The many families who splashed their feet in the Seven Canyons Fountain at Salt Lake City’s Liberty Park for a generation will find it beautifully reimagined to give them a new relationship with water.
Shut off in 2017 with an eye on health and safety concerns and Utah’s persistent drought, the beloved rock depiction of the seven canyon waterways feeding into the Salt Lake Valley has been transformed and reopened, now called the Seven Canyons Refuge.
Tens of thousands of gallons no longer pulse through the former fountain’s stone veins every day.
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) People gather during the opening of Liberty Park's Seven Canyons Refuge.
Instead, the park feature is interactive and courses with birdsong and the sounds of rushing water and stories of park lovers. It has a series of rocking metal water feeders fashioned in a Japanese style known as shishi-odoshi, in a nod to one of Salt Lake City’s sister cities, Matsumoto.
The site’s familiar downward flowing channels are spotted with bronze perches, also fashioned in a Japanese tradition of repairing broken pottery, as well as with etched tiles on its pathways with symbols of Indigenous culture — all while nudging visitors to reflect and revere water’s life-sustaining gifts.
And though it runs dry, the tree-lined refuge was rain-soaked Thursday when scores of residents, city officials, art sponsors and leaders from the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation met there to unveil, celebrate and consecrate it.
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Rios Pacheco, a spiritual representative from the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation, leads city officials in a blessing of Liberty Park's Seven Canyons Refuge in Salt Lake City.
“We need to let our children know water doesn’t come from the tap. Water isn’t something that is just given to us,” said Shoshone tribal spiritual leader Rios Pacheco, after offering prayers and blessing each of the refuge’s seven creek beds and its Great Salt Lake basin with sacred tobacco.
“In our culture,” the tribal spiritual leader said, “we have different types of songs, prayers and dance, but most of it’s for the essential things in life. And the most essential thing is water.”
“That water,” Pacheco said, gesturing to the sky, “represents the tears of our Creator, because of the love he has for us.”
Reimagined and more water-sensitive
(Danny Chan La | The Salt Lake Tribune) The Seven Canyons Fountain at Liberty Park in 2003.
The original fountain was donated to the city by O.C. Tanner in 1993 and mimics in boulders, landscaping and stone conduits the paths that Mill Creek, City Creek, Red Butte, Emigration, Parleys, and Big and Little Cottonwood creeks take as they flow into the Jordan River and the Great Salt Lake.
It was a major kid-friendly draw to Liberty Park for nearly 25 years before it failed to meet county health codes and had to be turned off. Resurrecting the fountain was estimated to cost between $2 million and $4 million — to say nothing of consuming all that water each day.
The remake, which cost $857,968 from the city’s capital improvement budget, also strikes new chords of sustainability, stewardship and historic themes related to the valley’s ecosystems.
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Attendees at the opening of Seven Canyons Refuge in Liberty Park.
One of the original artists of the Seven Canyons Fountain, Stephen Goldsmith, worked in collaboration with the landscape architecture firm ArcSitio, along with city engineers and public-lands stewards and the Salt Lake City Arts Council, to create and design the reimagined version.
After almost eight years of public input, budgeting, design and construction work, its new and restored features are more tactile and immersive — and now open again.
Flows with ‘light and sound and touch’
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Ashlyn Davis, left, and her daughter Aurora Davis, 5, interact with one of the pieces of art that highlights native birds in Liberty Park's newly opened Seven Canyons Refuge.
Judging from the children and parents who clambered Thursday over its rocks and poured water from drinking bottles into its creek heads to watch it flow down, it has been restored as a gathering place.
Several of them scanned QR codes carved into the 18 perches dedicated to the calls of native bird species — and those songs rang out from their cell phones.
Kim Shelley, the city’s director of public lands, said the popular public art installation had evolved with community around it, “in a way that both honored the past and reflected Salt Lake City’s values.”
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall speaks during the opening event at Liberty Park's Seven Canyons Refuge, Thursday, Oct. 16, 2025.
Mayor Erin Mendenhall, who took flak over the fountain’s closure during her campaign for reelection, said it may no longer spout water, “but it still flows with light and sound and touch.”
“It’s a place that asks us to think about water,” the mayor said, “not as something that we use, but as something that we are connected to and that we cannot live without in a desert city like ours.”
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Brad Parry, vice chair for the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation Tribal Council, speaks at the opening of Liberty Park's Seven Canyons Refuge.
The refuge also acknowledges more fully the site’s ties to Utah’s Indigenous peoples. The Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation, whose ancestral homelands encompassed the area along with the Utes, was asked to contribute a set of newborn footprints for a concrete imprint on one of the art installation’s paths.
Bradley Parry, vice chair of its tribal council, recounted that his niece had a baby who did not live, known as Little Banksy, whose name in Shoshone means “moved too quickly or can’t catch him,” Parry said, “because he moved through life too fast.”
“His footprints are right here to welcome all the people,” Parry said, his voice laden with emotion. “That’s what this place means to the Shoshone Nation.”