Utah County's summer is a relay of city celebrations. Nearly every incorporated city takes a turn, and from late May through Labor Day there is almost always a parade happening somewhere within twenty-five minutes of Provo.
The big ones are covered elsewhere on this site — the Freedom Festival, Steel Days, Strawberry Days, the Lehi Round-Up, Fiesta Days, Oremfest, Golden Onion Days, Art City Days, Orchard Days and Pony Express Days.
This guide is about the other ones. Lindon, Alpine, Highland, Salem, Cedar Hills, Saratoga Springs. They are smaller, they are almost entirely free, and for the specific experience of a small-town parade and a park full of neighbors they are frequently better than the marquee events.
Read this before you trust any date
The single most useful thing on this page is a warning.
Published dates for small Utah County celebrations disagree across sources, routinely and badly.
The Highland Fling is the clearest example. Across three well-known Utah events listings covering 2026, it appeared as July 30 to August 1, as July 31 to August 2, and as a single day on August 1. Those cannot all be right.
Santaquin's Orchard Days appeared in one 2026 roundup as "no dates announced yet" at a point when the city had already published a complete day-by-day schedule, and in another as July 26 to August 2 when the city's own dates were August 1 to 8.
Strawberry Days appeared in a 2026 list under the window June 12 to 20 — which is the 2027 window. The 2026 celebration ran June 13 to 21.
The mechanism is not mysterious. Statewide festival roundups are written once, early in the season, and copied forward. Nobody rechecks a city of nine thousand people. The large festivals get corrected because enough readers complain; the small ones do not.
The rule: for any city celebration under about twenty thousand residents, get the dates from the city's own website. Not from an events aggregator, not from a roundup, not from this page a year after it was written.
A second and related trap: regional listings sort by date, not by county. Bluffdale Old West Days shows up in the same August cluster as Lindon Days and Salem Days in several Utah event calendars. Bluffdale is in Salt Lake County. It is a perfectly good celebration and it is not part of this circuit.
The two waves
The circuit is not evenly spread. It comes in two bunches with a Fourth of July gap in the middle.
Wave one: late May into mid-June. The Cedar Hills Family Festival opens things around the end of May into early June. Saratoga Splash in Saratoga Springs and Art City Days in Springville land in the first half of June, Oremfest shortly after, and Strawberry Days in Pleasant Grove closes the wave. The Lehi Round-Up follows in late June.
The gap. Late June through mid-July belongs to the Freedom Festival and Pioneer Day. No small city tries to compete with those.
Wave two: late July into August. The Highland Fling and the World Folkfest in Springville close out July. Then the first full week of August produces the year's genuine traffic jam: Lindon Days, Salem Days, Orchard Days in Santaquin, and the Utah County Fair at the Spanish Fork fairgrounds, all at once. Alpine Days follows the week after. Golden Onion Days in Payson closes the season over Labor Day.
If you live here, the practical consequence is that the first Saturday in August forces a choice between three parades. If you are visiting, it means almost any early-August weekend gives you options.
Lindon Days
Early August, typically the first full week, centered on City Center Park.
If you want one recommendation from this page, this is it. Lindon runs what is probably the most complete free city celebration in the county.
The published lineup consistently includes a grand parade, a family rodeo with mutton bustin', free swim nights at the city pool, a movie in the park, concerts, games, the mayor's candy scramble, and fireworks — with nearly all of it free.
That last point is the distinguishing one. Lindon does not run a ticketed carnival as its centerpiece. The city funds the celebration so that a family can attend the whole week without spending anything except on food, and it advertises the parade and the swim as free rather than burying it.
The family rodeo is worth separating from the professional circuit. This is not Strawberry Days or Pony Express Days with PRCA competitors and standings on the line. It is a community event where local children ride sheep in helmets and the crowd knows most of the participants by name. For a family with young children, that is arguably the better evening.
Lindon is about ten minutes from Orem and fifteen from Provo, which makes this the most accessible celebration on this list from the population center. Living in Lindon and things to do in Lindon cover the city.
Salem Days
Early August, running about nine days, centered on Salem Pond and Veterans Memorial Ball Park.
