Utah Valley

South of Salt Lake, the freeway spills into Utah Valley — a fast-growing basin of cities along the shore of Utah Lake, anchored by Provo and its university, hemmed in by the sheer eastern wall of Mount Timpanogos. It is younger and busier than it looks, a tech corridor now nicknamed Silicon Slopes, but its best places are the canyons that climb out of it into the mountains.

The valley's signature peak, Timpanogos, hides a treasure inside: Timpanogos Cave National Monument, three linked caverns of delicate, colorful formations reached by a steep mile-and-a-half trail up the wall of American Fork Canyon. To the south, Provo Canyon carries the highway past Bridal Veil Falls, a 600-foot double cascade that drops straight to the roadside, and on up the mountain to Sundance Mountain Resort — the ski hill and arts retreat the actor Robert Redford founded in the late 1960s, whose institute went on to create the Sundance Film Festival.

At the valley's north end, the town of Lehi mixes old and new: the sprawling gardens, dinosaur halls, and family museums of Thanksgiving Point sit a few minutes from the Lehi Roller Mills, a working 1906 flour mill best known to the world as a backdrop in Footloose. And up Spanish Fork Canyon lies a quieter kind of landmark — the Thistle Landslide, where in 1983 a slow-moving mountain buried the town of Thistle, dammed the river, and became one of the costliest slides in American history. The drowned remains are still visible from the highway.

Come for the canyons and the waterfall; stay for the strange mix of a college town, a film legacy, and a mountain that gave way.

What to See in Utah Valley

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

Utah Valley rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.