Provo Canyon has carried four transportation systems in 170 years: a crooked toll road, a slow railroad, a two-lane state highway that the railroad's death made room for, and the four-lane US-189 that took half a century of lawsuits to build. Each one was shaped by the same two facts. The canyon is the easiest way from Utah Valley to the Heber Valley and the Uinta Basin beyond, and it is barely wide enough for a river.
This is that history in order. For the canyon as a place to visit, with every stop and fee, see our Provo Canyon guide. For the train as a ride you can book, see our Heber Valley Railroad guide.
A railroad that came first on paper
The canyon's first transportation plan was a railroad that was never built. The Provo historian D. Robert Carter, writing in the Daily Herald in 2008, says William Gardner led a small party into the canyon in 1852 and that the same year the territorial legislature sent Congress a memorial asking for a transcontinental railroad routed into the Great Basin through Provo Canyon. The Heber Valley Railroad's history adds that the canyon was surveyed as a possible transcontinental route in the 1850s. The railroad builders chose Weber Canyon instead.
1855 to 1858: the toll road
With no railroad coming, church leaders turned to a wagon road. In 1855, Carter writes, the legislature granted William Wall, Evan M. Greene, Thomas S. Williams and Aaron Johnson the right to build a toll road "through Provo Canyon and beyond," to connect with the main trail from the Missouri River. Isaac Bullock led an exploring party through the canyon that year and found a possible wagon route to Fort Supply, the Mormon settlement near Fort Bridger.
The road was built because of a war. In 1858, during the Utah War, Brigham Young ordered the Move South, and families from Salt Lake City and northern Utah crowded temporarily into Utah Valley. Many of the men had little to do. In early June, Carter writes, Young organized the Provo Kanyon Road Company and put them to work. When the families went home in July, the road was "well on its way to completion."
What travelers got was a narrow, winding toll road:
- It was crooked. A traveler who signed his 1860 letter to the Deseret News "J.J.F." called the road good but "remarkable for being crooked," so winding that first-timers reaching the Heber end felt they "had performed a miracle."
- It was slow. The Heber Valley Railroad's history says the trip took three days in good weather and longer in winter, when snow slides blocked the route.
- It was the only way out. For Heber Valley ranchers, the same history says, the toll road was the only way to get hay, sheep, cattle and dairy products to market.
- It charged a toll. Carter places the toll house near present-day Springdell. In his account of an 1879 Brigham Young Academy excursion, the wagons paused there on the way home.
Tourism followed the road almost immediately. J.J.F. described Bridal Veil Falls and a lumber mill at the South Fork, today's Vivian Park. When the Utah Southern Railroad reached Provo in 1874, visitors from Salt Lake City could ride to Provo and continue to the canyon. In June 1879 a dozen wagons of Brigham Young Academy students and faculty, Karl G. Maeser among them, camped at the South Fork; the account Carter quotes has the students climbing the lower cascade of Bridal Veil Falls after lunch.
The tolls ended quietly. In the late 1880s, Carter writes, the road company's charter expired and the road became a public highway, so people could travel the canyon "free of charge."
1899: the Heber Creeper
The railroad finally came at the end of the century, and only after a court fight. The Heber Valley Railroad's history says surveying began in spring 1896 over the objections of the Telluride Power Transmission Company, which planned an 85-foot dam and reservoir in the canyon for its new power plant. After several trials, the railroad won.
The timeline from there was fast:
- March 20, 1899: track gangs started grading the line up the canyon.
- April 24, 1899: the first rails were spiked down, 52-pound rail that was surplus from the old main line.
- September 21, 1899: the first Rio Grande Western train reached Heber. Heber mayor Abraham Hatch and Provo mayor L.O. Taft drove the last spike together at the new depot.
- October 1899: regular service began, with mixed trains carrying passengers and freight on the 27-mile run.
The line lived on freight, and above all on sheep. The railroad's history says Rio Grande records for 1915 show 60 cars of sugar beets, 40 cars of cattle, 280 cars of hay and 360 cars of sheep shipped from Heber, and claims that more sheep left Heber by train in the 1920s and 1930s than any other station in the country.
The nickname came from the pace. A 1972 Wasatch Mountain Railway brochure, quoted in the same history, said nobody knew when "Heber Creeper" started, "but the legend is that the narrow twisting canyon made the trip so slow people began to talk of the train just creeping." A Denver and Rio Grande Western timetable from the 1920s set its top speed at 20 miles per hour. Carter adds that the train made the canyon easy to reach, and a string of resorts grew up along the tracks.
