Provo Outdoor Activities
Recommended Outdoor Activities by Groupon Customers
When Utah High Adventure's staff members head into work, they don't sip coffee during meetings or ride the elevator up to an office on the ninth floor. Instead, they crash through raging whitewater rapids and rappel down the sides of canyons against a backdrop of sun-soaked red rocks. Years of training and education have earned them the certification and expertise to lead other thrill-seekers on rock climbs, which is more satisfying than scaling the granite backsplash of a neighbor's fancy kitchen. They also guide mountain-bike rides across Utah's rippling alpine trails. During the spring, summer, and fall months, the company hosts weeklong tours into the wild, which include lodging and equipment.
Mountains echo with the clicking of hooves on rocks as mountain vegetation waves in the breeze and the sun glistens on snow-dappled trails. Schools of fish scatter as a pair of slick rubber boots parts the waters—a fisher wading through thick river sediment before casting a line into the current. Rocky Mountain Outfitters' experienced outdoorsmen usher customers through all manner of seasonal wilderness adventures, including fly-fishing on the Provo River, snowmobile tours, and horseback riding along mountain trails. Many tours run through Soldier Hollow Valley, which played host to the 2002 Winter Olympics.
Visitors may encounter roving wildlife such as snow rabbits, moose, and fawns frolicking through varied landscapes for memorable photo ops or police sketch-artist renderings. Adventure packages combine more than one outdoor activity and include the Reins and Train adventure, a role-playing tour that merges a train trip with a horseback trail ride. Depending on the season, guests can board traditional wagons or horse-drawn sleighs towed by teams of clydesdales, belgians, and spotted draft, or they can lasso free-range dinner rolls during Old West–style outdoor meals.
Trees sway with the breeze alongside the fairways at the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail. A fierce wind whips off the Pacific Ocean, knocking drives off-course at Pebble Beach’s famous 18th hole. At Global Indoor Golf, players take on the signature challenges of 66 international golf courses without leaving the comfort of their hitting bay. Instead, they queue up the course of their choice on the bay’s control monitor and watch as the terrain takes shape on a 14-foot screen, with the slopes, swale, and likelihood for seismic activity accurately recreated via advanced computer technology. Using their own clubs or the center’s complimentary set of TaylorMade R11s, players hit golf balls off an artificial turf mat into the screen, where two 360-degree curtains of infrared light-wave technology capture the golf ball’s flight information and spit back instant feedback on the shot’s flight data. The entire experience—from choosing a dream course, to sipping on between-shot beers in the lounge-like setting, to screaming “fore” in binary code—does away with the hassles commonly associated with real golf, such as uncooperative weather, hefty greens fees, and difficulty attaining a tee time.
A living museum of rare and important flora, Red Butte Garden covers more than 100 acres of verdant natural and display gardens, walking paths, and hiking trails. Seasonal events—from sponsored camping nights and family picnics to celebrations of the winter solstice—often take place among the flowers as well as educational programs led by amateur and expert gardeners that focus on plants such as orchids, lilies, and bonsai trees. During the warmer months, the Garden's outdoor concert series features popular musical performers, their guitar strings buzzing like the bees that water the flowers with tiny buckets one by one.
Park City was founded as a mining town, filled with miners that purportedly drank, gambled, frequented brothels, and committed crimes. Park City Ghost Tours’ guides delve into this illicit history during 70-minute walking tours. They investigate the sites most known for hauntings and chills while relaying the harrowing history of each. Tours begin nightly at 8 p.m., when the sun is thoroughly below the horizon and it gets harder to tell the difference between a zombie and a parking meter.
The paranormal investigators at Grimm Ghost Tours get up close and personal with Salt Lake City’s most infamous specters during their bone-chilling ghost tours. On these tours—which helped them win the A-List Award for Best City Tour in 2012—they guide guests toward local haunts while sharing the city’s grisly past in true tales of murder, mystery, and violence. Groups may leave the city limits behind during the Outer Reaches tour, shuffling off to the unimaginably dark corners that were once Ted Bundy’s hunting grounds. Guides also tell the tainted history of other spooky local sites, sending chills down the spines of guests who explore old Fort Douglas, the Hancock mansion, and the haunted scotch bottles of the Premiere Gentile Gentlemen’s Club. All of Grimm’s paranormal jaunts combine aspects of a bus and walking tour, quickly shuttling those with a morbid curiosity from one site to the next.
For participants looking for a more intense paranormal experience, Grimm Ghost Tours offers ghost hunts at a haunted site, during which they teach guests the techniques and mortal perils of the ghost-hunting business. Once the sun sets, the brave guests join their tour guides as they use specialized equipment to scour their destination for clues and signs of life after death.