Salem calls itself the City of Peace, and Salem Days is one of the valley's longer-running celebrations.
The lineup runs a parade, Dutch oven cook-offs, a carnival, live entertainment and fireworks. The Dutch oven competition is the characteristic piece — genuinely competitive, genuinely Utah, and worth arriving for if you have any interest in the food.
The setting does a lot of the work here. Salem Pond is a small, pretty body of water with a path around it and grass on the banks, and holding a city celebration around it produces a better-looking evening than a parking-lot carnival ever manages. The fireworks over the pond are the reason people from outside Salem come.
Salem sits in the south of the county near Spanish Fork and Payson, roughly twenty minutes from Provo. Best restaurants in south Utah County covers the area's food.
Alpine Days
Mid-August, the week after the Lindon and Salem cluster.
Alpine is a small city tucked against the mountains at the very top of the valley, north of Highland and east of Lehi, and its celebration reflects the setting — smaller, quieter, and more genuinely local than most of the circuit.
The programming follows the standard pattern: a parade, community events, entertainment and the usual family programming. What distinguishes Alpine Days is scale and setting rather than any single marquee event. This is a celebration for a city of around ten thousand people at the mouth of American Fork Canyon, and it feels like one.
The practical note: Alpine is at the end of the road. Access is through Highland and American Fork, and the drive from Provo takes around half an hour. Combine it with American Fork Canyon or the Alpine Loop, which start essentially at the city's edge, and the trip makes far more sense.
The Highland Fling
Late July into early August — and this is the one whose dates you must verify.
The Highland Fling is the most distinctive celebration on this list, because Highland leans into its name.
Alongside the standard parade and fireworks, the Fling runs Highland games and Irish dancers — the caber-and-kilts variety, not a generic summer festival with a Scottish label. There is also an art show and, in some years, hot air balloons rising over the valley, which several listings single out as the visual highlight of the week.
Whether the games are a serious athletic competition or a demonstration varies, and the scale is modest. But a small Utah city that noticed its own name and built a Scottish-Irish festival around it is doing something more interesting than most, and it produces the one celebration on this circuit that does not look like all the others.
Highland sits on the bench between American Fork and Alpine. Things to do on the north bench covers the area, and best restaurants on the north bench covers where to eat.
Note also that Payson runs a separate and much larger Scottish festival in July — the Payson Scottish Festival — which is a different event in a different city with a considerably deeper program. If Highland games are the reason you are going, Payson is the stronger choice and the Fling is the charming one.
The Cedar Hills Family Festival
Late May into early June.
Cedar Hills opens the summer circuit. The celebration is compact — recent editions have run over roughly a weekend rather than a full week — and the published lineup includes a parade, a drone show, a baking contest and fireworks.
The drone show is the notable inclusion. Drone displays have spread quickly through Utah Valley city celebrations in the last few years, with Steel Days in American Fork running one of the largest, and a small city putting one on is a meaningful expenditure. It also has a practical advantage worth knowing during a dry summer: a drone show does not carry fire risk, which matters in a county where fireworks restrictions are routine and where a bench city sits against dry foothills.
Cedar Hills is a small city adjacent to Highland and Pleasant Grove on the north bench, about twenty minutes from Provo.
Saratoga Splash
Mid-June, in Saratoga Springs.
Saratoga Springs runs its celebration on the west side of Utah Lake, and the name points at the thing the city has that others do not: water, and a great deal of recent growth around it.
The celebration follows the standard structure. What makes it worth a mention on this list is that Saratoga Springs, like Eagle Mountain next door, is one of the fastest-growing cities in the state, and its celebration is doing the same civic work — turning a very large number of recent arrivals into people who have been to the same things.
Living in Saratoga Springs and things to do in Saratoga Springs cover the city.
What these celebrations have in common
Strip out the individual quirks and the same structure appears in every one: a parade, a park, food, a fireworks night, and a set of small rituals for children.
That is not a lack of imagination. It is a formula that solves a specific problem, and the problem is the same in every one of these cities. Utah County's population has grown extraordinarily fast, most residents of most of these towns arrived recently, and a city with no shared history has to manufacture one. A parade produces the experience of having stood on the same street. A candy scramble produces a memory that a nine-year-old will still have at forty.
