passes under the road near Lone Peak High School, and comes out by the golf course before rejoining the rest of the neighborhood's trail grid. It's steep enough that people who use it regularly treat it as the workout lap rather than the pleasant one. For a family with a student at Lone Peak, it also functions as an actual shortcut home, one that never touches a street.
It's a small detail, but it's the kind of detail that only shows up if you've walked the park enough times to notice which paths people actually choose under their own power, rather than which ones show up first on a map.
A City of Small Parks, and One That's Wired In
Highland maintains more than twenty named neighborhood parks scattered across its subdivisions: Beacon Hill Park, Apple Blossom, Argo Circle, Canterbury Circle, Spring Creek, Town Center Meadows, Twin Bridges, Wild Rose, the Wimbleton parks, Windsor, Highland Family Park, and others. Most of these serve the streets immediately around them. They're built for the people on that block, and that's the whole job.
Glen Park is different because it sits on the canal trail's route through the city, which means it connects to a system that keeps going long after the subdivision ends. Beacon Hill Park, a few blocks over, does something similar in miniature. It's the starting point most commonly used for the Lower Hog Hollow Creek Trail, which runs north along the creek before ending at the Angel's Gate Trailhead. Between the two parks, Highland has quiet, block-level green space on one hand and genuine trailhead infrastructure on the other. Knowing which is which changes how a resident actually plans a Saturday.
What the Rest of Fall Actually Looks Like
For most people who live near Glen Park, September and October don't require any real decision. The pond, the playground, and the paved canal trail all keep running the way they have all year. Fishing stays good into fall. The paved loop stays usable through the cold months, snow permitting.
The decision belongs to anyone who treats the same parking lot as a launch point for the dirt side. If a ride up toward the American Fork Canyon foothills has been sitting on a weekend to-do list, this is the stretch of fall where the ground is still dry and the posted season hasn't run out yet. Wait too long, and the choice gets made for you.
That's the thing about a park that looks like one place. It's really several, and each one runs on its own schedule.
If you're weighing a move to Highland, or already live here and are curious what a home in this kind of setup is actually worth, the team at Foundry Group knows this stretch of Utah County well enough to talk through it honestly. Reach out whenever you're ready.
