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WOODS CROSS - The cultured stone entry monuments and the ornamental orchard of fruitless fruit trees alert the motorist that this isn't your usual suburban slab of asphalt.
The tall grasses and shorebirds bobbing across the horizon to Utah's inland sea cement the image of a nature park, but one with a no-nonsense purpose.
State road builders promised a prettier model for 21st century freeways, and they're about to deliver. Legacy Parkway is nearly 80 percent complete - enough that the cops have to chase party-crashers from the pavement routinely - and it will open in September. With a lower speed limit and no truck traffic, it portends a saner commute at the same time it siphons one-third of rush-hour traffic from Interstate 15 in Davis County.
The state projects 20,000 car trips will flow over the new road daily when it opens.
The 14-mile, four-lane road weaves through grasslands and marshes from northwestern Salt Lake City to Farmington while saving nearly 4 square miles of migratory bird havens from development near the Great Salt Lake's shores. The columns supporting bridges evoke a Yellowstone-style gateway, while a pathway along the full length gives visitors on foot, bike or horseback a closer encounter with the country. A visitor area and parking lot near the 500 South interchange at Woods Cross adjoin a boardwalk leading across a marsh that the state is creating.
"It urges you to connect instead of just whizzing by at 65 or 70 miles per hour," said Friends of the Great Salt Lake Director Lynn de Freitas. "It's supposed to be so visually exciting that you want to walk the trailway, you want to push your [stroller] with your twins and read the [educational] signs. You feel a part of what's there in everybody's backyard."
Her praise didn't come easily, and it seemed unlikely in 1996 when then-Gov. Mike Leavitt first suggested pushing an I-15 alternative through the internationally significant wetlands that sustain 5 million birds funneling past this oasis between mountain and desert. Those who loved the marshes recoiled and sued under the Clean Water Act, until Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. brokered a compromise narrowing the roadway, preserving more land, lowering the speed to 55 to avoid stressing birds and banning trucks with five or more axles.
Now de Freitas is busy helping the Utah Department of Transportation design signs and kiosks to help people learn things about the lake that they might never consider when stuck on I-15 farther east. And she's glad that commuter trains have begun running next to the parkway, and that money secured in the compromise has supported a study that appears to foreshadow light rail for southern Davis County.
"It does seem like we've turned the corner [toward] a larger community understanding that our air quality sucks: What are we going to do about it?" de Freitas said. "There is this legacy of Legacy Parkway that we should be pretty proud about."
State Sen. Greg Bell, R-Fruit Heights, was mayor of Farmington through much of the dispute. He sympathized with suburbanites grousing about bumper-to-bumper drives into the city, and he worried about the region being paralyzed if something closed the existing freeway in his county pinched between the Wasatch Range and the lake.
Now, Bell said, he hopes the state will build more parkways that emphasize Utah's contrasting vistas, and not just lane capacity.
"We don't have many parkways in the West," he said. "They're a common sight in the East and I really think they blend beautifully with the natural landscape." He named the George Washington Memorial and Blue Ridge parkways in Virginia - grassy, tree-lined divided roads where tourists sometimes drive just to enjoy the sights.
Legacy sets a precedent of lovely utility.
"It really shows off both the mountains to the east and the wetlands and the lake to the west," Bell said.
The state is permitted to disturb 103 acres of wetlands but may end up crossing just about 80 acres of the natural pollution filters and bird habitats, UDOT Project Director Todd Jensen said. In return, Legacy Nature Preserve Manager Eric McCulley must manipulate floodgates to create 12 new acres and maintain 760 acres that otherwise might have gone dry after construction.
McCulley also will conduct limited educational tours of the preserve, and the public can skirt it to look at birds and the views along a few miles of gravel trail across a pedestrian bridge from Woods Cross.
"This whole area was on the blocks for industrial or housing or golf courses," Jensen said, pointing west across the grassland to a post that houses one of Utah's most productive bald eagle nests. "They were going to build right up to the Jordan River floodplain."
The river that drains from the Salt Lake Valley into the lake ultimately will provide a link to a new world of trails for cyclists. Salt Lake City Mayor Ralph Becker said his budget, proposed last week, completes the city's portion of a Jordan River trail. That leaves about a mile to punch through Davis County and connect to the parkway's trail, tying most of the Wasatch Front together. Becker is working with Davis County officials in requesting federal money.
"We could have a pretty unbelievable trail system," Becker said.
The highway's double lanes in either direction cleave to separate elevations in places, and in others a median flooded by design harbors ibises and plovers, the stilted birds for which the lakeshore is revered, if not famous. On the north end, honoring nearby Fruit Heights, is a broad platform of fruit trees bred to bear no fruit so they won't encourage stopping. Once on the parkway, motorists will find just two exits before the end: at Parrish Lane in Centerville and 500 South in Woods Cross.
Notably absent is a soundwall or any kind of stark barrier on either side. A mere 3 feet of wire mesh on wooden posts - the sort of fence that might protect a garden - separates Legacy from its neighbors. The trail opens onto every community it touches.
"People can come literally out of their houses and get on the trail," Jensen said. "We want people to be able to walk along this so they can see what we're preserving."