Best Hikes in Utah

Utah's ranked summits split into three real ranges rather than one. Ten of the fifteen sit within about 25 miles of each other in the High Uintas Wilderness, part of the Uinta Mountains — an unusual east-west trending range, the highest in the contiguous United States running that direction, built from Uinta Mountain Group bedrock 770 to 742 million years old. Kings Peak, 13,528 feet, anchors that cluster as both the group's high point and Utah's official state high point; South Kings Peak, its lower shoulder, sits less than a mile away. About 173 miles southeast, four more — Mount Peale, Mount Mellenthin, Mount Tukuhnikivatz and Mount Waas — form the La Sal Mountains above Moab, a genuinely different kind of mountain: laccoliths, where magma intruded under the Colorado Plateau's sedimentary layers 29 to 27 million years ago and domed them upward without ever reaching the surface. Mount Timpanogos, the group's lone outlier, sits apart from both — 72 miles from Kings Peak and 187 miles from Mount Peale — in the Wasatch Range above Provo and Orem, the second-highest Wasatch summit after Mount Nebo and, by trail traffic, probably the single most popular hike in this entire list. Kings Peak and South Kings Peak tie as the shortest hikes in the group at 1.4 miles; Kweeyahgut Peak and Explorer Peak tie as the longest at 14.6 miles. 10 more Utah summits are already queued in the database — these 15 are simply the ones with a confirmed route and elevation profile today.