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The Utah Department of Transportation has shifted U.S. 189 traffic to a new northbound lane between Wellsburg and Charleston.

Courtesy Utah Department of Public Transportation

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A depiction of what U.S. 189 by Deer Creek Reservoir will look like post construction is shown.

Courtesy Utah Department of Transportation

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One year ago, the Utah Department of Transportation began a large construction effort on U.S. 189 near Deer Creek Reservoir to improve the Utah Valley to Heber Valley transportation corridor.

Significant progress has been made on the project, which calls for a grade seperation between northbound and southbound lanes and widening to two lanes in each direction between Wallsburg and Charleston.

Last week, UDOT shifted drivers onto a newly constructed northbound lane, and said it will shift its focus toward the highway’s southbound side and improvements at the U.S. 189 and S.R. 113 intersection.

The project’s timeline, however, has been extended from an estimated fall 2027 deadline to 2028, due to some delays in the geotechnical construction required to add a new road along the hillside, according to UDOT Region 3 spokesman Wyatt Woolley.

He said that while crews were drilling anchors into the hillside to stabilize slopes, they found large boulders that were difficult to excavate. UDOT said it has placed 12.2 miles of drilled anchors into the ground to prevent rock falls, and has moved 1 million cubic yards of earth.

“That’s really been the main thing is getting through all that rock and earth, while at the same time keeping U.S. 189 open,” Woolley  said. “We’ve never stopped 189 except for when we actually do blast, and we stop for 15 to 20 minutes, and then we keep everyone going, which is pretty significant when you think about it, to move that much earth out of the way up on the side of the mountain and down below are hundreds of cars going by every hour.”

Up next, crews will work to stabilize the steep slopes between the new northbound lane above and the southbound lane below. Woolley said cutting into the mountain in this section will take some time. A traffic light will also be built at the U.S. 189 and S.R. 113 intersection at Charleston at some point next year, which he said should help traffic at that intersection.

The project’s primary purpose was two-fold: to alleviate traffic on the Provo Canyon route used heavily by those who live in Utah County but commute to the Wasatch Back for work, and to improve safety on a road that has one lane each direction next to Deer Creek, with no center median and little shoulder space.

“There’s going to be some large physical separation there, so less chances of head-on collisions, and hopefully people will be able to drive a little bit safer going around those bends and turns and things, and we’ll have less incidents in the future,” Woolley said.

U.S. 189 has remained one lane in each direction during construction, and Woolley said traffic has been about the same going up and down, with the exception of crashes and temporary closures for blasting.

He said when UDOT does a blast, it tries to do it around 10 a.m., after the morning commute but before the lunch hour.

“(Traffic) honestly hasn’t been that bad,” Woolley said. “Swiss Days is an anomaly where they get thousands of people that want to come to  Midway, and there’s nothing we can really do about that. But this project is going to be a significant improvement to traffic through that part of the canyon.”