The Tushar Mountains: Utah's Highest Peaks Almost Nobody Knows

The Tushar Mountains are a volcanic range east of Beaver in south-central Utah that rise past 12,000 feet, making them the third-highest range in the state after the Uinta Mountains and the La Sal Range — and the tallest peaks anywhere in Utah south of the Uintas. Their high point, Delano Peak, reaches about 12,169 feet. Most people have never heard of them, because the interstate that runs right past their western foot gives you no reason to look up.

That is the strange thing about the Tushars. Tens of thousands of vehicles a day roll up I-15 through Beaver, and the drivers see a wall of green-and-gray mountains off to the east and keep going, sure that the real high country is somewhere farther north near Salt Lake. It isn’t. The peaks they’re glancing at stand higher than anything in the Wasatch. The Tushars just don’t advertise.

Where they are and why they look like Colorado

The range sits east of Beaver, about 190 miles south of Salt Lake City, straddling the line between Beaver and Piute counties. Drive up State Route 153 out of Beaver and the road climbs from high desert into aspen and spruce, then breaks out onto rolling alpine tundra that looks nothing like the red rock most people picture when they think of southern Utah. Broad grassy summits, snowfields that hang on into July, marmots on the talus. It reads more like the San Juans of Colorado than the slickrock two hours south.

There’s a reason for that. The Tushars are volcanic, not the layered sandstone of Zion and Bryce. The peaks were built between 22 and 32 million years ago by a run of eruptions violent enough to blow the tops off entire mountains. One of the biggest sources was the Mount Belknap caldera, a collapsed volcano that fed repeated rhyolite eruptions across the range. Mount Belknap itself still stands 12,137 feet high on the rim of the old crater. Everything you hike up here is the eroded stump of something that once exploded.

Delano Peak: the easy 12,000-footer

Delano Peak is the roof of the range and, improbably for a mountain this tall, one of the friendlier summits in Utah to reach on foot. The standard route starts near Big John Flat off Forest Road 123 and climbs the peak’s wide west ridge. It’s roughly a mile and a half up, gaining about 1,500 feet, on gentle grades through open tundra to a rocky summit with a register where you can sign your name. No technical scrambling, no exposure that will stop a fit hiker. You start high because the road already delivered you above 11,000 feet, and you finish standing on the highest ground in two counties.

The catch is the same one every high peak carries. You are above treeline the entire way, which is glorious at nine in the morning and genuinely dangerous at two in the afternoon when July thunderheads build. Utah’s monsoon runs through midsummer, and lightning on an open ridge is not a risk you negotiate with. Start at first light, be off the top by noon, and watch the sky the whole way.

The flowers are the whole point right now

Time it for the back half of July and the west ridge is not just green, it’s loud with color. The Tushar tundra grows the kind of tiny, ground-hugging alpine flowers that most people associate with the Arctic — the same families that bloom in northern Alaska — and mid-to-late July is when they peak. Paintbrush, columbine, and a low carpet of alpine bloom run right up the slope you’re climbing.

Utah’s biggest goat herd lives up here

Watch the high rocks and you’ll likely see white. The Tushars hold the largest herd of mountain goats in Utah, an animal that isn’t even native to the state. Wildlife managers transplanted goats onto this alpine tundra in 1986, and the herd has grown to somewhere around 200 to 300 animals. The broad, grassy high country is close to perfect habitat for them, and Delano’s ridge is one of the more reliable places in Utah to watch shaggy white goats pick across a skyline at 12,000 feet.

Eagle Point: skiing the range nobody skis

The Tushars carry a ski resort almost as quietly as they carry everything else. Eagle Point sits high in the range about 17 miles up SR-153 from Beaver, with a base at 9,100 feet and a summit near 10,600, roughly 650 skiable acres, and more than 350 inches of snow in a good year. It runs on a schedule closer to a private club than a resort — open a handful of days a week through the season — which is exactly why the people who find it guard it. In summer the same terrain turns into lift-served mountain biking and a jumping-off point for the tundra above.

The Canyon of Gold

Drop down the range’s east side toward Marysvale and the story turns from rock to people. Bullion Canyon, about five miles up a dirt road from town, earned the nickname “the Canyon of Gold.” The first prospectors panned stream-worn gold nuggets out of Pine Creek here in 1865. By 1868 the Ohio Mining District was organized, and its main camp, Bullion City, swelled to 1,651 residents at its 1880 peak — a real town of hotels and saloons tucked into a canyon at 8,000 feet.

The gold thinned, the town shrank, and mining sputtered on until the Bully Boy Mill shut for good in 1938. But the canyon didn’t erase itself. The Forest Service laid out a self-guided “Canyon of Gold” driving tour with eight roadside stops, and a quarter-mile walking loop called Miners Park threads past sixteen displays of old equipment, reconstructed workings, and refurbished cabins, including the 1920s Dalton Cabin and the Bully Boy Mill still standing above the road. It is one of the better places in Utah to walk straight into 19th-century mining history without a guide or a ticket.

What most people get wrong about the Tushars

They assume tall means hard. Delano is a walk-up. They assume southern Utah means red rock and heat, and then find snow in July and 30-degree relief from the valley floor. And they assume a range this high must be crowded, because the Wasatch equivalent would be. It isn’t. On a July weekday you can have a 12,000-foot summit close to yourself, which in modern Utah is close to a miracle.