The Six Weeks When Tuhaye Trades The Lake For The Leaves

Ask a first-year owner at Tuhaye when the season ends and you'll usually get one answer: after Labor Day, when the boat traffic thins and the plateau goes quiet. Ask someone who has lived a full year behind the gate and you'll get a different answer, because at Tuhaye there isn't one season ending. There are two calendars running at once, and this particular stretch of the year is the one place they don't overlap.

That's the thing nobody explains when you move in. Ownership here comes with a single Talisker Club membership that spans four separate properties: golf and family amenities at Tuhaye, skiing at Empire Pass, a Main Street outpost in town, and backcountry access through The Outpost. Each of those runs on its own clock. Right now, in the six weeks bracketing Labor Day and running into the first hard frost, you can watch two of those clocks cross paths, one about to wind down for the year and one already starting to wind up.

The Marina Doesn't Wait For The Rest Of Us

Jordanelle Reservoir has a hard, well-documented peak. Boating traffic runs heaviest June through August, water temperatures top out in July and early August, and the three weekends everyone already knows about, Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Labor Day, are consistently the busiest on the ramps and the lake. That means the holiday weekend coming up isn't just another busy Saturday on the water. It's the last of the three anchor weekends the entire boating calendar is built around.

What happens after it is less obvious if you haven't owned a boat here before. Jordanelle Rentals and Marina, the full-service operation inside Jordanelle State Park that handles moorings for local boat owners, shifts straight from summer storage into fall winterization once that weekend passes, with spring re-launch scheduled whenever owners are ready to go back in the water. If you keep a boat moored at Hailstone, now is the window to get on their schedule before the good haul-out slots fill. The lake doesn't taper off gently. It has a hard closing date, not a gradual slide, and that date is one week away.

But Your Membership Doesn't Clock Out, It Just Moves

Here's where the second calendar picks up the slack, and it's the part of this stretch that's genuinely new this year. Talisker Club has two physical additions landing on opposite ends of the club system in 2026, and together they explain why "the season" at Tuhaye doesn't actually track with the reservoir.

The first is a family-focused outdoor amenity built right into Tuhaye's own footprint: outdoor rock-climbing walls, a fishing pond with beach entry, paddleboarding and canoeing, direct access to Tuhaye's mountain bike trail network, and a slope reserved for winter tubing. That amenity was built to open this summer, which means as of right now it's either freshly open or about to be, sitting a short golf cart ride from a marina that's simultaneously being winterized. One end of the property is closing its water access for the year. The other just opened new water access, on land, a few hundred yards away.

The second addition sits at the opposite end of the membership, at Empire Pass, where an on-mountain ski lounge is arriving this winter just off the Bandana run between Red Cloud and Montage. It's designed as a warm-up stop mid-ski-day, and it won't open for a few more months. But it's the reason the club's calendar doesn't actually stop when the lake does. Your membership is already building the next thing you'll use, it's just building it somewhere else on the mountain.

If you golf, there's a smaller, quieter data point worth knowing too. The Mark O'Meara-designed course at Tuhaye has moved through Golf Digest's Utah rankings across three cycles: fourth in 2021-'22, fifth in 2023-'24, seventh most recently for 2025-'26. That's not a story about decline so much as a crowded field, Utah has added and reshuffled its top courses over those same years, but it's the kind of detail that comes up at the clubhouse bar more than anywhere else, and it's worth having straight if someone brings it up.

The Six Weeks Between The Lake And The Leaves

Once boats start coming out of the water and before the ski lounge opens, there's a specific window that belongs entirely to the drives off the plateau, and Tuhaye happens to sit within easy range of the two best ones in the Wasatch Back.

Guardsman Pass connects Park City to Big Cottonwood Canyon and Midway, and the road spends most of its length weaving through dense aspen groves that turn gold as the color window opens. The pullouts along the way give you sweeping views of both the Heber Valley and the Salt Lake Valley at once, which is part of why photographers treat it as a fall standby. It's worth knowing the road is seasonal, so the window to drive it closes on its own schedule once snow arrives.

The other option runs the opposite direction. The Mirror Lake Scenic Byway starts in Kamas, about twenty minutes from the gate, and climbs 42 miles through the Uinta Mountains before it reaches the Wyoming border. Along the way it tops out at Bald Mountain Pass, 10,715 feet, the highest paved road in the state, passing alpine lakes and overlooks the entire way up. September and October are when the Wasatch Back turns into the kind of color display people plan trips around, and both roads are within a half hour of Tuhaye's gate.

The valleys below the plateau are running their own parallel calendar. Kamas and Heber both shift into harvest mode this time of year, with pumpkin patches, corn mazes, farmers markets, and roadside stands selling apples, squash, sweet corn, local honey, and fresh cider. It's the same six weeks, happening a few hundred feet lower in elevation, and it's an easy pairing with a color drive if you're already headed that direction.

Even The Birds Change Shift

One more marker locals watch for as the marina empties out for the season: the wildlife on Jordanelle shifts with the calendar too. Osprey and red-tailed hawks work the coves all summer, and by late fall they give way to bald eagles, which become noticeably more common on the reservoir as the weather turns. It's a small thing, but if you spend any time on the Hailstone shoreline this time of year, it's one of the clearest signs that the lake has moved into its off season even while everything else at Tuhaye keeps going.

What This Means If You're Already Inside The Gate

None of this requires action from anyone reading it as a lifestyle note rather than a to-do list, but a few things are worth having on your radar this month. If you keep a boat moored at Hailstone, call the marina now rather than waiting, haul-out slots fill fastest in the weeks right after Labor Day. The new family amenity at Tuhaye is open and worth a visit before the tubing slope needs actual snow to be useful. And if a color drive is on your list, Guardsman Pass and the Mirror Lake Byway are both close enough to treat as an afternoon rather than a trip, but only for as long as the weather holds.

The larger point is simpler than any single item on that list. Tuhaye doesn't have an off season so much as it has a handoff, and this is the exact six weeks where you can watch it happen, one part of the property going quiet while another opens for the first time.

If you're weighing a move inside the gate, or you already live here and want a clearer read on how the club's calendar affects value and timing, Cameron Boone knows this plateau as well as anyone working it. Let's Connect.