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ROSE PARK—When West Jordan Mayor Dirk Burton was growing up in Kearns, his father worked for months to build his own fiberglass canoe.
“I remember him working on it in the back yard,” Burton said. “He decided to test it in the Jordan River.”
Burton remembers pushing through the overgrowth around the river with his father. And once in the water, he said, the pair were frequently compelled to pull the canoe out and portage around obstacles in their way.
But on Thursday, speaking to reporters steps away from a recently-restored stretch of the Jordan River, Burton remarked on the “fantastic changes” that have occurred along the river corridor in the years since that childhood memory and promised the best is yet to come .
“You think the past is exciting? Wait until you see what the future has to bring for us,” said Burton, who is also chairman of the Jordan River Commission.
Burton was among the speakers at a kickoff for the Get to the River Festival, a monthlong celebration of the Jordan River Parkway, now in its 9th year and running through September and into October. The festival sees cities, nonprofit organizations and private stakeholders in three counties partner on activities and projects around the river and the paved walking and biking trail that accompanies its roughly 40-mile ribbon of critical greenspace between Utah Lake and the Great Salt Lake.
“You can think of it as our walking and biking superhighway,” said Ari Bruening, CEO of Envision Utah. “This is a place to recharge and rejuvenate, a place to get exercise and it’s a place, even, to travel.”
Development around the parkway has kicked into high gear since the completion of the paved trail in 2017—the now-named Archuletta Bridge between 200 South and North Temple was the final piece—with increased public investment in adjacent parks, mileage markers and wayfinding signs, as well as major infrastructure projects around riparian rehabilitation, regional trail and transit connections, boat launches and river-oriented business and residential design.
But while access to, around and on the river has vastly improved, it remains mired in environmental challenges stemming from decades of neglect, diversion, pollution, climate change and the impact of illegal camping, particularly in the Salt Lake City segment.
“Like most urban streams, the Jordan River has water quality issues,” said Jodi Gardberg, a state watershed protection manager. “We’re at the bottom of the Utah lake and Jordan River watersheds, and pollutants and accumulation are happening upstream. Drought exasperates these issues.”
This year’s river festival coincides with the release of the Jordan River Commission’s new “Blueprint”—or master plan—which will guide river planning and projects for the next decade or more. The original Blueprint Jordan River, in 2008, led to the creation of the commission and catalyzed the completion of the parkway trail. And organizers say the new document aims to extend the vision of the river beyond its banks and to the canyon streams, city stormwater systems and even broader socioeconomic realities that all end up trickling down, so to speak.
“What we’ve highlighted in this update to the Blueprint Jordan River is that you can’t address the river without looking at the entire watershed,” said Jordan River Commission executive director Soren Simonsen. “It takes a village and it takes an entire region to address some of these big challenges—like the river, like the homeless community and homelessness in general.”
Simonsen noted the increased attention being paid to the state’s water issues, and particularly around the dangerously low levels of the Great Salt Lake. The Jordan River is a microcosm of those state-level water issues, he said.
“The Jordan River is one of the major tributaries to the Great Salt Lake,” he said, “so if the river’s not healthy—which it’s not in some ways because of diversions and water use—the lake’s not healthy.”
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Among this year’s Get to the River Festival events are weekly afternoon paddle tours on Fridays, beginning September 2, various biking and walking tours and a day of service on September 10. Concluding the festival, on the 1st and 2nd of October, will be a beer garden at Salt Lake City’s historic Fisher Mansion, which is currently under rehabilitation and is planned to eventually host kayak rentals and other river-based activities.
“We’ll be planting, we’ll be weeding, pulling goat heads and puncturevine and thistle and all kinds of things,” Simonsen said. “But also just enjoying and socializing using this incredible resource that just continues to get better and better.”
A full calendar of events can be found at gettotheriver.org.
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