Sand Hollow Trails

Sand Hollow State Park is mostly known for the red water reservoir and the OHV access to Sand Mountain, but a network of mountain bike trails runs across the park’s perimeter and connects to BLM land outside the park boundary. Twelve-plus miles of dirt singletrack with sandy connectors give riders a desert-flat alternative to the cliff-and-mesa terrain that defines most of the 435.

A bike network in an OHV park

The riding here is unusual for a state park — separated bike trails alongside one of the busiest OHV destinations in Utah. The bike trails are signed for non-motorized use, but the broader park area is shared, and on busy weekends riders need to navigate around side-by-sides on the access roads between trailheads. Most riders come during weekday mornings or in shoulder seasons when the OHV crowd thins.

Sand and how to ride it

The defining surface challenge is sand. The trail bed runs over wind-blown red sand for stretches, and tire pressure and momentum decide whether a section rides or walks. Locals run wider tires and lower pressure here than they would on the slickrock mesas. Newer riders sometimes underestimate the sand and burn out on what looks on a map like an easy ride.

The Sand Mountain edge

The bike trails skirt the western edge of Sand Mountain — the dune system that anchors Utah’s OHV culture — without crossing into the OHV-permitted dunes themselves. The visual is dramatic: pink-red dunes rising on the right, the reservoir’s red-blue water on the left, the cliffs of Hurricane to the north. It is one of the most photogenic flat-land rides in the 435.

Where Sand Hollow sits in the 435

Sand Hollow is most often visited for the water and the OHV scene; the mountain biking is the third reason to come. Riders who include Sand Hollow on a Hurricane trip get a different terrain palette than the cliff trails next door — sand and red water and dune edges instead of slickrock and cliff exposure. The state park entrance fee covers all uses; the campground and day-use pass adds a different schedule constraint than the BLM trails do.