1912 to 1938: the road becomes a highway
Cars made the old wagon road matter again. According to a history of the route on the Utah Highways blog, the canyon road was added to the state highway system in 1912, was written into the 1919 state highway law, and became State Route 7 in the early 1920s. The Heber Valley Railroad's history says a paved highway was built from Provo to Heber in the 1930s, and that this was "the beginning of the end" for the railroad, because Heber Valley farmers could now ship by truck.
Passenger trains were already fading. In the 1920s the Rio Grande cut its two daily round trips to a single mixed train, a round trip leaving Provo at 7 a.m. and returning by 11:05.
The road's number changed late in the decade. The Utah Highways history says a dispute between Utah and Wyoming over extending US-89 led to the creation of a new US-189 from Provo through Heber toward Wyoming, and SR 7 became a hidden legislative designation underneath it. (A realtor-run canyon website says US-189 was "completed in 1938 as State Road 7" and redesignated in 1977; the highway history describes 1977 as the year the hidden SR 7 designation was deleted. We have gone with the highway history.)
1938 to 1942: Deer Creek moves everything
The biggest change to the canyon's upper end came from a dam. Construction of the federal Provo River Project began in May 1938, and its key structure, Deer Creek Dam, sits about 16 miles northeast of Provo. The Bureau of Reclamation says the first water became available in 1941.
The railroad ran straight through the dam site. The Heber Valley Railroad's history says the tracks ran up the center of the valley, "directly through the spot where the dam was to be located." Through 1938 and 1939, crews built a new line up the west side of Weeks Bench to a ledge above the future waterline, with new bridges over the Provo River and Snake Creek. Trains began using it in 1940, the old line was torn up, and for two years the new track hauled fill from a Weeks Bench quarry to the dam. That history gives 1942 as the year the dam and reservoir were completed.
The highway moved too. The Utah Highways history says the reservoir flooded much of the old road, so a new alignment was built along the lake, with a bypass around Charleston in place by 1950.
1967 to 1993: a railroad dies, and comes back
By the mid-1960s the Heber branch was nearly empty. The railroad's history says milk now moved by truck, houses had switched to natural gas, and trains ran once a week by 1966 and only a few times a month by 1967. The Denver and Rio Grande Western applied to abandon the line, and the last Rio Grande freight train left Heber in 1968.
The abandoned railroad shaped the modern road. The railroad's history says UDOT bought the tracks to pull them up and use the right of way for US-189. The Utah Highways history says that in 1967, US-189 between Provo and the canyon mouth at Olmstead was moved onto a new roadway beside the rail line; that is why University Avenue north of downtown curves instead of running straight.
The upper line survived because Heber did not let it go:
- 1970: local residents and rail enthusiasts, led by Heber businessman Lowe Ashton and members of the Promontory Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society, saved the line.
- 1971 to 1990: the private Wasatch Mountain Railway ran steam excursions from Heber, at first to Bridal Veil Falls, always known as the Heber Creeper. It went out of business in 1990.
- 1992: the Legislature created the Heber Valley Historic Railroad Authority and appropriated $1 million.
- May 8, 1993: the revived railroad made its first run. The track from Heber City to Vivian Park was rebuilt in 1993 and 1994.
1970 to 2005: the four-lane fight
The modern highway took longer to build than the original railroad and the original toll road combined. In December 1995, the Deseret News reported that UDOT had planned "for at least 25 years" to turn the twisting two-lane road into a four-lane highway, and that UDOT's accident rate on it ran 40 to 80 percent higher than on similar two-lane roads in the state. The same article cited a Dan Jones poll of Utah County residents, taken in December 1994, that found 82 percent in favor of four lanes.
The opposition was organized and persistent. Fly fishermen wanted the road kept away from the Provo River, residents worried about trucks pouring into Provo and Orem, and Robert Redford, whose Sundance Resort sits off the canyon, argued that four lanes did not fit. A federal civil suit derailed the project in 1986. Redford was among those who sued to stop it, the paper reported.
The project went ahead in pieces:
- The lower canyon. The first five-mile section, from the mouth, was finished in 1991.
- The tunnels. The 2.7-mile stretch from Upper Falls to Wildwood, with its two short tunnels, was the most expensive piece of highway in Utah at an estimated $43 million in 1995. In 1996 High Country Flyfishers, the Provo River Coalition and others sued over its environmental review. A federal judge refused to halt the work, but the Deseret News reported in December 1998 that the segment had suffered "landslides, cracking in two tunnels, federal fines for building too close to the Provo River, construction delays and cost overruns," and that UDOT had parted ways with its general contractor. The settlement that month required UDOT to update its 1989 environmental study before any further phase. A 2002 article put the final cost of the two miles at $39 million and noted that a rock slide crushed a passing pickup in 1997.
