Paul Jenkins was driving up Butterfield Canyon on the evening of July 22, revisiting the canyon he used to explore in high school, when the road started to feel wrong under his tires. He described the sensation like driving over a waterbed, and by the time he stopped the truck, half the road ahead of him had already dropped away. He later told ABC4, "I wasn't lucky, I was blessed."
That was six weeks ago. It's now September, the month a lot of Herriman households start planning the annual drive up Butterfield Canyon Road to watch the maples and oaks turn before the county gates the mountain for winter. This year, that drive may not happen at all, and the reason has less to do with the storm itself than with a calendar problem nobody's talking about yet.
What Actually Washed Out
A monsoon cell built over the Oquirrh Mountains on the evening of July 22 and dropped 0.7 inches of rain in a short burst at a weather station near the Kennecott Copper Mine. That's not a lot of water by most standards, but on a mountain road cut into loose soil, it was enough. By the next day, Salt Lake County confirmed a washout about 5.5 miles up the canyon, where the road narrowed to a passable strip roughly 8 feet wide before giving way entirely in spots.
The Tooele County Sheriff's Office posted the closure notice on July 23 after Salt Lake County notified them, since the damage sits on the Salt Lake County side of a road that crosses two counties. Barricades went up at the pass. Damage warning signs went up near White Pine on the Tooele side. Steven Kuhlmeier, Director of Public Works Operations for Salt Lake County, told Fox 13 what the county could and couldn't promise:
We don't have a timeline at this point.
As of the most recent public update in early August, that was still the case. Salt Lake County's own trail park page still listed the road closed to vehicle traffic, and nothing since has indicated a change.
Two Counties, One Canyon, No Shared Deadline
Here's the part that gets lost in most of the coverage. Butterfield Canyon Road leaves the west end of Herriman Main Street and climbs about 6.6 paved miles and 2,213 feet into the Oquirrhs before turning to graded dirt as Middle Canyon Road and dropping into Tooele County near White Pine campground. Two separate governments manage two separate halves of the same route. Salt Lake County owns the paved Herriman-side climb where the washout happened. Tooele County manages the dirt descent and the campground that stayed open the entire time.
That split is why the story reads as contradictory if you only catch part of it. The Tooele side is fine. Camping at White Pine never stopped. But none of that helps anyone trying to drive through from Herriman, because the blocked section sits on the Salt Lake County side, and the repair timeline rests entirely with a department that has, so far, declined to give one.
The bigger issue is the one almost nobody mentions: Butterfield Canyon Road gates itself every year, closing to vehicles from November 1 through June 1, storm or no storm. That's routine, and it has nothing to do with this washout. But it means the road only reopens this year if repair crews finish before the county closes the gate anyway. With September just starting, that leaves roughly eight weeks, and no public schedule has surfaced for when repair work on a mountain washout even begins, let alone wraps. A road that's "closed indefinitely" in July can, without anyone changing a headline, become a road that's closed until next June simply by running out the clock on a deadline that was already there before the storm hit.
If This Is the Drive You Take Every Year
For a lot of Herriman residents, this canyon isn't a bucket-list destination. It's the place you take the family photos in October, the detour on a Saturday afternoon when the leaves turn, the spot you send visiting relatives when they ask what to do for an hour. That routine is off the table this year for anyone hoping to reach the upper elevations, since the best color sits well above the washout and the road doesn't let you get there.
If you're checking conditions before heading up, go to Salt Lake County Public Works directly rather than trusting a mapping app or an old blog post. Search results for this canyon skew heavily toward undated photography write-ups and scenic-drive posts that have no idea a storm hit two weeks or two months ago. You can still drive partway up from the Herriman side before hitting the barricades at the pass, but there's no crossing through to Tooele County, and reaching White Pine or the Tooele-side trails this fall means going around through Tooele County rather than through the canyon itself.
Where the Color Still Shows Up This Year
The good news is that Butterfield isn't the only piece of the Oquirrhs accessible from Herriman. A few options that the washout doesn't touch:
- Yellow Fork and Rose Canyon, accessed from a separate trailhead off Rose Canyon Road, part of the same Southwest Canyons Trail Network that includes the Butterfield Trailhead Regional Park. The trail follows Rose Creek through shaded stretches with picnic areas along the way, and it's unaffected by anything happening on the paved road a few miles over.
- The Herriman hills trail system more broadly, which is getting easier to reach on its own timeline. A new trailhead is under construction on the west side along Juniper Trail Drive, with parking, restrooms, and a pavilion planned. It's not open yet this fall, but it's worth watching for next season as another way into the same range that doesn't depend on a single paved road holding up.
Neither of these replaces the specific experience of driving to the rim and looking down into the mine pit the way Butterfield lets you do. But if the goal is fall color and a walk in the Oquirrhs, the canyon isn't the only door in.
What This Month Actually Looks Like
Herriman's own calendar gives residents something concrete to plan around while the canyon question sits unresolved. Fall Cleanup runs September 8 through 12, the city's annual chance to get rid of bulk household items before the season turns. The Inflatable Dash is set for September 14. Neither one requires checking a county road status page first.
The bigger takeaway, though, is less about foliage and more about how much of daily life in a place like Herriman depends on decisions made by agencies most residents never think about. A road that starts at the end of Main Street and feels entirely local is, in practice, split between two counties with two separate authorities and two separate sets of announcements, and the gap between them is exactly where a temporary problem can quietly become a seasonal one.
That kind of detail, who actually controls what, and how a routine calendar interacts with an unplanned event, is the same kind of granular local knowledge that shapes how a neighborhood functions day to day, well beyond what shows up in a listing photo. It's the sort of thing Tricia Vanderkooi tracks closely for buyers and sellers across Herriman and the rest of the south Wasatch Front, because knowing how a place actually works matters as much as knowing what it looks like. If you're curious what your Herriman home is worth heading into fall, or thinking about what a move here or away from here might look like, get your free home valuation and start the conversation with someone who pays attention to the details that don't make headlines.
