Most evenings between May and October, the gravel stretch of the Historic Union Pacific Rail Trail that runs past Silver Creek Estates carries the same rotation of neighbors: dog walkers timing their loop before dinner, a handful of riders working horses out from the Wasatch Trail toward Glenwild, and commuters on bikes cutting the short way home from Kimball Junction instead of taking Highway 40. It is the closest thing the neighborhood has to a Main Street, minus the storefronts.
It also happens to run through ground the federal government has spent decades trying to clean up. Silver Creek carries tailings left behind by more than a century of mining upstream around the Park City ridgeline, and this spring the Environmental Protection Agency released its plan for addressing what remains along the trail corridor. The plan is not a full cleanup. It cannot be, and the reason why says something useful about how this stretch of trail will actually change over the next year or two.
A Century of Mining Left More Than Scenery Behind
The affected area runs roughly six miles, from the Prospector neighborhood through the Snyderville Basin toward Interstate 80, tracking the length of Silver Creek itself. The tailings deposited along that corridor contain arsenic, lead, and zinc, byproducts of the silver mining that shaped Park City long before it shaped a ski resort. The EPA has been chipping away at this watershed in stages for years. Richardson Flat, the operable unit closest to Highway 40, was capped and contained in the 1990s and early 2000s under United Park City Mines, and the agency's most recent five-year review found that containment still performing as intended. The stretch getting attention now sits in the adjacent sections of the corridor, the parts still exposed to foot traffic, paw prints, and hooves every day.
Why the Agency Is Fixing the Trail Before the Floodplain
Here is the number that matters more than any other in this story. Full contaminant removal along the entire corridor would cost an estimated 69 million dollars. The EPA has roughly 17 to 20 million dollars available, raised largely through court settlements rather than a fresh appropriation. That gap is not a footnote. It is the entire reason the agency's preferred approach targets the sections closest to the rail trail surface, where tailings sit nearest to the ground people and animals actually touch, rather than attempting to address the full six-mile floodplain in one pass.
Put plainly, the EPA is triaging by contact, not by total contamination. A dog that spends thirty seconds a day nosing around trailside soil is a different exposure problem than tailings sitting undisturbed forty feet into a floodplain, and the funded plan is built around that distinction. One detail from the agency's own planning makes the logic even clearer. Rather than building new storage for the soil it plans to excavate along the trail, the EPA has been evaluating whether to truck it to Richardson Flat, the section already capped and proven stable. That would mean the newly disturbed sections get treated, while the material itself ends up back inside a containment system the agency already trusts.
What Residents Told the EPA in May
The tradeoffs in that math were not lost on the people who use the trail every day. At a public open house held May 11 at the Park City Library, concerns from residents centered on pet safety, general health, and the disruption construction would cause to the trail itself, according to reporting from local outlet TownLift. Those are not abstract environmental policy concerns. They are the exact questions a dog owner or a daily rider would ask before a single shovel goes into the ground: will the trail stay open, will dust and disturbed soil pose a bigger short-term risk than the tailings already sitting there, and how long will any of this take.
Where the Process Stands Now
The public comment period on the plan closed June 6. From here, the EPA reviews everything it received and issues what is formally called a CERCLA Action Memorandum, the document that finalizes which cleanup alternative moves forward. No date has been announced for that decision as of this writing, which means the agency could still adjust scope, sequencing, or the disposal plan for excavated soil based on what residents raised in May.
A few practical ways to keep track of where this stands:
- The Local newsletter from KPCW covers Summit and Wasatch county government news daily and has followed this story from its earliest planning stages.
- Residents can still direct questions to EPA Region 8's community involvement coordinator, Brent Campbell, whose contact information was published alongside the original plan.
- Park City's own Rail Trail Master Plan process, run through the Engage Park City platform, covers a separate but related set of trail improvements and is worth checking for anyone who wants the fuller picture of what is planned along the corridor over the next few years.
If You Use the Trail This Fall
Nothing about the current timeline points to an imminent closure of the Silver Creek segment. But it is worth knowing that when this agency has done trail construction here before, it has closed sections rather than working around foot traffic. In 2024, bridge replacement work between Prospector and Richardson Flat Road triggered a full detour onto a temporary gravel route nicknamed the Wag-On trail, which stayed in place for roughly two months while the bridges were rebuilt. If the current cleanup follows a similar construction pattern once a remedy is finalized, a comparable detour through this stretch is a reasonable expectation, not a certainty.
The Corridor Is Also Where the Neighborhood Actually Lives
It is easy to talk about a Superfund-adjacent cleanup in purely technical terms and forget that this same six miles of trail is stitched into how Silver Creek residents spend an ordinary week. Anaya's Market, which opened its Silver Creek location on Pace Place at the end of 2024, runs an eighty-seat taco eatery that has become a regular stop for anyone finishing a ride or a walk hungry. Silver Summit Cafe keeps a rotating daily special posted each morning for the diner crowd. The Equellness center, tucked along Silver Creek Road, hosts community events like its spring tack sale and wellness fair, drawing neighbors in for a look at the horses even if they do not own one themselves. And the Long Rifle and Maple trails that thread through the neighborhood connect riders directly into the Wasatch Trail and on to Glenwild's trail system, making the horse-friendly character of this place more than a listing description.
None of that changes because of an EPA action memorandum. But it explains why the fine print of a federal cleanup plan is not background noise here. It is a story about the same ground people cross on their way to get tacos.
For now, the plan stays what it has been since April: a targeted, funding-constrained approach that treats the ground closest to the trail first, with a final decision still pending and a comment period already closed. Anyone who walks, rides, or bikes this corridor regularly has more reason than most to keep an eye on when that decision lands.
Stein Eriksen Realty Group keeps close watch on the projects, plans, and public decisions shaping every corner of Park City and the Wasatch Back, from Deer Valley's resort core to neighborhoods like Silver Creek that rarely make the headlines until something like this comes along. If you have questions about how local infrastructure and land use decisions affect a specific property or neighborhood, contact us.
