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Draper Journal

SunCrest’s new spacious and picturesque park

Nov 21, 2019 05:46PM ● By Mimi Darley Dutton

Draper’s newest park, sitting on six acres in SunCrest, overlooks Utah Lake. (Mimi Darley Dutton / City Journals)

By Mimi Darley Dutton | [email protected]

Sitting on six picturesque acres overlooking Utah Lake and the valley, Draper City’s new park in SunCrest has a lot to offer residents of all ages. 

“It has the most spectacular view of any park in our Draper park system. It’s really amazing,” said Rhett Ogden, Draper parks and recreation director. 

Located at 15350 South Traverse Ridge Drive, the park opened Oct. 16 with a ribbon-cutting ceremony, following six months of planning and one and a half years of construction work. 

The park offers two pickleball courts, a large playground area for children that has play equipment, climbing structures and slides as well as swings, and a group pavilion that holds up to 80 people and can be rented through Draper’s parks and recreation department. It also offers two picnic tables, each with their own pavilion cover for shade, as well as a ¼ mile paved path around the perimeter of the park so walkers and runners can measure their miles. 

There are about 1,200 homes in SunCrest whose population this park will help serve. “It’s a Draper City park so any residents are welcome to use it. We’ve known for a while that one of our goals was to get a nice area park in SunCrest, so this will be a great addition. It’s a place they can exercise and it has playground features you won’t find in any of the other 40 parks in Draper,” Ogden said. 

Though challenging, the city worked to take advantage of the existing landscape to build the park. “We used the different elevation gains to have a nice, unique playground, and we were able to use a lot of the onsite boulders. We uncovered some beautiful rocks that we were able to save and implement in different areas of the park. It turned out really unique,” he said. 

Barbara Gibby lives nearby and can see the park from her house, so she’s noted a lot of activity happening since it opened. “We were anticipating it for a long time and were delighted when it was finished. We love it,” Gibby said. 

Kari Rodgers is also a SunCrest resident making use of the new park. “It’s just nice to have a great park up here,” she said.

Gibby has made use of the pickleball courts, and both Gibby and Rodgers like the flat, paved walking path as an alternative to walking their hilly neighborhood. 

This was a park that might not have been, according to Ogden. He said the property was once slated to be residential and then at one time it was going to be a salt dome for the public works department. “I think we ended up with a really neat property,” he said.