Walk the paved path through Highland Glen Park on any September evening and you will pass runners, a few cyclists coasting downhill from Cedar Hills, someone teaching a kid to ride without training wheels, and at least one dog that has clearly done this loop a thousand times. Almost none of them are thinking about what they are walking on top of.
The trail has a name for a reason most people never look up: Murdock Canal Trail. It is not a metaphor. There is an actual canal under the pavement, and it explains more about how this stretch of Highland works than the view of Mount Timpanogos does.
A Canal Before It Was a Trail
The Murdock Canal was built between 1910 and 1913, part of a broader push to irrigate what was then dry, largely unfarmed land across Utah County. It was named for Joseph Murdock, a local figure who pushed the irrigation project forward. For a century, that canal ran as an open ditch, carrying water south from the mouth of Provo Canyon toward the northern end of the valley.
The open ditch went underground in the early 2010s, when the canal was enclosed in pipe for water efficiency and safety. Once the water was contained below grade, the surface above it was free for something else. That something else opened in May 2013: a paved, multi-use path that now runs close to 17 miles, connecting seven communities across Utah Valley, from the mouth of Provo Canyon in the south to Thanksgiving Point in the north. Highland is one of the seven.
This is worth sitting with for a second. The flat, wide, gently graded trail that makes Highland's stretch of the Murdock so easy to bike or push a stroller down is flat because it was engineered to move water evenly across a landscape that slopes toward Utah Lake. The trail didn't get built and then happen to be flat. It's flat because the canal beneath it had to be.
Highland's Two Entry Points
Highland has two formal trailheads on the Murdock system, and they serve different parts of the city.
- Highland Glen Murdock Trailhead, inside Highland Glen Park itself, gives direct access to the park's pond, playground, splash pad, and picnic areas before continuing along the canal route.
- Mitchell Hollow Park, a separate access point on the north side of the city, connects riders and walkers heading toward Lehi and the Point of the Mountain without routing them through the park.
Highland Glen Park sits on roughly 37 acres near Lone Peak High School, and the Murdock Canal Trail runs directly through it before continuing southeast toward American Fork, Pleasant Grove, Lindon, and Orem. If you have ever wondered why the trail through the park feels different from the stretch along Alpine Highway just north of it, the answer is that the park section was built to double as both a canal corridor and a neighborhood gathering space, while the sections further out were built purely as connective infrastructure.
Fall Is When the Pond Does Something Different
Highland Glen Park's pond gets most of its foot traffic in summer, when swimming and paddling are the draw. Fall changes the crowd and the pace. Fishing tends to be best early in the morning or late in the afternoon this time of year, and the pond itself is small enough that it fills up fast, so arriving before the rest of the neighborhood wakes up is less about solitude and more about actually getting a decent spot along the bank.
The trees around the pond and along the canal corridor also do more work in October than they do in July. The park's shade cover, which mostly serves to cool people down in summer, turns into the main visual draw once the color starts to shift. If you have only ever seen this stretch of trail during a hot afternoon bike ride, the same half mile in late fall looks like a different park entirely.
If you're heading out for a morning walk on the Murdock before the pond crowds in, Porch Coffee is worth the short detour beforehand. It has built a local following less for speed and more for the kind of unhurried, book-lined atmosphere that makes it a legitimate stop rather than a drive-through afterthought.
The Fixture That Isn't Imported
A lot of neighborhood content this time of year defaults to generic seasonal filler: a pumpkin patch that could be anywhere, a corn maze two counties over. Highland actually has its own long-running fixture, and it's worth knowing the shape of it before the calendar fills up with everyone else's version of fall.
Trick-or-Treat Street is Highland City's own event, held at Splash Pad Park with local businesses and community groups handing out treats along a route built specifically for families. Entry is through the south gates, marked by a large orange arch, and the path through the park is designed to be accessible for strollers, wheelchairs, and wagons. Scooters and bikes are asked to stay home for this one, which tells you the event is built around foot traffic and slow movement rather than a race to collect the most candy. Overflow parking runs along the south side of City Hall when the main lot fills.
It's a small detail, but it matters if you're planning around it: this isn't a festival trucked in for the season. It's Highland's own event, run by the city, in the same park that hosts the splash pad kids use all summer and the Santa visit that follows later in the season.
What the Trail Is Actually Telling You
The Murdock Canal Trail gets treated like scenery: a nice flat place to log miles with a mountain view. But the reason it exists, the reason it's flat, and the reason it runs exactly where it does all trace back to a 1910s irrigation project most people walking it today have never heard of. That's not trivia for its own sake. It's a reminder that the infrastructure shaping daily life in a place like Highland is usually older, more deliberate, and more buried than it looks from the surface.
Fall is a good time to notice it. The crowds thin out, the light gets better for actually seeing the trail instead of just getting through it, and the neighborhood's own calendar, from the pond's slower rhythm to Trick-or-Treat Street at Splash Pad Park, starts running on its own schedule instead of summer's.
If you're already walking this trail every week, none of this changes your route. It just changes what you're thinking about the next time you cross one of the underpasses and realize there's a hundred-year-old canal running quietly beneath your feet.
For more on what makes this part of Utah County worth knowing, Joshua Sterling keeps an ongoing series of neighborhood guides for Highland and the surrounding Wasatch Front communities. If you ever want to talk through what's happening in the local market alongside the local trail system, reach out anytime.
