Your Highland Fling Weekend, Read Like a Local: Heritage Night, the Caber Toss, and Where to Disappear Between Acts
July 9, 2026
July 9, 2026
If you live in Highland, you already know the last weekend of July is not really a festival. It is a civic holiday the city hosts for itself, staged inside a 6.6-acre park, and the interesting question is not whether to go. The interesting question is which of the three distinct events layered onto the same lawn you actually want.
Because Highland Fling runs Thursday, July 30th through Saturday, August 1st, 2026, and the programming on those three days is not a continuous celebration. It is Heritage Night, then a youth-focused Friday, then a Saturday that opens with a Scottish athletics competition and closes with a Fleetwood Mac tribute act and fireworks. Treating them as one event is how residents end up exhausted by Saturday afternoon.
The city's own framing is worth taking at face value. Thursday's schedule pairs a 4:30 to 8:30 p.m. Scottish Village and vendor row with a Fireman Fundraiser Dinner from the Lone Peak Fire Department, an interactive blacksmith demonstration, and a car show run in partnership with J.C. Hackett. Celtic dancing from Barclay School of Dance and Archibald Academy of Dance runs 5:30 to 6:00 p.m., followed by an Earth Wings Bird Show and the Synkofa Celtic Band closing the night.
The reason the Heritage Night framing matters is baked into the city's origin story. Highland was probably named by Scottish immigrants who said the terrain reminded them of their Beloved Scottish Highlands, and the Fling honors that heritage and the strength of those who settled here. That is not window dressing on the schedule. It is the reason the Games exist, the reason a pipe band closes Thursday, and the reason Saturday morning begins with a caber toss instead of a pancake breakfast.
If you have not been in a few years, the practical read is this: Thursday is the adults' night. The programming assumes a longer attention span and a willingness to stand near a blacksmith for twenty minutes. Bring the kids for the bird show at 6, then rotate them out.
Saturday morning and Saturday night have almost nothing to do with each other, and locals who plan around that fact have a much better weekend.
The morning event is the Games. From 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. at Heritage Park, Utah Heavy Athletics athletes compete in traditional Scottish events including the Caber Toss, Weight for Height, Stone Put, Weight for Distance, the State Hammer Championship, and the Sheaf Toss for Height. Between events, tours run through the historic DUP Pioneer Cabin in Heritage Park, where you can see pioneer artifacts and learn about Highland's early history.
The night event is a concert with pyrotechnics. Here is where reading the bill closely pays off:
Saturday, August 1, is Highland Fling's Concert in the Park featuring Fleetwood Visions, a Fleetwood Mac tribute band, with Ryan Shupe opening with high-energy bluegrass, followed by a fireworks finale.
Ryan Shupe opening for a Fleetwood Mac tribute is a genuinely thoughtful pairing for a city named by Scots. Bluegrass has direct instrumental lineage to Celtic folk. If you have kids who have never sat still for live music, Shupe is the set to arrive early for. If you are showing out-of-town family what a Utah suburban summer sounds like, this is the ninety minutes.
The 10:00 a.m. Mayor's Welcome sits between the two Saturdays, opening the celebration with introductions of the Grand Marshal and City Council members. It is short. Residents who go tend to stay for the Games; residents who skip it tend to arrive after 2 p.m. and camp on the concert lawn.
Heritage Park is 10400 N Alpine Highway, and by Saturday afternoon the parking situation is what you would expect. The advantage of living in Highland is that the city's trail network gives you three legitimate ways to reset between events without driving anywhere.
Hog Hollow Creek from Beacon Hill Park. This is the shortest escape. The Hog Hollow Creek Trail is a hand-built singletrack that follows Hog Hollow Creek, and the official trail is a mile long, extending from Beacon Hill Park to join Hog Hollow just above the Angel's Gate trailhead. Park is at 5959 W Beacon Hill Blvd. Twenty minutes up, twenty minutes back, and you have not seen a kilt.
Angel's Gate at Spring Hollow. For a longer reset before the concert, the lower route from Alpine into Highland offers either the singletrack Hog Hollow Creek trail or the wide easy Hog Hollow trail, which rejoin at the mouth of the canyon near the Angel's Gate trailhead in Highland. The usual riding season is April through November, so late July is prime.
Highland Hollow, behind Smith's. This is the one guests never find. The trailhead is a small parking lot on Canterbury Drive, tucked behind a Smith's Marketplace, and the gulch below the store feels genuinely disconnected from suburbia. The main path diverges into trails with names like Knight Rider and Gregg's; Knight Rider winds close to the creek under a canopy of trees, and in winter it takes on an aesthetic describable only as Norman-Rockwell-meets-Peter-Brugel-the-Elder. In late July it is shaded and cool by mid-afternoon.
Murdock Canal Trail for the flat recovery walk. If the Games have left everyone in your household with sore feet, the paved option is right there. The 18-ish-mile trail runs from Clubhouse Dr. at Thanksgiving Point down to 800 N. in Orem, is paved, multi-use, and has water and bathroom facilities every few miles. About 4 miles from the northern trailhead, the trail runs tangentially through Highland Hollow, which means you can pick it up from the same Canterbury Drive lot.
The point of listing these is not to catalog trails. It is that Highland residents have a real structural advantage over anyone driving in for the Fling: your reset button is a five-minute drive from the park. Use it between the caber toss and the concert and you will still have the energy to stand for fireworks.
The Fling does not exist in isolation. That same weekend, the World Folk Festival runs July 30 through August 1 in Springville, bringing performers from around the world for music, dance, and culture, and Santaquin's Orchard Days runs July 26 through August 2 with a multi-day rodeo, games, and food. If your household is split between people who want the Fleetwood Visions set and people who want a rodeo, the calendar is on your side.
The Fling's differentiator is that it is a community favorite featuring an art show, family activities, and one of the most visually stunning highlights of the summer, hot air balloons rising over the valley. Balloon launches at community festivals in this county are typically tied to early morning wind windows, which is why the Games' 9 a.m. start time and the balloon flight windows tend to overlap. Look up before you look at the athletes.
A brief field guide for the relative who has flown in and wants the "authentic Highland" experience:
Highland is a city where the calendar tells you more about what living here is like than any listing description will. A weekend that opens with a Scottish village vendor row and closes with a tribute band and fireworks is a specific kind of place. It is also, functionally, the one weekend a year when the whole city ends up in the same 6.6 acres.
If you have been thinking about the shape of your life here, whether the house still fits, whether the yard is doing what you need it to, or whether a move within Highland or out to Alpine or Cedar Hills is on the horizon, the Fling weekend is a useful gut check. You will spend three days walking your own neighborhood.
When you are ready to talk about what that gut check turned up, Naomi McClure works with buyers and sellers across Utah Valley and Salt Lake Valley and knows Highland from Heritage Park down to the Hog Hollow trailhead. Let's Connect.
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