The small cities do this better than the large ones, and the reason is scale. At Steel Days or the Freedom Festival you are one of tens of thousands. At Alpine Days you are one of a few thousand, and the person handing out candy from the float is somebody's neighbor. The event is worse as entertainment and better as a town.
The honest assessment
For a visitor, the small-city circuit is not a destination. Nobody should drive from out of state for Alpine Days. The marquee celebrations exist for that.
For a resident, it is the best-value thing Utah County does all summer. These events are nearly all free, they are fifteen to thirty minutes away, and there is one almost every weekend from June through August.
Best single pick: Lindon Days, for the completeness of the free program and the accessibility from Provo and Orem.
Most distinctive: the Highland Fling, for actually doing Highland games.
Prettiest setting: Salem Days, for the pond.
Best paired with something else: Alpine Days, because you are already at the mouth of the canyon.
And whichever you choose — check the city's own website for the dates. Three separate 2026 listings gave three different windows for the Highland Fling, and none of them was checking with Highland.
How a small city pays for a free festival
A reasonable question, given that most of this circuit costs nothing at the gate: where does the money come from?
Three sources, in roughly descending order.
The general fund. City budgets carry a line for community events, and for a small city it is a meaningful expenditure — staff time from parks, public works, police and the recorder's office, plus direct costs for entertainment, insurance and infrastructure. This is a deliberate spending decision, made annually, and it is why celebration programming occasionally shrinks in a hard budget year.
Recreation, arts and parks tax revenue. Several Utah municipalities levy a small local sales tax dedicated to recreation, arts and parks — commonly abbreviated RAP tax. Eagle Mountain publishes a dedicated page for its version. The revenue is restricted to the named purposes, which makes it a natural funding source for a city celebration, and it is the quiet mechanism behind a lot of what looks free in Utah County.
The politics are worth knowing: a RAP tax is normally approved by voters and periodically reauthorized. So when a small city runs an unusually good free celebration, there is often a ballot measure behind it that residents voted for.
Sponsorship and vendors. Local businesses buy visibility, and food and craft vendors pay for booth space. This is the most visible layer — the banner on the stage, the logo on the schedule — and typically the smallest of the three.
Two consequences follow that are useful to a resident.
First, "free" means "already paid for." These celebrations are funded by the people attending them, through taxes they approved. That is a better deal than a gate fee for most families, and it is also the reason cities feel entitled to program primarily for their own residents rather than for visitors.
Second, the ticketed items are usually the ones that are structurally hard to subsidize — a carnival operator is a private contractor, a professional rodeo has stock contractors and prize money, a tournament has referees. When you see a mostly free celebration with two or three paid events, you are usually looking at exactly the events that involve paying an outside business.
Volunteer labor is the fourth and largest input, and it appears in no budget. The committees that run these celebrations are unpaid residents, frequently the same people for many years, which is why individual events persist across decades and why a celebration can decline sharply when a long-serving organizer stops.
One last practical note
If you are trying to build a summer around this circuit, keep a note of which city you did last year and rotate. The celebrations are similar enough that doing the same one every August turns into a habit rather than an outing, and different enough that a new town genuinely feels different.
The other habit worth forming: go to the parade in the town you live in, and the evening events in the town you do not. Your own city's parade is where you will see people you know, which is most of the point. Somebody else's fireworks are just better when you have not spent the week hearing about the planning.
Related Guides
- Steel Days: How American Fork Takes Over Two Full Weeks in July
- Strawberry Days: Utah's Longest-Running City Celebration
- Orchard Days: Santaquin's Rodeo Week
- Pony Express Days: The Celebration That Spreads Across Three Weekends
- Art City Days: Springville's June Celebration
- The Payson Scottish Festival
- Utah County's Small Towns: Elk Ridge, Woodland Hills, Genola and Goshen
Frequently Asked Questions
How many city celebrations does Utah County actually have?
When do the small city celebrations happen?
Which one should I go to if I only pick one?
Why do the published dates for these festivals disagree so much?
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Is Bluffdale Old West Days part of the Utah County circuit?
What is the mayor's candy scramble?
Do the small cities have rodeos too?
