Parkway sections targeted

SOUTH JORDAN — Hop on your bike, lace up your in-line skates or slip on some hiking shoes and try to follow the Jordan River from the Great Salt Lake to Utah Lake.

Sooner or later, you'll find yourself at a dead end.

But planners of the Jordan River Parkway trail hope — with a little input and help from the public — those rough spots on the trail soon will be history.

The Jordan River Natural Areas Forum on Tuesday hosted the first of three public open houses to gather advice from trail users and would-be users. Most of the trail is more or less functional now, but there are nine problem areas the coalition building the trail is struggling with. Members hope the public will help them get a sense of which areas are of the highest priority.

"We're asking people, 'Where should we put our limited resources?' " said JRNAF trail project chairman Jeff Williams.

Those resources potentially could include money from a fund that would be created if voters approve Initiative 1 next week.

The input will help planners come up with a plan to present to the Salt Lake County Council of Governments in January.

Some of the incomplete trail sections are short stretches that simply lack pavement; others are several blocks long and lack even a consensus as to where the trail should run. One 400-foot stretch at the far south end of the Salt Lake Valley was washed away in a mudslide last fall.

Kent Player, who works with JRNAF and is chairman of the Draper Parks, Trails and Recreation Committee, said the biggest problem area is near where the river crosses 9000 South.

Just north of 9000 South, the river flows through a golf course and passes behind land owned by Utah Power and the Fur Breeders Agricultural Co-op, both of which have security concerns about a public right-of-way in their back yards.

Some trail supporters want to work with those landowners — as well as the city of Sandy, which owns the golf course, and the Utah Department of Transportation, which owns an easement in the area — to build the trail along the banks of the river one way or another. Others say the trail should leave the river at that point and travel for a few blocks along 700 West — an idea Player said would never work.

Player's idea is to divert the trail from the river to a canal that branches off the river near 9000 South. It would rejoin the river trail at an already completed section in Midvale.