“Shooting the Tube”
A high school rite of passage, “shooting the tube” is a thrilling ride on a raft (of some sort) through a metal culvert that runs underneath the I-15 freeway near the mouth of Parley’s Canyon. Okay, it’s not so much a secret as it is a dare.
Tanner Park is in a hollow below the spaghetti bowl convergence of Interstates 215 and 80. It connects users to a larger trail system, The Bonneville Shoreline Trail, that runs along the foothills of the Salt Lake Valley.
The trail is built along the “bathtub ring” or high-water mark of the prehistoric Lake Bonneville which carved out the valley. The tube’s exit is located at the back of the park in a pool popular with the dogs who are also popular in Tanner Park. To shoot it, hike up out of the hollow and cross the freeway by the system of bike and pedestrian bridges down to an area below a giant rock pinnacle. The traditional graffiti spot charmingly dubbed “Suicide Rock” where high schoolers and college fraternities still make their marks in the eternal battle of who rules.
Suicide Rock is so named because a broken-hearted native maiden threw herself from its pinnacle, which, before the modern freeways were installed, would have been a significant geological landmark at the mouth of Parley’s Canyon.
