The Wasatch Front 100 reaches its 36-hour cut-off at Soldier Hollow on Saturday evening, and with it the 2026 Grand Slam of Ultrarunning comes to an end. Runners set off at 5am on Friday from East Mountain Wilderness Park above Kaysville, Utah, on a point-to-point course carrying roughly 24,000 feet of climbing and 23,300 feet of descent. For most of the field it is a hundred-mile race with a buckle at the end. For a smaller group it is the fourth and final instalment of a summer that began in June.
The Grand Slam requires completion of three of the four qualifying races — Old Dominion, Western States, Vermont and Leadville — followed by Wasatch, all within the same summer. Wasatch is not optional. That structure makes the Utah race the point at which a season's work is either ratified or lost, and it explains why the finish line at Soldier Hollow tends to produce a particular kind of emotional arithmetic. Grand Slam awards are presented alongside the Wasatch finisher plaques and belt buckles.
This year's Wasatch also carries additional weight for anyone planning 2027. A finish qualifies runners for the Hardrock 100 lottery and, new for 2026, for Western States as well, which has quietly raised the stakes for mid-pack runners who might otherwise treat the September date as a season-closing effort rather than a strategic one. Entry into the race itself runs through a selection process rather than a straight lottery, and registration closed in late June.
Wasatch is not the only ultra of consequence this weekend. The Ultra-Trail Harricana of Canada is running four distances across 11 to 13 September in Charlevoix, Quebec, with the 125km headline race allowing 29 hours for its point-to-point course and offering a 2027 Western States qualifier. The Mogollon Monster in Arizona started at 6am on Saturday with a 38-hour limit, and both the Superior Fall Trail Races in Minnesota and the eleventh Boulder Field Ultras at Hickory Run State Park in Pennsylvania are under way.
Taken together it is one of the densest weekends on the North American ultra calendar, and it arrives at a point in the season when the European trail schedule has largely emptied out after UTMB. The Golden Trail World Series resumes in Japan next weekend at Myoko. Until then, the sport's centre of gravity sits in the Wasatch Range, where the last Grand Slam finishers will still be moving through the dark on Saturday afternoon.