The long walk to the lake

For most of its history Vineyard lived beside Utah Lake without really touching it. The shore belonged to dairy farms, then to the steel mill, and behind both stood a wall of reeds. When the dairies stopped grazing the lakeshore in the 1980s and 1990s, the invasive reed called phragmites spread thick across the wet ground at the water's edge.

The idea of a public path around the whole lake is older than the modern city. The Utah Lake Commission called a loop trail a high priority in its 2009 master plan, and starting in 2016 it worked with Utah County, the Mountainland Association of Governments and the state Department of Natural Resources to map a 98.2 mile route around the shore. In 2012 the trail existed only as three short, disconnected paved pieces, one of them alongside the Lindon Marina at Vineyard's northern edge.

A trail along the shore

Today the Utah Lake Shoreline Trail runs along Vineyard's shore from near the Lindon Marina to the south side of the city, with Vineyard City managing four of the lake's public access points. At Vineyard Beach in the north there are picnic tables and an accessible ramp to the sand. Sunset Beach Park, three acres at 385 North 300 West, has a playground, restrooms and a bike repair station. A trailhead at the west end of Center Street has parking, benches and a dirt path down a steep bank to a sandy beach, and a small lot at 170 South has a wooden ramp for launching kayaks.

In October 2023 the trail picked up a classroom. Botany students from Utah Valley University, working with the city under professor Ashley Egan, planted and labeled a one mile loop beside the trail near Sunset Beach Park. Each sign gives a plant's common name, scientific name and family, with a code linking to more. The plant walk was opened with a ribbon cutting on October 10, 2023.

Inland, the city has been stitching together a chain of parks. Vineyard lists seven: Gammon Park and Penny Springs Park at six acres each, Vineyard Grove Park at 18 acres, Sunset Beach Park, Vineyard Beach, and the small Rendezvous and Bridgeport parks. In 2023 the city adopted a plan for about 90 acres of park running down its central corridor, built from a survey that drew nearly 600 responses. It called for a dog park, a dozen pickleball courts and shade over the splash pad at Vineyard Grove; a heritage themed community center, garden and all abilities playground near Gammon Park; and quiet open space and an arboretum at the south end, a curl of land the plan calls the Fish Hook. The full build was expected to take about five years.

Closing the gaps

For years Vineyard's trail had a problem: it ended abruptly at both ends. The northern end was fixed first. On August 26, 2025, Lindon finished the last 0.85 miles of its Lindon Heritage Trail, which starts just south of the Lake Side power plant, crosses into Vineyard and meets the shoreline trail near the Lindon Marina. The finished route runs 6.5 miles. At the ribbon cutting, Vineyard Mayor Julie Fullmer said simply, "Our city lines are invisible."

A second connection is coming from the east. In May 2024 the Utah Department of Transportation picked a Vineyard project for $5 million from the first round of its new statewide trail network: a 2.1 mile paved path along the Vineyard Connector road from Interstate 15 to the lakeshore, running past the new downtown of Utah City.

Walkara Way

The southern gap is the hard one. Between Vineyard and Provo lie private lakeshore farms, and the plan to cross them grew from one landowner's idea. In 2018 Jake Holdaway, whose family had owned lakeshore land for six generations, proposed what he called Walkara Way, named for a Timpanogos chief: cattle would graze down the phragmites, landowners would give easements for trails and beaches, and the state would build the fences. In 2020 its backers described about 1,000 acres of shore opened between Provo and Vineyard for fishing, birding, hunting and camping, linked by a trail. Holdaway explained the name this way: "We do want to respect the heritage and history that happened there."

Money followed. The Legislature put $4.4 million into the project in 2021, and the Mountainland Association of Governments added another $4 million in 2023. Then the project stalled. In early 2022 it was caught up in the fight over a private company's plan to dredge islands out of the lake, and Holdaway's family, after finding a road drawn across their land in that company's investor materials, said in 2023 that they would no longer donate it. By April 2024 Walkara Way was moving again under the Utah Lake Authority's new leadership, with about six parcels totaling more than 600 acres on board. Holdaway, by then a city councilman, was running about 30 head of cattle on his own 55 acres to test whether grazing could hold back the reeds.

At the far end of that gap, the trail is already waiting. On October 26, 2024, the rebuilt Provo River Delta opened to the public, with a new Skipper Bay Trailhead, an observation tower and a 3.8 mile loop tying the delta to the Provo River Parkway Trail and Utah Lake State Park. Walkara Way's plan calls for a 3.25 mile trail from Vineyard to the delta. When it is built, a walker could follow paved trail from Vineyard's beaches to the mouth of the Provo River and up the river parkway toward the canyon.

A beach in waiting

Vineyard Beach is next. In the Utah Lake Authority's 2025 recreation access plan, it is called a strong candidate for more recreation amenities, with concepts first shown in 2022 for a marina, a marina village, a city hall, a bike park, a skate park, volleyball courts and a wider beach as Utah City is built beside it. For now the plan lists the plain problems: too little shade, too little sand, a gravel parking lot and no marked crossing over Vineyard Road between the lot and the shore.

The small fixes are already coming. In February 2026 the city council took up an $18,560 state outdoor recreation grant, won in partnership with the Utah Lake Authority, for benches, bike racks and bike repair stations along Vineyard's stretch of the shoreline trail. Residents had asked for benches in a city survey. City staff hoped to have them all installed by the end of September 2026.