"An elk herd: ‘thinking about crossing the road’"
- 6 days ago
- 4 min read
What a Park City police log reminds us about the gift of living here, and what it asks of us in return.
On a Thursday evening earlier this month, someone called Park City police to report roughly 25 elk gathered along S.R. 224 near Aspen Springs. The caller said the herd looked "like they are thinking about crossing the road." A few hours earlier that same morning, another herd had been reported near Aspen Springs Drive, and the night before, two more groups were spotted along the same stretch of highway, one of them near the McPolin Farm.
The paper ran it all under the police log as a wildlife sighting, something that happens a lot around here.
It's worth sitting with that for a moment. A herd of wild elk, 25 strong, paused at the edge of a state highway, alive in the dusk. Somewhere else in the country, that would be the entire evening news, and here it's a Tuesday. What a remarkable thing to be able to say.
The gift of living here
Park City is one of the increasingly few places in the American West where you can still watch a cow moose walk her calf across a meadow, where a herd of elk a hundred strong can come down in winter, where deer in the backyard are ordinary enough that nobody looks up from the coffee. Neighbors stop their cars to let them pass. Kids learn their names. Drivers swap stories about the big bull they saw near Quinn's Junction or the moose that wandered onto Main Street at midnight.
This isn't the case in most places anymore, especially in communities that grew fast without thinking about it, or in towns that paved over their migration corridors and came to treat wildness as nostalgia. Park City still has the real thing, and that's something to be genuinely grateful for. It's also something worth protecting on purpose.
What makes Park City, Park City
People here care fiercely about this place, and it shows in the open space preservation, in the barn at McPolin that a whole community rallied to save, in the silhouettes of deer and elk standing along Kearns Boulevard that someone put there because they decided wildlife deserved to be acknowledged even on the drive into town.
That same instinct is what this moment is asking us to lean into. The thing that makes Park City feel like Park City, the thing the world recognizes when it sees this town, isn't the buildings or the shops or even the ski runs. It's the living mountain the town sits inside of, the wildness that still walks through it, the way humans and animals share a place here without either one fully giving way to the other. Preserving that takes good decisions, made on purpose, by a community that knows what it has.
Honoring what we love
Other places have shown that when a community decides to act thoughtfully, real things change. Just up the road at Parleys Summit, the wildlife overpass has been a quiet triumph, with 97 percent of mule deer and 100 percent of moose that approach it crossing safely. Utah has been leading this work for fifty years. The tools exist, the expertise exists, and what's left is the conversation about what's right for S.R. 224 and the community's will to carry it through.
Last fall, Save People Save Wildlife, alongside Rock Design Associates, UDOT, the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, Park City Municipal, Summit County, and wildlife connectivity researcher Tony Clevenger, released the Phase 1 Park City Connectivity Report. It's an independent, science-based look at the S.R. 224 corridor between mile markers 7 and 9, the stretch that runs past the McPolin barn through the Snyderville Basin, and it's the first time this specific piece of road has had a blueprint built for it.
The report doesn't arrive with a finished answer, which is the point. It lays out a phased strategy that weighs mobility, aesthetics, and ecological function, because the goal is a solution shaped by Park City for Park City, one that fits this landscape and this community's values.
The invitation
A herd at Aspen Springs, thinking about crossing the road, is one of the most Park City scenes there is. It's also an invitation to notice, to be grateful, and to do the work that keeps this place the kind of place where scenes like that still happen a generation from now.
Park City has always been willing to do things intentionally. Preserving our open space wasn't an accident, and protecting the barn wasn't an accident either. The character of this town is the result of people who loved it enough to act on that love. The elk in the police log are asking the same question those earlier choices answered: are we paying attention, do we still know what we have?
We think Park City does, and we think there's something beautiful ahead in deciding, together, how to protect it. Safe passage for wildlife means safe passage for all.
