Salt Lake & the Wasatch Front

Most of Utah lives here, on the narrow shelf of land between the Great Salt Lake and the wall of the Wasatch Range. The Wasatch Front is the state's urban spine — a string of cities running north to south beneath the peaks — and its center is Salt Lake City, founded in 1847 when Brigham Young led the first Mormon pioneers down out of Emigration Canyon and declared the valley the right place to stop.

The city radiates from Temple Square, where the granite Salt Lake Temple took forty years to build and the domed Tabernacle still hosts its famous choir. Just above downtown, Ensign Peak is the knob Young climbed days after arriving to survey the new settlement; across town, This Is The Place Heritage Park marks where the pioneers first entered the valley. Between the monuments the city keeps its gentler pleasures: the aviary and gardens of Liberty Park, the International Peace Gardens, the strange and lovely folk-art Gilgal Sculpture Garden, and up on the foothills the Natural History Museum of Utah and Red Butte Garden.

West of the city lies the inland sea that named it. The Great Salt Lake is the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere, a shrinking remnant of ancient Lake Bonneville; Antelope Island rises from it with a free-roaming bison herd, the old lakeshore pavilion of Saltair sits on its southern edge, and far to the west the blinding white Bonneville Salt Flats draw the land-speed racers.

Behind the city the Wasatch climbs fast, and the two Cottonwood Canyons hold some of the deepest snow in the country — Alta and Snowbird in Little Cottonwood, Brighton and Solitude in Big Cottonwood. Out in the valley's southwest corner, the terraced pit of the Bingham Canyon Mine is so vast it can be seen from space.

North up the Front the cities keep coming: the century-old Lagoon amusement park, the warplanes of the Hill Aerospace Museum, and the old railroad hub of Ogden with its grand Union Station and the nearby slopes of Snowbasin and Powder Mountain. Farther still, history and art share the lakeshore: Golden Spike National Historical Park, where the transcontinental railroad was joined in 1869, and Robert Smithson's coiling earthwork Spiral Jetty out on the lake's lonely north arm.

What to See in Salt Lake & the Wasatch Front

26 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Salt Lake & the Wasatch Front rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.