Walk Thaynes Canyon Drive on any weekday morning this month and you will notice the new concrete underfoot before you notice anything else. It runs along the south side of the road, past the municipal golf course's driving range, wide enough for a jogger and a cyclist to pass without either one stepping into the gravel shoulder that used to be the only option. This is Phase I of the Thaynes Canyon Pathway Project, and it opened at a small ribbon-cutting ceremony on September 23, 2025, after breaking ground that spring.
What is less visible from the sidewalk itself is a decision the city made almost a year later, in June 2026, that quietly reversed the plan for what comes next. The next stretch of path, the one meant to carry the route from Thaynes Canyon Drive toward the resort along Three Kings Drive, was originally drawn up as a 12-foot multi-use path, matching what residents already walk on today. In a June 25 council meeting, city staff recommended something narrower instead: a six-foot sidewalk. Not because the budget shrank. Because the neighborhood asked for it.
What actually got built in 2025
Phase I was never meant to be dramatic. It covers roughly a third of a mile, running along Thaynes Canyon Drive from Three Kings Drive to State Route 224, then continuing as a sidewalk along Snow Creek Drive to the McLeod Creek trailhead. Park City engineer John Robertson described the early version bluntly as looking like a sidewalk to nowhere while it was still under construction, since the first segment did not yet connect to anything residents could walk or bike to directly.
That changed once the crossing at Snow Creek was finished. The path now links Thaynes Canyon Drive across SR-224 into Snow Creek Plaza, home to The Market at Park City and the breakfast spot Five5eeds, and onward to the McLeod Creek Trail and the Farm Trail beyond it. Council member Jeremy Rubell, who lives in the area, said at the opening that adoption of the path had already been fast. The project also came with a practical tradeoff residents had raised for years: it eliminated the informal dirt overflow parking that used to spill along the golf course side of the street, since the new paved surface left no room for cars to park on the shoulder.
Over 80 percent of Phase I's funding came from grants, tracing back to a 2019 Utah Department of Transportation award for biking and pedestrian improvements in the Thaynes Canyon and Three Kings corridor, with Summit County adding money later to keep future phases moving.
The plan that got scaled back
Phase II was supposed to finish the job. The original vision extended the same 12-foot multi-use path along Three Kings Drive, creating a continuous corridor from the golf course all the way to the base of the resort. Design work ran through 2025, with an alternatives analysis to follow in spring 2026, ahead of a construction start the city had already set for spring 2027.
Then came the resident feedback. Transportation Planning Manager Julia Collins told the council that people living along the corridor favored a narrower, lower-impact path over the wider one originally proposed.
"To have those pedestrians separated from the roadway, provide bicycle signage and safety awareness on the street, target roadway narrowing to accommodate that sidewalk."
That is Collins describing the tradeoff the city landed on: a six-foot sidewalk, separated from traffic, paired with signage and street narrowing rather than a full-width shared path. A temporary crosswalk is in place along the corridor through the fall while the permanent design moves forward, with construction still aimed at spring 2027. What changed in June was not the timeline. It was the width.
Here is the shape of the whole project side by side:
| Phase | Route | Width planned | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Phase I | Thaynes Canyon Dr to Snow Creek Dr, connecting to McLeod Creek Trail | 12 feet | Open since September 2025 |
| Phase II, original concept | Three Kings Drive to the resort area | 12 feet | Replaced after resident feedback, June 2026 |
| Phase II, revised | Three Kings Drive to the resort area | 6 feet | Recommended June 2026, construction still aimed at spring 2027 |
The pattern is worth sitting with. Most infrastructure fights in a resort town go the other direction, with residents pushing back against anything that narrows a road or adds friction for cars. Here the ask ran the other way. People on Thaynes Canyon Drive already have a 12-foot path in front of their homes and, according to the feedback the city collected, would rather the next segment stay modest than turn Three Kings Drive into a second version of the same thing.
What the path actually connects you to
None of this matters much in the abstract. It matters because of what sits at either end of it.
At the golf course end, Park City Golf Club remains the anchor of the neighborhood in both directions of the calendar. Designed by William H. Neff in 1962 and still municipally owned, the 18-hole, par-72 course posted 2026 rates ranging from $36 to $122 depending on season and holes played, according to a Park Record rundown published in July. In winter, the same fairways become the neighborhood's Nordic ski network, which is part of why Thaynes Canyon has always functioned as a four-season address rather than a seasonal one. The course also picked up a practical update tied to the same pathway project: a protective net installed along Thaynes Canyon Drive in late 2025 to shield walkers and cyclists from stray shots off the driving range, a small but telling sign that the city is treating the path as permanent infrastructure rather than an afterthought.
At the Snow Creek end, the path drops residents directly at a plaza that covers daily errands without a car. The Market at Park City anchors the strip with a full grocery counter, deli, and pharmacy, and Five5eeds next door has become one of the more talked-about breakfast counters in town. From there, the McLeod Creek Trail and Farm Trail extend the walk further into open space, both graded easy enough to make them a genuine before-dinner option rather than a weekend project.
For anyone who wants a harder outing, Iron Mountain sits just beyond the neighborhood's back edge. It is one of the more demanding hikes inside city limits, steep enough that locals treat it as a winter sled run once the snow settles in, which says something about how directly this neighborhood's geography shapes its calendar.
Why the smaller sidewalk is the real story
It would be easy to read the pathway project as a routine infrastructure update, the kind of thing that shows up in a city newsletter and gets forgotten. The more interesting fact is what the reversal reveals about the neighborhood itself. Thaynes Canyon is dense with long-tenured, full-time residents who use these streets daily, not seasonally, and when the city asked what they wanted for the next mile of pathway, the answer was not more capacity. It was less disruption. That is not the kind of preference that shows up in a market report, but it shapes exactly how the next two years of construction on Three Kings Drive will feel to anyone walking it.
The pathway will keep expanding on the same spring 2027 timeline the city already had in place. It will just do it at six feet instead of twelve, because the people who live along it said that was the version they actually wanted.
If you are watching this corridor because you already call Thaynes Canyon home, or because you are weighing what a quiet, golf-course-adjacent street in central Park City actually offers day to day, the team at Selling the Slopes tracks these changes as closely as we track the market itself. Reach out when you want the neighborhood read from people who walk it.
