I didn't grow up with fall. I grew up in Georgia, where October is basically August in a cardigan, and the leaves go from green to brown to gone and nobody makes a big deal about it. We moved to Utah in 2015 and I have been a little obsessed ever since.
Every September I get the same itch, and it's such a specific itch. It's the Gilmore girls one. Where you want a town square with a gazebo in the middle of it and a diner where somebody knows your order and a reason to wear the big sweater at 4pm on a Tuesday.
Utah can do a version of that. Nobody is going to drive through Provo Canyon and think they're in Connecticut. But the FEELING is here, and it's here for about six weeks, and if you don't write it down you'll blink and it'll be Thanksgiving and you'll have done none of it. Ask me how I know.
So here's where to point the car and when the leaves turn. And if you want to skip all of that, the 30 item list is down at the bottom.
Utah has a Stars Hollow, it's just spread out over three counties
The thing that makes Stars Hollow work on screen is that everything is walkable and everybody is out on the street. Utah isn't built like that, our towns are built around parking lots. But there are a handful of places here that get close, and they're all within about an hour of each other.
Midway is the closest thing we have. It's a little Swiss looking town in the Heber Valley with a real town square, chalet trim on half the buildings, and mountains sitting right on top of it. Go on a Saturday morning in late September and it's exactly the energy you're after.
Park City's Main Street in the second half of September, before the ski crowd shows up and while the aspens above town are still gold. Go early. Like 9am early, when the shops are opening and the street is quiet and cold.
Heber is worth a stop mostly for the train. The Heber Valley Railroad runs right along Deer Creek and through the canyon, and a slow train through fall color with kids who are not allowed to ask "how much longer" is a genuinely great two hours.
Spring City and Ogden's 25th Street are the two that people forget. Spring City is a tiny historic town in Sanpete County that looks like a movie set nobody bothered to build. Ogden's 25th is old brick and string lights and a farmers market that runs into fall.
Nobody is going to drive through Provo Canyon and think they're in Connecticut. But the feeling is here.
When the leaves actually turn in Utah
This is the part people get wrong, and it's the reason so many families drive up a canyon in mid October and find bare sticks. Utah fall doesn't happen all at once. It comes DOWN the mountain.
Mid September is the high stuff. Mirror Lake Highway over the Uintas and the Nebo Loop out of Payson go first, because they're sitting at nine and ten thousand feet. If you want gold aspens and you want them early, that's where you go.
Late September into the first week of October is the sweet spot for most of us on the Wasatch Front. The Alpine Loop, Big and Little Cottonwood, Guardsman Pass, Emigration Canyon. This is the week to take a day off if you can.
Mid October is the valley. The maples in your own neighborhood, the trees along the streets in Provo and Salt Lake, the orchards down south. By then the canyons are done and your front yard is the show.
One honest note for this year: we came out of a hot summer with really low snowpack, and the foliage people are saying colors may run a little early and a little less bright than usual. So if you were planning to go the second weekend of October, I'd move it up.
The drives, ranked by how little effort they take
The Alpine Loop is the one. It connects American Fork Canyon to Provo Canyon, it takes maybe ninety minutes if you don't stop, and you'll stop. There's a canyon fee on the American Fork side, and the loop closes once the snow comes, usually sometime in late October or November.
The Nebo Loop out of Payson is thirty five miles along the highest peak in the Wasatch and it's somehow always empty compared to the Alpine Loop. If you want the drive without the traffic, go here.
Guardsman Pass connects Big Cottonwood to Park City and it's the prettiest twenty minutes in the state at golden hour. It also closes for winter, so don't save it.
And if you only have an hour, drive Provo Canyon up to Sundance and ride the lift. You sit down, somebody else does the work, and you're above the aspens looking down at all of it.
The small town Tuesday stuff
The drives are the postcard, but the Gilmore feeling is really about the ordinary things you do over and over in the same six weeks every year. Utah is loaded with those.
Rowley's Red Barn in Santaquin for apples and cider donuts and a wagon ride, which is my favorite one of these by a mile. Hee Haw Farms in Pleasant Grove if you have littles. Cornbelly's at Thanksgiving Point in Lehi for the giant maze and all the noise. Jaker's Jack O' Lanterns in Springville once it's good and dark. The Scarecrow Festival at Thanksgiving Point, which is free to walk through and takes twenty minutes and my kids talk about it for a week.
Then there's the stuff that isn't an event at all, and honestly that's the better half of the season. Soup on the first day it drops under sixty, and the whole family on the couch under every blanket we own, and conference weekend in October in pajamas, and a football game where you freeze the entire time and love it anyway. Bread in the oven because the house finally feels cold enough to justify it.
That's the part you have to write down, because that's the part that gets skipped.
30 things for a Gilmore girl fall in Utah
Thirty, because that's how many slots are on the Stars Hollow list and I like when things match. Steal all of them or steal five.
- Drive the Alpine Loop on a weekday when nobody else is up there
- Cider donuts at Rowley's Red Barn in Santaquin
- Walk Midway's town square in the big sweater
- Ride the Sundance lift up and stay at the top longer than you planned
- Take the Heber Valley Railroad through the color
- Pick your own apples instead of buying the bag
- Park City Main Street at nine in the morning when it's still cold
- Find a gazebo and take the picture, that's the whole point
- Get lost in the maze at Cornbelly's
- Watch the sun go down over Utah Lake
- Drive the Nebo Loop before the snow closes it
- Buy the pumpkin from a farm stand, not the grocery store
- Read an entire book on the porch
- Hike to Stewart Falls when the aspens are gold
- Sit through a high school football game and freeze
- Make soup the first day it drops under sixty
- Walk the Scarecrow Festival at Thanksgiving Point
- Take the long way home through Provo Canyon for no reason
- Movie night with every blanket in the house on the floor
- Farmers market, and only buy things you can eat in the car
- Soak in the Homestead Crater in Midway
- Bake something with your kids and let them make the mess
- Wear the boots you have been saving since March
- Guardsman Pass at golden hour
- Watch conference in pajamas with the good breakfast
- Feed the ducks at a canyon pond
- Go for a walk after dark when the air finally smells like fall
- Try a bread recipe you have never made
- Write down what you're thankful for before Thanksgiving gets loud
- Hang the list somewhere everybody has to walk past it
Why the list part matters more than the ideas
I could give you a hundred ideas and you'd do four of them. I know because that was me for years. The season would start and I'd have all these plans in my head and then it would be November and we'd have gone to one pumpkin patch and I'd feel like I missed it.
What changed for us was putting it on the wall. Big. Where the kids can see it and check things off themselves and where I have to look at it every single time I walk to the laundry room. It turns "we should do that sometime" into a thing that's staring at you.
That's the whole reason Belle Bucket exists, honestly. The list on the wall is the thing that makes the season happen.
Make your own list
Our small town fall design is called Stars Hollow and it has 30 slots and you fill every one of them yourself. Print it big and hang it where everybody has to walk past it.
Make your list →Want the free one first? Grab the Gilmore Girl's Fall bingo card, or go see all the fall lists.
xo, Amy