- Deer Creek Dam. The next section, from the Sundance turnoff to Deer Creek State Park, had to cross the Hoover Slide, a slow earth movement that cracked the road most springs, and the face of the dam itself. BYU's Daily Universe reported in February 2005 that a $55 million, two-year project had begun to double the 4.5 miles between the dam and the state park, move the road away from the river and bridge the spillway, with the road closed every weeknight from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.
The sources do not agree on the length of the whole job. The 1995 Deseret News described 22 miles of road between the valleys; the 1998 article called it a 26-mile project from Orem to Heber, with 11 miles done, and the 2002 article said seven miles were done. A 2008 state scenic byway plan gives the canyon road as 22 miles from the mouth to Heber City.
Today: the last two lanes
One stretch never got its turn. In October 2025, UDOT began widening about three miles of US-189 on the east side of Deer Creek Reservoir, between the Rainbow Bay day-use area and the SR-113 junction near Charleston. KUTV reported that UDOT attempted this stretch in 2002 but never finished it, citing its closeness to the water and a lack of funding, and UDOT's Wyatt Woolley said that when the project is done the highway will have two lanes in each direction. The original fall 2027 finish has slipped into 2028; our Deer Creek widening update has the current traffic picture.
Reading the history from the car
Driving up from Orem, you pass most of this story in order:
- Olmstead, at the mouth. The 1967 realignment brought the highway in along the old railroad grade. A 2008 state byway plan lists the Olmstead Railroad Bridge and Power Plant as eligible for historic listing.
- Bridal Veil Falls. Tourists were writing home about it by 1860, two years after the toll road opened. Our Bridal Veil Falls guide covers the trail.
- Springdell. The toll house stood near here, according to Carter. We found no marker for it.
- Vivian Park. The South Fork mill site of 1860, the 1879 Academy campsite, and today the lower end of the Heber Valley Railroad's track. The byway plan lists the Vivian Park Railroad Bridge as eligible for historic listing; our Vivian Park and Nunns Park page covers the park.
- The tunnels. The 1990s segment that cost more per mile than any highway in Utah at the time.
- Deer Creek Dam. Plans in 2002 called for dropping the highway from the dam's crest to its face and spanning the spillway, and the 2005 project included a spillway bridge. Above the dam, the railroad runs on the ledge it was moved to in 1940, and the reservoir covers the old road and the original track. Our Deer Creek and Jordanelle guide covers the water.
- The east shore of the reservoir. The construction zone is the last piece of a widening that has been planned since about 1970.
Frequently Asked Questions
When was the first road built through Provo Canyon?
Was Provo Canyon really a toll road?
Why is the Heber Valley Railroad called the Heber Creeper?
When did the train first run through Provo Canyon?
How did Deer Creek Dam change the canyon?
Why did widening US-189 take so long?
Is US-189 four lanes all the way to Heber now?
Can you still ride a train in Provo Canyon?
Sources
The facts in this guide were checked against these sources. Hours, fees and rules change, so confirm anything time-sensitive with the source before you go. How we make Provo.com.
- Provo River Project, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Checked October 20, 2026.
- Provo Canyon Scenic Byway Corridor Management Plan (updated Nov. 4, 2008), Utah Office of Tourism. Checked October 20, 2026.
- Heber Valley Railroad: Our History, Heber Valley Railroad. Checked October 20, 2026.
- Wagon trails, railroad encouraged in Provo Canyon (D. Robert Carter, 2008), Daily Herald. Checked October 20, 2026.
- Long and winding road: the debate over UDOT's plans to widen U.S. 189 (1995), Deseret News. Checked October 20, 2026.
- Canyon work to require reviews: UDOT agrees to do impact studies (1998), Deseret News. Checked October 20, 2026.
- More lanes in Provo Canyon? (2002), Deseret News. Checked October 20, 2026.
- Provo Canyon road undergoes major changes (2005), The Daily Universe (BYU). Checked October 20, 2026.
- Work underway on new lanes in last stretch of US-189 up Provo Canyon (Oct. 2025), KUTV/KJZZ. Checked October 20, 2026.
- Utah Highways: Provo Canyon, Utah Highways blog. Checked October 20, 2026.
- Provo Canyon Road (realtor-run canyon site; cited only for a disputed date), provocanyon.us. Checked October 20, 2026.
